Here’s the real reason Boris Johnson and his ilk suddenly care about public sector pay

Sometimes a handy reference book is needed to decode some of the more obscure turns of phrase used by Boris Johnson – like when he takes a turn for the linguistically bizarre and calls a political opponent a “mutton-headed old mugwump”, meaning, presumably, that he disagreed with the views of Jeremy Corbyn.

This time it turns out that when Boris Johnson says “I support a public sector pay rise”, it actually means “I would like to become Prime Minister one day”. Who’d have thought it? Sometimes I feel like my lack of an Oxbridge degree shows.

The Foreign Secretary has joined the ranks of cabinet ministers Michael Gove, Jeremy Hunt, Justine Greening and Damian Green who are suddenly now all breaking rank to demand extra cash for teachers, nurses, firemen and the like. Despite the fact that all of them voted against Labour’s amendment which proposed to scrap the wage cap on public sector staff only last week, they seem to have simultaneously had a change of heart over the weekend.

Yes, Johnson would have risked losing his job on the front bench had he done so outright, but there was little stopping a “government source” from leaking his comments. This morning’s headlines spoke of him taking down a maimed Theresa May along with her Chancellor Philip Hammond, a potential leadership rival, in one rugby tackle.

Does Boris Johnson actually care about the impact of austerity? To his credit, he has been one of the more vocal opponents of the fiscal policy since 2010, but seemed unconcerned about cuts to the public sector during his time as London Mayor. The capital saw the loss of 600 firefighters and 10 stations during his tenure. When quizzed on the damaging consequences this policy might have, he told a Labour politician to “get stuffed”.

There’s nothing surprising about the U-turn made by prominent Tories. The Conservative Party is nothing if not a vehicle for political survival – the Conservatives’ particular brand of austerity was shaped, and will be cut short by, political pragmatism.

In 2010, faced with the deficit, the Government had to cut some spending, but by 2014 the IMF was advising the Treasury that it needed to strike a balance between spending cuts and tax rises when designing the rest of the consolidation. By this point the Tories had realised that public spending cuts were a useful stick with which to beat Labour; the two-year pay freeze on all but the lowest paid public sector workers became a universal 1 per cent pay cap until 2020.

Emboldened by their electoral success in 2015, Theresa May couched her general election message in the same terms: Labour’s “magic money tree” would destroy the economy, and only the Conservatives could balance the books. What she didn’t count on was that the real people with real jobs like, say, I don’t know, nurses or policemen would have felt the pinch in the lack of investment in their workplaces as well as the lack of money in their pockets, as house prices, rent, fuel, and their weekly shopping bills increased.

With public sentiment turning decisively away from damaging cuts, the Tories are jumping on the anti-austerity bandwagon, using borrowed protest signs as fig leaves to cover their voting records over the past seven years. It may be politically savvy, but I doubt voters will let them get away with it. Few of us may know what a mugwump is, but equally few of us are stupid.