Labour’s hopes of electoral success depend on one man – Boris Johnson

Sometimes in life things turn in your favour so comprehensively and so unexpectedly that you find it difficult to adjust. So it is with the Labour Party. Not so very long ago there was still the feeling that their situation was hopeless and that Boris Johnson, the great political alchemist of our times, was more or less guaranteed a decade in Downing Street to do as he wished. Keir Starmer, it was thought, might at best put a dent in Johnson’s majority, and he was advised by some in his own party to quit.

Not any more. Labour suddenly has a 10-point lead over the Conservatives, the biggest in a decade. But they seem unwilling to enjoy their luck. You can still sense the angst, the fatal lack of confidence. The left still thinks Starmer should quit and there’s some talk of Jeremy Corbyn converting his obscure Peace and Justice movement into an obscure Peace and Justice Party, so dismal do things apparently seem to them for Labour under Starmer.

Opinion poll leads can evaporate as rapidly as they grow, but it’s real enough. They can relax, for now.

Yet on the Labour front bench the campaign to be rid of Johnson has taken on a frenetic quality, as if they have to get rid of Johnson because he’s this great political asset for the Conservatives. He isn’t. The public, on the whole, hates his guts. Labour are just as well off, or better off, if Johnson survives.

The impressive shows of passion from Angela Rayner, completed by Starmer’s lawyerly cross-examinations are all very well, but they need to chill and savour the moment. Boris Johnson is now a win-win for them, the only question being how big and for how long.

The bigger win would be if he gets away with it this time, again, and carries on as prime minister. Labour should try to understand what those closest to Johnson have known for some time, and is in fact quite apparent, which is that he is incorrigible. He cannot be fixed or reformed. He is 57, but behaves like a spoilt 12 year old. There will be bogus non-apologies after the Gray report into “Partygate” comes out, and the public won’t be fooled. There will be a clear-out of staff at No 10, and they will be replaced by a new cohort he will happily ignore. Someone such as Michael Gove may be made de facto deputy prime minister, the wise old hand at his side, but, just like the present actual deputy prime minister, Dominic Raab, the title will be meaningless, and just an excuse to delegate the more tedious bits of the job to another mug.

The culture of Downing Street will not alter in any significant way, because Johnson is too much of an old big dog to learn new tricks. Even if he wanted to, which he doesn’t.

There will be “red meat” to buy off his critics inside the party, but at the cost of actually deepening the party’s unpopularity. That is the paradox. Abolishing the BBC doesn’t seem an obvious vote winner. Ordering the Royal Navy to try and solve the refugee crisis in the Channel might seem like a good idea, but not if the Navy is no more willing and able to break the law and drown civilians than the Border Force or the RNLI. Navy destroyers could be ordered to ram the dinghies, I suppose, or “push them back” as the euphemism goes, but I wonder if that’s why people join the Navy. I can’t see the admirals being overjoyed with their new, impractical anti-humanitarian remit.

Ending the Plan B Covid restrictions on the same date as they were always going to be ended doesn’t feel like the great game changer they need, either. Johnson could, just for the hell of it, trigger Article 16 to cheer up the hard-line Brexiteers, but the consequent trade war with Europe wouldn’t do anything to speed our economic recovery. Nor, I think, will the publication of a White Paper on Levelling Up transform the fortunes of Johnson and his party. I think we also know how the rumoured imminent creation of Sir Gavin Williamson, gallant knight of the schoolrooms, will go down.

There’s plenty more nonsense where that came from if Johnson is permitted by his gullible backbenchers to stumble from crisis to scandal to crisis again between now and the next election. There is now that same feeling about his premiership as there was after the ERM crisis for John Major in 1992, or Gordon Brown’s election-that-never-was in 2007 – a turning point when the opposition broke through, and there was really no conceivable way back. The narrative goes all wrong. Failures in government tend to start feeding on each other, you might say exponentially. They expose and exacerbate ideological divisions that were previously only well-concealed differences of view.

When administrations reach a stage of decay and exhaustion there is a constant muttering about a change of leadership that just makes matters worse, and with every fresh setback, ministerial resignation, lost by-election or round of disastrous local election results a fresh leadership crisis breaks out. The prime minister loses authority and the cycle worsens. So it was for Major and Brown, until their inevitable battering at the general election, delayed for as long as possible. So it will be for Johnson too – indeed it already is. Imagine if he tried to hang on until January 2025.

So the best thing – the biggest win – for Labour is that Johnson plods on, aimless, weak, incompetent until the voters who “lent” him their vote in 2019 decide they’d like it back, thanks very much. The next few years will be very difficult economically, post-Covid and post-Brexit, and building a new economic model to cope with these structural changes will take time. With about half his premiership gone, there actually isn’t anything Johnson can do about productivity and enterprise on such a time frame and with the public finances being in the state they’re in. The narrative of inflation, slow growth and stagnating living standards means an inevitable run of grim news. The boosterism that served Johnson so well in the 2016 Brexit referendum and the 2019 election will just feel like a joke in poor taste by 2023 or 2024. By then Starmer will look like a messiah.

The smaller win for Labour would be if Johnson was swiftly deposed by his party. There would be such a display of violent Tory in-fighting as we haven’t seen in many a year, and we’d be treated once again to the obscene spectacle of some 150,000 rather unrepresentative members of the Conservative Party selecting a prime minister on behalf of the whole country. Given the chance they’d pick Jacob Rees-Mogg; so another Labour gain. But a process of modest Tory revival might ensue.

So the obvious drawback with forcing the Tories to ditch Johnson is that the Tories get a new leader, a bit of a rebrand and a relaunch, especially with someone competent and straight and less associated with the tawdry Johnson years, a figure such as Jeremy Hunt or one of the less noticed contenders such as Tom Tughenhat, a fresh skin and a conscious break with the recent, Brexit and Covid-ridden past. Such a figure would probably secure some sort of political recovery for the Tories, but he (or she) would be lumbered with a fairly toxic legacy of empty slogans and general aimlessness.

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A majority of about 80, a fresh mandate and the usual advantages of incumbency give any prime minister supreme advantages over any opposition – but they still need a united party, some public money and above all some sense of mission and purpose to make a success of their administration. Some policies would be nice, too. The odds are surely against those suddenly appearing, for the simple reason that they can’t agree on where they should be going. After 11 years they’ve run out of energy and ideas, as governments tend to over time.

The rot, ironically, probably set in with Brexit, a project never properly defined for fear of frightening the voters and which pushed all other political thinking to the margins.

For the moment then, Labour need do no more than sit back, enjoy the show and just avoid making any tactical mistakes. Johnson and the Conservatives are doing all the heavy lifting required to get Starmer into 10 Downing Street sooner or later. At the moment Labour cannot lose. Believe it.