Labour should not assume all voters are still cross with Boris

It’s all too easy to picture the scene, isn’t it?

The rostrum is erected outside No 10. A gaggle of euphoric-looking followers gather on the pavement. Nadine grinning like a buffoon. Rees-Mogg smugly smiling to himself, hand on the shoulder of his child Sixtus.

And then up the street walks Boris Johnson. Arriving at the rostrum he lets out a small laugh: “As I was saying, before I was so rudely interrupted…”

Everyone present giggles nervously. The Blonde Bombshell is back.

Most residents of liberal London and the metropolitan cities of England are horrified; literally disgusted. How could this possibly have happened?

And yet they are reassured that this will be for a maximum of a couple of years. Normal voters, they say to each other, have had enough of Boris. The populist bandwagon came screeching to a halt in the spring. People were sick of the rolling bin fire that followed wherever his premiership went and were apoplectic about the parties.

It’s all ok: Keir will crush him in 2024, they reassure themselves.

That is indeed the most likely outcome should Johnson return next week and fight another election, but I’m very far from confident it will be easy.

Something very funny happened in the summer, something missed by most political observers because they were so focused in the never-ending leadership election. The focus groups we ran at that time were fascinating.

It occurred almost overnight after Johnson waved farewell to Downing Street: voters began to forgive him. They began to display signs of “seller’s remorse”. The prospect of a prime minister Sunak or a prime minister Truss also began to concentrate a few minds. Would they really prefer either of those two in No 10? People really weren’t sure.

The idea that he had been “stabbed in the back” also took hold.

One swing voter put it memorably like this: “I really liked Boris and I was really, really disappointed in the way he was treated. They’re picking on minor things. You know, furnishings and wallpaper and making such a big deal about it. And it’s the media. The media are the ones that turn everyone against him.”

Another was equally sympathetic: “He stepped straight in and it was Brexit and then it was Covid and now it’s the war in Ukraine. Everybody waffles on about, ‘he should have done this, he should have done that’. But I’d like to see them [Sunak and Truss] in his shoes.”

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Please don’t get me wrong: I don’t really think that a prime minister Johnson would be able to hold his party together long enough to get to a general election in one fully functioning piece. I also think that while his unique hold over the public imagination – and the strange goodwill many people seem to have for him – would see a bump in the polls (especially in the Red Wall), any such surge would fall well short of enough to win a majority.

Put simply, it seems clear that Johnson’s charisma would not be enough to hold together the 2019 electoral coalition – socially conservative working class voters in the north of England with more socially liberal middle class voters in the home counties. There are, after all, still a lot of people who hate him – and who are not prepared to forgive him for partying while they couldn’t go to their granny’s funeral.

Obviously, all of this really only matters if Johnson achieves one of the greatest political comebacks of all time. But if that happens, Labour strategists would do well to remember that there really is no one like him – and that a decent part of the electorate, one that will be key to 2024, have remembered that they’re really quite fond of him.