How Starmer and Sunak could unite against Johnson to clean up politics

Keir Starmer doesn’t call him “Boris” either. “Johnson and I really loathed each other,” the Labour leader told Matt Forde on his podcast this week. “It was obvious. We really never spoke behind the scenes very much.”

It is The Independent’s style to refer to the former prime minister as Johnson or Mr Johnson because first-name terms seem chummy. But what is interesting about Starmer’s personal dislike of Johnson is that it is something that he and Rishi Sunak have in common.

“He didn’t stand for anything, he had no principles, he had no integrity, he lied through his teeth and he brings everybody down with him,” Starmer said. “Is there anybody who’s had any relationship with Johnson – in any sense of the word – who hasn’t ended up in the gutter?”

Well, Sunak isn’t in the gutter yet, but that is because he broke with Johnson over the Chris Pincher sexual assault allegations. Sunak resigned as chancellor because he didn’t believe Johnson when he said that he didn’t remember being warned about Pincher’s conduct. Sunak ran for the Conservative leadership promising higher ethical standards, and when he became prime minister pledged that his government would have “integrity” at every level.

So he and Starmer have a chance to unite to clean up politics, taking advantage not just of their common distaste for Johnson’s casual approach to morality, but of the better atmosphere between them.

Asked by Forde about Sunak, Starmer said: “My personal relationship with him is much better. He phoned me the day he became prime minister, gave me his personal number and we said we would work together on things like Ukraine, if there was a terrorist incident, God forbid, or security issues.” In other words, all that stuff about Labour working with the Johnson government on coronavirus was very much through gritted teeth. But, as Starmer said, “it was obvious”.

Wise heads criticised Sunak for his handling of Nadhim Zahawi’s problem with his tax returns, saying that he could have gained more credit with the voters if, when he sacked Zahawi from the cabinet, he had made more of a song and dance of the new improved ethical standards of his administration compared with the Johnson period. But that would have risked offending not Johnson himself – he is beyond managing, wanting to “bring down” Sunak regardless, as George Osborne put it recently – but the 110 MPs who nominated Johnson, thinking it would be a good idea for him to return as prime minister after the seven-week Liz Truss interregnum.

So Sunak has to proceed cautiously, well aware that saying what he really thinks about Johnson – or indeed about Truss’s fiscal policies – risks dividing the parliamentary Tory party and uniting the party in the country against him.

This is another example of the poisoned inheritance that Sunak received from his predecessors. He cannot go big on having cleaned up Johnson’s act without casting aspersions on the ethical standards of his predecessor and by implication his predecessor’s supporters. He cannot say what he thinks, which is that never mind putting party before country, Johnson puts self before party and country.

This could all become awkward when the privileges committee finally gets round to its public hearings about Johnson misleading parliament over lockdown gatherings. But in the meantime, Johnson is keen not to waste any opportunity to make life difficult for his successor. Yesterday he urged Sunak to press ahead with the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill, which would tear up the treaty he, Johnson, negotiated and signed with the EU – in other words, Johnson wants Sunak to threaten to break international law in the way that he did, although he never actually broke it.

In his interview with Forde, Starmer, once he had been respectful of Sunak for long enough, unfairly accused the prime minister of being weak, because “he didn’t win his leadership race, he avoided it; he hasn’t got a mandate”. That is rubbish: Sunak fought one leadership election and lost it; before putting himself forward a second time and winning unopposed under the rules. He has the only mandate he needs in British constitutional theory, which is the explicit support of a majority of his parliamentary party.

If Sunak is weak, it is mainly because his party lacks the discipline to unite behind him, and because Johnson, the most selfish politician Britain has known since Disraeli, is trying to do everything he can to destroy him.