EXPLAINING JOHNSONISM: 'Let them eat cake': Conservatism in the age of Boris Johnson.

AuthorSaunders, Robert

In December 2019, Boris Johnson led his party to its most spectacular electoral success for a third of a century. Nearly 14 million people voted Conservative - the second highest number of votes ever polled by a British party - bringing to an end a decade of hung parliaments and precarious majorities. Johnson's party had smashed through Labour's 'Red Wall', broken the parliamentary resistance to his Brexit deal and rewritten the geography of British politics. Armed with an eighty-seat majority, a pliable cabinet and a parliamentary party purged of rebels and 'big beasts', Johnson was the most powerful Conservative leader since Margaret Thatcher; able to anticipate a decade or more in which to remake British politics in his image.

But had those voters come to praise the Conservative Party or to bury it? For its critics, the party that had stormed the polls in 2019 was not the Conservative Party at all. It had morphed into something new: an 'English nationalist party', a 'Vote Leave government', or a 'populist Johnsonian cult'. (1) Its actions, thought one writer, were 'not simply un-conservative', but 'an explicit repudiation of everything that it means to be a Conservative'. (2) A party that was once cautious of change had embraced a revolutionary transformation. A party that once prized scepticism now urged its supporters to 'believe in Brexit'. The party of the constitution had suspended Parliament, while the party of law and order was legislating to break its own legal commitments. The 'natural party of government' now excoriated 'the establishment', while the party of traditional moral values was led by a voluptuary, an adulterer and 'the most accomplished liar in public life'. (3) Who now believed, with Sir Arthur Bryant, that 'the Conservative acts always with caution'? Or, like Anthony Quinton, that 'Conservatives have an attachment to established customs and institutions', and a hostility to 'sudden, precipitate and revolutionary change'? (4)

Yet the charge that Johnson marked a rupture in Conservative politics raises a number of problems; not least that it has been heard so often before. Ever since Disraeli denounced the Conservatism of Sir Robert Peel as 'an organized hypocrisy', the death of some allegedly more authentic form of Conservatism has been announced with wearying regularity. As early as 1903, Johnson's hero, Winston Churchill, proclaimed the death of the 'old Conservative Party' and the rise of 'a new Party', modelled on 'the Republican Party of the United States'. Eight years later, Herbert Samuel declared that the Conservative Party was 'no longer conservative' at all, because it had embraced 'such revolutionary proposals' as 'the referendum' and 'Women's Suffrage'. Keith Joseph would conclude in 1974 that he had never truly been a Conservative at all, while Ian Gilmour regarded Thatcher as a liberal cuckoo in the Conservative nest. Nothing places Johnson more squarely in the Conservative tradition than the allegation that he has subverted his party's true principles.

As a two-term Mayor of London, Foreign Secretary and election-winning prime minister, Johnson cannot simply be an anomaly. He edited the leading Conservative weekly, The Spectator, for six years and made his reputation as a columnist for the party's in-house newsletter, The Daily Telegraph. He has been the darling of the Party Conference for two decades, and was elected to the leadership by an overwhelming vote of the party membership. Whatever doubts Conservatives may have harboured about his lifestyle, morals or political methods, they have consistently rewarded him with the most glittering prizes in public life.

Like all Conservative leaders, Johnson draws selectively on the Conservative past, constructing a constellation of ideas and positions in response to contemporary political pressures. His Conservatism is not that of Harold Macmillan, David Cameron or even Margaret Thatcher, but nor is it what his beloved classical authors would have called a 'lusus naturae': a 'sport of nature', or a random mutation in the Conservative gene. It draws on longer changes in the party, that make Johnson as much a symptom as a source of the new Conservatism. The result, however, remains an inchoate phenomenon, pulled in different directions by a divergent electoral coalition. Johnson's great skill lies rather in holding together divergent materials than in giving them new direction. In consequence, his leadership marks a suspension, rather than a resolution, of his party's contradictions, in a manner that stores up formidable challenges for the future.

Cakes and ale: Johnson in historical perspective

Unlike David Cameron or Theresa May, Johnson is not sentimental about the Conservative tradition. He has consistently surrounded himself with figures from outside the party, like Dominic Cummings and Munira Mirza, and he openly repudiates much of the May-Cameron legacy. (5) It is hard to find a precedent for a government that has so successfully reinvented itself mid-term, or so effectively disclaimed responsibility for its own conduct of policy. His thinly-disguised manifesto, The Churchill Factor, luxuriates in the 'suspicion and doubt' with which 'Respectable Tories' viewed Winston Churchill, and 'the venom with which they spat his name'. When he writes of those Conservatives who mocked Churchill as 'an adventurer... a fat baby, and a disaster for the country', or of Churchill's 'contempt for any notion of... loyalty to the Tory Party', we are invited to draw the obvious parallel. (6)

Yet Johnson was formed by the Conservative tradition, and it is not difficult to find precedents for his politics: whether the 'cakes and ale' Toryism of the late-nineteenth century - a 'beer and bible' Toryism that preferred 'England free' to 'England sober', and championed the 'pleasures of the people' against do-gooders and busybodies - or the 'muscular Unionism' of Lord Randolph Churchill and Lord Salisbury. Johnson is not the first Conservative to pit himself against Parliament, or to accuse MPs of subverting 'the will of the people'. Before 1914, the Conservative Party under Bonar Law spoke openly of 'breaking the parliamentary machine', asserting 'the Supremacy of the People' against the 'paid puppets' of the House of Commons. Johnson may have threatened to ignore the Benn Act in 2019, but he has not, like Bonar Law, endorsed a paramilitary army, dedicated to the violent overthrow of an Act of Parliament. (7)

When Johnson promises 'freedom day', or hails the 'freedom-loving' instincts of the British people, he recalls the Toryism of the early 1950s, with its promise to 'Set the People Free'. The 'War on Woke' invokes Thatcher's assault on the 'loony left', or later battles against 'political correctness', while claims that Labour would 'raise the white flag' to Russia tap into a long history of smearing the patriotism of the left. Stylistically, Johnson's shambolic, extravagantly eccentric act recalls the artful doddering of Harold Macmillan: another showman with a taste for the theatrical. Yet whereas Macmillan's performance was subverted by a new wave of satire, Johnson insulates himself against...

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