Boris 2.0? Not impossible, but unlikely
The former prime minister is again touted for a comeback as Rishi Sunak's ratings languish, so here are some observations to help inform your predictions
The febrile but persistent notion that Boris Johnson will, could or should return to the premiership and the head of the Conservative Party reflects deep and bitter divisions within the organisation but also a desperation born of anxiety, that the government faces a sizeable defeat at the next election. I’ve said repeatedly that I don’t think it will happen, nor do I think it should, but it cannot be ruled out completely; after all, no-one would have imagined that we would see five prime ministers within less than seven years (2016-22). What I have done here is to set out a number of points which I think are broadly accurate. Readers may then draw their own conclusions about what is likely to happen.
1) Boris Johnson is not currently a Member of Parliament, having given up his Uxbridge and South Ruislip seat in June 2023. The rules of the Conservative Party make clear that the leader must be a sitting MP, so for Johnson to be able even hypothetically to return to his old position would require him to get back into the House of Commons. With the ironic exception of his old constituency, the Conservatives have not won a by-election in more than two years, have won only four of the 22 contests in the 2019 Parliament and have lost formerly safe seats like Wellingborough, Mid-Bedfordshire and Selby and Ainsty with huge, sometimes 20+ per cent swings to the Labour Party. Even if a vacancy were engineered to accommodate him, Johnson could have no certainty at all of winning a by-election, and defeat in such a contest would be an abject humiliation.
2) Rishi Sunak’s personal popularity is clearly very low. A poll last month found only one in five voters would choose him as “the best prime minister”, though Sir Keir Starmer only received the support of 33 per cent. Perhaps more worryingly, Sunak seems unable to change his ratings. He was preferred by only 30 per cent of those surveyed when he took office in October 2022, and his popularity has fallen relatively steadily since then, always behind that of Starmer. He is not far off 18 months in Downing Street, and despite several attempts to revive his fortunes—chaning environmental and Net Zero plans, significant policy shifts announced at the 2023 party conference, the Rwanda bill—nothing has moved the dial. With less than a year at most till an election, it is hard to see what will change his fundamental lack of appeal to the electorate.
3) The likelihood—we can argue elsewhere about numbers—is that the Conservative Party will lose the forthcoming general election and go into opposition after 14 years in office, longer than the Labour government which preceded it (albeit the first five years were spent in a curate’s-egg coalition with the Liberal Democrats). This is true despite a lot of evidence that the public is not at all enthused by the prospect of a Labour government, as I have written. Although I don’t expect them to win any seats, I think the electoral performance of Reform UK will damage the Conservatives more than Labour and is likely to amplify the scale of a Labour victory.
4) There has been a lot of mythologising about Johnson’s personal popularity and electoral appeal. Although the Conservatives were generally ahead in the opinion polls in the first years of this parliament, the tide turned decisively against them in November and December 2021. One trigger seems to have been the vain attempt to save Owen Paterson, MP for North Shropshire, from suspension after he was found guilty of breaking House of Commons rules on paid advocacy. Apart from a tie in March 2022, the Conservatives have lagged in the polls ever since, and the “Partygate” saga over the breaking of Covid-19 lockdown regulations, which began to emerge around the same time, entrenched the government’s woes. Both of these blows to its popularity were clearly and directly attributable to Johnson’s leadership, style and personality. As polling legend Professor Sir John Curtice, of the University of Strathclyde, has observed, “This is a self-inflicted wound that basically is Johnson’s legacy… the one word that is now associated with Boris Johnson in the public imagination is liar”.
5) In any event, Johnson’s electoral appeal was overrated after the scale of the Conservative victory at the 2019 general election. Curtice had made this point on several occasions. In October 2022, he was clear.
Johnson has never been that popular. He was very popular among Leave voters back in 2019 but deeply unpopular among Remain voters so he basically appealed to one half of the country but not the other. There is a bit of a myth about him being a gloriously popular politician but he never has been, certainly not since 2016.
What Johnson did bring to the specific circumstances of 2019, the “crucial attribute that Boris Johnson brought to the table—which wasn’t just his actual success in general, because it wasn’t—[it] was uniting Leave voters behind the Conservative party”. However, he also faced a divided Labour Party led by Jeremy Corbyn, which dropped from a poll lead as large as 10 per cent in the spring of 2019 to rough parity as Theresa May’s leadership collapsed in the summer. Going into the election, Labour committed to seeking a new Brexit deal and a confirmatory referendum, but Corbyn said he would take a neutral stance in such a campaign, which robbed the party of direction. Nearly half of those who decided not to vote Labour cited “the leadership” as their motivation. Like Margaret Thatcher before him, Johnson was initially lucky in his enemies.
6) The persistent rumours of a Johnson comeback were fuelled by polling data last month showing that Johnson was “the favourite” to replace Rishi Sunak as prime minister. The poll by Whitestone Insight was commissioned by Lady McAlpine, widow of construction mogul Sir William McAlpine and sister-in-law of former Conservative Party treasurer Lord McAlpine of West Green. She has made no secret of her dislike of Rishi Sunak and her desire for Johnson to lead what she inexplicably calls a “new squeaky clean Conservative Party” (as if Johnson would be the man to lead that). The data are suggestive but inconclusive: even the advantage Johnson enjoys over Sunak among “lost” Conservative voters in a hypothetical choice was 52 per cent for Johnson over Sir Keir Starmer compared to 39 per cent for Sunak over Starmer, noticeable but not necessarily seismic, while among the general population as surveyed the margin was only 28 per cent compared to 25 per cent. Lady McAlpine claims, “It doesn’t matter where Boris goes in the world. People like him and therefore listen to him.” This is not easy to justify evidentially.
7) Boris Johnson would find little to attract him in being leader of the opposition facing a newly elected government. He will turn 60 in June, though in a strange way he seems ageless, and whoever leads the Conservatives after a Labour victory would have to assume that the new government would last a normal four- or five-year parliament. Any prospect of returning to office would seem very distant, and Johnson is not a man for down-in-the-weeds hard graft. Moreover, the leader of the opposition is paid a salary of £144,649 (including the basic salary of a Member of Parliament), less than Johnson earned as prime minister, obviously. It is significantly less than his estimated current earnings: when he was announced as a weekly columnist for The Daily Mail last summer, it was rumoured he was being paid £1 million a year. He earned £4.7 million in the first year after leaving Downing Street, and the full-time role leading His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition would curtail much of that potential.
8) Whatever the result of the election, one party will have achieved something historic. If the government were to be returned, it would be an enormous reversal of fortune and a triumph over the most unpromising circumstances. On the other hand, while the polls all show an enormous Labour lead, we have to remember that realising that advantage will involve Starmer leading his party to a revival greater by some way than Sir Tony Blair achieved in 1997. Taking into effect changes to constituencies recommended by the Boundary Commissions, Labour needs a swing from the Conservatives of 12.7 per cent, while Blair only managed 10.2 per cent to deliver his first landslide victory.
You can shuffle these factors as you like. As I say, my own view is that there will be no Johnson revival, and this episode will be recorded in the history books as a passing, slightly crazed search for a solution to looming defeat. A fifth change of leader within a party’s tenure would be unprecedented, but then nothing which has happened since, arguably, the early 2010s or before has really fallen into the category of “normality”: the global financial crisis, the coalition government, the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence, the Brexit referendum in 2016, Brexit itself in 2020 alongside the Covid-19 pandemic… As the late Alan Clark used to say, “anything can happen at backgammon”. I think, however, the eight points I’ve set out here are robust and certainly need to be factored in to any predictions. Watch this space…