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“You turn if you want to. The lady’s not for turning,” Margaret Thatcher told the Tory faithful in Brighton as part of her famous 1980 speech to Conservative Party conference.
The divisive former PM did not do compromise – not on privatisation, industry or her hated poll tax – and, in the end, that unyielding leadership style saw “the iron lady” ousted.
Fast-forward 40 years and there is a very different Conservative prime minister in Downing Street.
He won power on a landslide victory in December, taking so-called “red wall” former
Labour seats by pledging to “level up” state spending and “get
Brexit done”.
The former
London mayor, it seems, is unafraid of U-turns.
Be it bending on the
immigration health surcharge, which would have seen overseas health workers pay to use the NHS; backing footballer Marcus Rashford’s campaign for free school meals over summer; or his climbdown over the early return of schools – Johnson has time and time again signalled he is prepared to be flexible.
In the midst of a global pandemic, and government and civil servants stretched to capacity, some turbulence is to be expected.
But with economic disaster looming on the horizon and the Covid emergency wages scheme set to be scaled down, is Johnson playing a dangerous game signposting his flexibility to voters, opponents and even his own backbenchers? David Gauke was exchequer secretary to the Treasury in 2012 when chancellor George Osborne’s notorious “omnishambles” budget collided heavily with public opinion.
The government eventually buckled over plans to charge VAT on hot takeaway food – more commonly referred to as “the pasty tax”.
Gauke recalls sitting opposite Osborne, then viewed as Cameron’s likely successor, as Number 11 weighed up whether to stick or twist given “the political capital we were expending”.
Theresa May’s former justice minister thought the tax was “justified” but questioned whether it was “worth going to war with The Sun every day for and worth alienating a lot of your own MPs for”, Gauke said.
He told HuffPost UK: “The conclusion we came to was that trying to persevere with the particular policy was going to cause considerable political damage for what was a relatively small sum of money.”
Having to accept defeat is tough for ministers, but even more difficult for backbenchers who can feel remote from policy decisions, says Gauke,
It is something the former MP says Johnson – who is accused of delegating to a small number of ministers listening to his top adviser Dominic Cummings over MPs – must bear in mind.
“You take a deep breath and you do it,” says Gauke. “Sometimes, it is part of the
Job of being a minister. You hope not to be in that position and you have to make the best of it, but it is harder for backbenchers.
“It can really damage their confidence if they went in to defend the policy and then were made to look foolish.”
Gauke believes many of the U-turns have been the fault of a relatively inexperienced cabinet, who were all under pressure when the PM was seriously ill with coronavirus.
He also warned the public will increasingly ask: “If you have money for the furlough scheme, then why wouldn’t you give money for this?” should the about-turns continue.
“Boris Johnson as prime minister was always going to delegate more than others – but there is only so much of that you can do,” he said.
“If you are going to follow that Ronald Reagan model, you have to have a very competent top team around you.
“In the end, the system depends heavily on the prime minister providing the necessary leadership and that is tough in these circumstances, particularly if you are not fighting fit.”
Two U-turns defined the premiership of former Labour PM Gordon Brown ahead of his 2010
election defeat – abolishing the 10p tax rate, and “the election that never was”.
Stewart Wood was his top adviser in 2008 when Labour backbenchers threatened to rebel over how the 10p rate would hit some of the UK’s poorest.
The policy had been drawn up a year earlier when Brown was chancellor, but the newly-minted PM’s defence that it formed “part of a package” was wearing thin with MPs.
Matters came to an excruciatingly high-profile head for Brown at a press conference in
Washington, where he was taking questions alongside then US president George W Bush.“I was with Gordon at the
White House rose garden and here was the BBC’s [then political editor] Nick Robinson asking about the 10p tax rate when we were supposed to be talking about the special relationship,” says Wood, now a Labour peer.
Afterwards, Bush joked with Brown: “I thought they were talking about Tempe,
Arizona,” while Wood and the PM took calls from Labour whips as Angela Smith, then parliamentary private secretary to Yvette Cooper, threatened to resign.
“It was horrible,” remembers Wood. “It was an embarrassing time for the government – no doubt about it.”
Worse for Brown, and his standing with the public, was his U-turn on an early election, which came in the months after he took over from Tony Blair.
“For the first few months, his different style was exactly what the public wanted – his unflashiness, his control freakery was popular for a while. He was 10 or 12 points ahead,” said Wood.
Brown believed he could use his popularity to press on David Cameron’s sores – the modernising Tory leader was thought to be in trouble with the old guard – and his press secretary Damian McBride briefed that an early poll was on the cards.
Later, an examination of the party’s election war chest and a sharp drop in the polls meant he “got cold feet”.
“It was a pressure tactic against the Tories but the big mistake he made was letting the briefing go on for too long,” said Wood.
Brown’s image as a strong leader suffered irreparable damage, demonstrating that while some U-turns can be popular, if they expose a lack of judgement or pinpoint a leader’s perceived flaws, they can be fatal.
Wood believes that, while Johnson’s U-turns so far have not damaged him, the decision to stick by Cummings, who provoked widespread public anger when he broke lockdown by visiting Durham, could return to haunt him.
Johnson was elected because of promises to “throw money at the red wall”. But like the financial crash in 2008,
Coronavirus has “swept away that political terrain”.
It is being forced to shift away from that solemn promise – or a failure to “get Brexit done” – that Johnson may fear most.
Former Lib Dem leader Vince Cable, who served as business secretary during the coalition years, knows this from painful experience.
He told HuffPost
UK government can be difficult when “you march everyone up to the top of the hill only to have to march them down again”.
But U-turns that clearly demonstrate a leader
BREAKING promises can be worse.
His party’s decision to back a hike in university tuition fees – something Nick Clegg had promised students he would not do – destroyed trust. The Lib Dems were left with just eight out of their previous 57 seats after the 2015 election.
Like Johnson’s battle with his own party’s Remainers and fiscal conservatives, Clegg and Cable fought to convince activists not to tack left and force the party to back free tuition in 2010. Unlike the PM, however, they failed.
“I was absolutely adamant it was a terrible idea because there was no way we could deliver it in government,” says Cable.
“It was then profoundly difficult. We had broken a pledge and there was no way to disguise it.”
Johnson’s anti-austerity stance – for example, he backed the living wage as London mayor – is part of his brand.
Cable adds: “What would cause real damage and political damage is if, having opened up the floodgates with the furlough scheme, they panic in the autumn budget and crack down on spending.
“People will get really angry.”
The former MP for Twickenham says the public may be more accepting of a change in direction than they were in Thatcher’s era, but adds that as PM during an unprecedented moment in
British history Johnson has a responsibility to be transparent with the public.
“Grown up governments accept that when the circumstances change, you have to change policy.
“If you have done a U-turn, you have to be honest and have the confidence in your judgement to be able to go out and explain it.” Related... U-Turn As Government Ditches NHS Covid Contact Tracing App For Apple-Google Model
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