In a crowded field, the now polarising figure who botched his last run at the leadership is looking more like a sideshow
Have we reached Peak Boris?
It feels like a frankly perverse time to be asking the question, just as the former foreign secretary sweeps into Conservative party conference to a hero’s welcome. Only
Boris Johnson could still command a front page just by galumphing through a field in shorts (it wasn’t quite a field of wheat, what with all the wheat being reduced to stubble by now, but still the pictures looked as if he was mocking
Theresa May and her one sad moment of youthful excess). And few are better placed to chuck petrol on the fire burning beneath her Chequers deal. The reason the hall is half-empty while the fringes are rammed is that so many delegates just want to hear a rousing, full-blooded defence of “proper
Brexit” and to boo all hints of compromise, something they’re hardly going to get from the platform.
Don’t underestimate the seductiveness, either, of Johnson’s argument that the Tories should stick proudly to their guns in the face of a growing electoral threat from Labour; that, if anything, they should double down on support for free market capitalism, rather than tacitly suggesting (as the chancellor Philip Hammond did on Monday) that Jeremy Corbyn might have a point about how badly that’s working for some. The sotto voce message to rattled Tories is that they can stay in their ideological comfort zone after all.
Yet for all that, there are two significant differences between this year and all the previous years of Johnson effortlessly overshadowing whoever was Tory leader at the time. Firstly, he’s now operating in a far more crowded field. They’re queuing round the block in Birmingham for anything involving Jacob Rees-Mogg, a reminder that Johnson is no longer the only somewhat eccentric self-publicist in town, but also that hardcore Brexiters often like their heroes untainted by the necessary compromises of office. Some haven’t forgotten that Johnson was suspiciously slow to resign after the Chequers deal and that in cabinet he meekly acquiesced to the idea of a backstop in Northern Ireland, now seen as the rock on which a hard Brexit foundered.
But the second difference is that in embracing Brexit ideology so fervently, he has sacrificed much of his fuzzy general likeability. These days when he reminds interviewers of how he won the London mayoralty by wooing people who wouldn’t naturally consider themselves Tory voters, it only serves to underline how impossible he’d find that now. Johnson is no longer the candidate capable of reaching the parts other Tory politicians can’t, but a sharply polarising figure. And while that may not matter much to Tory members consumed with lust for a perfect Brexit, it is a serious obstacle to his reaching the shortlist from which they will choose their next leader. Tory MPs who were once prepared, through gritted teeth, to put him on to the shortlist because he looked like a winner are no longer so sure that’s what he is. Others with painful memories of his last botched run at the leadership are casting around for someone less likely to self-destruct in the middle of it.
And perhaps Johnson has simply calculated that none of that matters; that both Donald Trump and Corbyn have in their very different ways demonstrated the power of whipping up a mass popular movement behind you, and that change now comes from the bottom up not the top down. Perhaps he’s counting on a membership radicalised by Brexit to pressure their MPs into supporting him, for fear of the backlash if he were deliberately kept off an otherwise dull shortlist. Maybe it’s Johnson who knows which way the wind is actually blowing, and those ambitious cabinet ministers doing it the traditional way – a coy flash of pro-Brexit ankle here, a nod to electoral reality there – are hopelessly behind the times. If so, we’ll probably look back on this week as a turning point in the way Tory leadership elections are fought.
But if not, then it may be Boris Johnson’s last real hurrah. Enjoy it, if that’s quite the phrase, while it lasts.