When Boris Johnson sailed into a meeting of the 1922 Committee of Tory backbenchers on the wave of a seismic election victory, he joked that he was looking forward to seeing how long it would take for letters of no confidence to start pouring in from his parliamentary colleagues. A year after he became leader, the Conservative backbenches are already restless. One former cabinet minister said they thought the “clouds had gathered” – and not just because of the pandemic, but owing to a feeling that a “good-time” prime minister was not what was needed for the massive economic challenges ahead. Even Johnson’s critics concede he has had, as one put it, “a hell of a year”. One pointed out that Johnson had “been on the backbenches, where he was almost a figure of fun, then won the leadership, divorced his wife, secured a fiancee, fathered a child and nearly died of Covid. It’s a lifetime in one year.” But they added: “The hard facts are that Boris is a good-time prime minister; his grip on detail is shocking. He’s the chairman of the board rather than the chief executive. And he’s got a highly contentious, divisive and controversial chief executive in Dominic Cummings.”
Though Johnson has a reputation as a genial parliamentary colleague, MPs say he has few trusted friends in the party. “He is not clubbable: he doesn’t come into the tearoom, you don’t see him around very much,” an ex-cabinet minister said. Another MP said: “In this No 10, the Conservative party is just something they need to govern. And the party is becoming gradually unwhippable as a result.” If the economic downturn and the fallout from an inquiry into the pandemic put the party into freefall, some have even begun to think Johnson may need to be replaced before the next election. “The party has no emotional attachment to Boris because he does not give us something to believe in, apart from as a vehicle for power,” one MP said. “So a year out, if the polls look bad, it could happen.” If the time comes when the Tories are behind in the polls and a rival begins to gather supporters, “it’s not that people will move against him, they just won’t lift a hand to help him,” another backbench MP said. In anticipation of the possibility that the Tories will be led by someone other than Johnson by the time of the next election, Labour is pinning responsibility for the failings of the Covid-19 response on the government as a whole. “They’re government decisions, they’re Conservative decisions,” said one Labour strategist, who added that Keir Starmer was deliberately avoiding personal attacks on Johnson. “People have been trying that for years and it doesn’t work. It’s a question of competence. It’s a question of delivering what you promised.” One former adviser to Theresa May expressed surprise about the discontent of Tory backbenchers. “Given that Boris Johnson has the biggest majority since Blair, that restiveness in the party is a striking thing that I didn’t expect,” they said. Tory backbenchers say they need to see a more definitive programme from No 10, and some blame a Downing Street team and cabinet that they say was constructed to deal with Brexit and little else. One long-serving Tory MP said he and a colleague had discussed how many members of Johnson’s cabinet would have met the threshold to be included in Margaret Thatcher’s top team, and decided the answer was none. “It’s tall poppies: he can’t stand tall poppies,” he said. “I think Boris has shown in the first year that the government and the team in No 10 is obsessed – and obsessed isn’t too strong a word – with Brexit,” said one MP, a backer of Johnson’s leadership campaign. “And they were caught completely unprepared for Covid because they didn’t put together a government that had anything other than Brexit in mind.”
One former cabinet minister said the economic challenges ahead went far deeper than dealing with the fallout from coronavirus and were likely to affect the Tories’ target voters. “We’re leaving the largest trading free-trade bloc in the world. And we are in the deep freeze with the biggest economy in the world,” the former cabinet minister said. “And this is on top of coping with a pandemic. We are a small ship riding into a massive storm – a massive threat to the living standards, financial wellbeing and economic future of people who do vote.” Though Labour may have pinned its hopes on Johnson taking the brunt of the blame for any mishandling of coronavirus, including delayed decisions on lockdown, it is one area where MPs are prepared to cut the prime minister some slack – and where they believe voters will too. “If you take my classic marginal seat, we have had enough doctors, beds, ventilators, PPE,” one veteran MP said. “We’ve been able to furlough thousands. Very few people are complaining – yet. “I think there’s a lot of sympathy for the prime minister as someone who was a sort of casualty of war. Of course, the whole Dominic Cummings thing was a nightmare. But it’s not quite the same thing as passing a judgment on Boris himself.” Johnson’s brush with his own mortality sent shockwaves through the party, many MPs said, but several said they felt he was now trying too hard to prove his fitness. “I think people were really worried about him for a while,” one former minister said. “Everybody has to be Putin on a horse in this game; nobody can admit weakness. Hence the press-ups”. Many MPs said Johnson would be the right figurehead for the coming years when the country desperately needs to renew its self-confidence. Steve Brine, the Winchester MP who ran Jeremy Hunt’s leadership campaign, said last Friday’s Downing Street press conference in which Johnson held out the hope of a “significant return to normality” by Christmas was a welcome return to the optimism of old. “That’s what the country needs right now,” he said. “We need his optimism now more than ever, and we have to get behind him.” Johnson’s general election victory in December was defined by the dismantling of the so-called “red wall” of traditional Labour seats across the north of England, where the call of “get Brexit done” persuaded voters to turn to the Conservatives in droves. Those new MPs are now keen to see the prime minister deliver on what they promised their voters: “levelling up” and closing the stark economic disparity between north and south. Some more experienced MPs expressed concern that the narrative may not produce tangible results for their election leaflets. “Levelling up isn’t really defined properly. It can’t be defined properly, because that’s the nature of it. It’s something that’s generational, not from one election cycle. So you can’t declare victory on levelling up,” one MP said.
Ben Bradley, the former Tory vice-chair who was one of the first MPs to seize a “red wall” seat, in Mansfield in 2017, said Johnson’s success or failure would be down to that agenda. “I think the narrative is good. But the proof in the pudding, isn’t it?” he said. “We said that these were lent voters, so we have to deliver and prove that they did the right thing. So that’s the challenge for him, almost more so than dealing with the pandemic, which is process-driven. It’s understanding the needs of those voters and getting that tangible stuff in place that makes them feel better, within three or four years.” One former cabinet minister cautioned that Johnson should not set too much store by his reputation in ex-Labour seats. “I went to 17 red wall seats. The name Boris Johnson barely came up. The name Jeremy Corbyn came up all the time,” the MP said. Few are daring to predict whether Johnson can keep hold of power beyond the next election. “He is definitely intending to fight the next election. Politicians like Boris are about winning and not about anything else,” one frontbencher said.