A great escapologist turns into a lame duck

He’s pulled it off again! Boris Johnson, the great escape artist, has ducked being sacked by his own party’s MPs. Enough called for a vote of no confidence for the Conservative parliamentary party to have to hold one, but not enough voted to get him dumped.

Johnson may well be just a bit tired...
He’s clung on to his job, but weakened. A lame duck

He does, however, emerge from the battle badly damaged. After all, 148 of his parliamentary colleagues voted for him to go. It’s fascinating to imagine them talking to their constituents at the next general election. 

“Vote for me! Vote Conservative!” they’ll be saying.

“What?” will come the voter’s reply, “and put back into Downing Street the man that you voted to throw out?”

To be fair, I always had ambivalent feelings about the vote. I mean, it’s a terrible blot on all of us, damaging to our reputation abroad but also making it hard to have a reasonable sense of pride in our country, that we tolerate the level of rottenness Johnson has inflicted on Britain.. Clearly, seeing Johnson fired would have been a major benefit for the country generally, a kind of cleansing.

It would have been the Conservative Party pouring a powerful drain cleaner down the grate, instead of just adding to the sewage as it has for years.

On the other hand, Johnson, once a major electoral asset for the Tory Party, is now a colossal liability. In less than three weeks, there’s going to be a by-election in Wakefield, a constituency in Labour’s former ‘Red Wall’, through which Johnson drove a bulldozer at the last general election, in 2019. It’s the kind of seat Labour absolutely has to win back if it is to have a chance of forming a government again.

Well, no opinion poll is worth as much as the real poll on election day, but the latest survey in Wakefield shows Labour 20 points ahead. Just because opinion polls aren’t always reliable, that doesn’t mean victory’s in the bag, of course. It is, however, at the very least encouraging.

Make no mistake about it, if Labour does indeed win back the seat, a huge part of that success will be down to Johnson, the millstone around the Tories’ neck.

This all means that, had Johnson lost the confidence vote, I’d have felt a sense of relief for Britain in having seen the pool of corruption he created at Downing Street finally flushed down the drain. On the other hand, I’d have regretted the departure of a Tory leader perhaps easier for Labour to beat than pretty well any other. And just as Britain needs to cleanse itself of the Johnson gang, so it needs to free itself of Tory government more generally too.

This sorry crowd has been in power for ten years and has achieved nothing of value. The teaching profession is in crisis. The National Health Service, which they inherited from Labour in 2010 in the most vigorous state it’s ever enjoyed since it was founded three-quarters of a century ago, is stumbling towards its grave. Housing, despite yearly promises to build huge numbers of new homes, is unable to keep up with need. The judicial system can’t handle the pressure on it. Why, even the police, and the Tories have always promoted themselves as the party of law and order, is far too short of resources to cope. 

The need for a Labour government has never been more acute. That might make the Tories’ decision to remain saddled with a damaged, lame-duck leader, now an electoral liability, rather a good thing for Britain in the longer run. In a perverse way, mind you, not the way Tory MPs may have intended, since it might well be the very boost Labour needs to win the next election and kick the Tories into the long grass. 

Take another of the supposed achievement of the Tories. One of which many of their number, and Johnson in particular, are proud. That’s getting Britain out of the European Union. Which only makes it all the more fascinating to see one of their MPs, Tobias Ellwood, already calling for Britain to rejoin the Single Market. 

That’s the arrangement that allows free trade between European nations. It has regulations concerning product standards, but it does not require full EU membership. Norway is a member of the Single Market, without being a full member of the EU.

Ellwood has called for radical thinking to “energise our economy through these stormy waters”. Britain is facing a cost-of-living crisis, and Ellwood thinks joining the Single Market would help. He also points to some specific areas of concern. 

Fishing and farming, for instance, that Brexiters claimed would hugely benefit from leaving the EU, are in reality facing terrible difficulties. And there is a currently insurmountable problem in relations between Northern Ireland which, as part of the UK, has left the EU, and the Republic of Ireland, which hasn’t. 

“All these challenges would disappear,” Ellwood claims, “if we dare to advance our Brexit model by rejoining the EU single market (the Norway model).”

He’s entirely right. Leaving the Single Market was a catastrophic error. We should get back in.

But here’s the problem. It’s those regulations I mentioned before, the ones governing the Single Market. If we were to rejoin, we’d become, as opponents have often pointed out, rule-takers rather than rule-makers. We really ought to have a say in what the rules are.

Of course, that’s an easily resolved problem. We only need to rejoin the full EU. That would give us the say we need. So Ellwood is right about the need to get back into the Single Market; he just needs to take the next, obvious step and call for us to reverse Brexit altogether.

See what I mean? Twelve years in, the Tories have a track record of no achievements and a great deal of damage. Brexit was part of that damage. Ellwood has, in effect, admitted as much. In many ways, that makes Johnson the perfect symbol of everything they’ve done since 2010. Incompetence and disappointment – yep, that’s not just Johnson, it’s the trail of destruction of twelve years of Tory government.

Tonight, Conservative MPs had the chance to dump him. They bottled it. But at least that leaves a hopeless, damaged, lame duck leader likely to be taking the Tories into the next election, at the head of a deeply divided party. 

Our principal need remains as strong as ever. Which is not just dumping Johnson, but getting the Tories out of Downing Street altogether.

Tory MPs may just have made Labour’s job a bit easier.