For Rishi Sunak, 5 July will live in the memory as the date on which he offered his resignation as Prime Minister. The running jokes about the Stanford alumnus expatriating himself immediately to California miss some salient factors about the Sunaks’ lifestyle. One Downing Street aide speaking to me last week expected Sunak to “spend more time in his new sauna”. The former PM upgraded his private swimming pool system in North Yorkshire only last year – why leave now?
But two years is a long time in politics. Three prime ministers later, it’s easy to forget that 5 July recently had a different resonance. In 2022, it was the date that Sajid Javid and Rishi Sunak both resigned from Boris Johnson’s Cabinet. Johnson threw in the towel two days later.
The clear-sighted minister Victoria Atkins – likely to be a thoughtful voice in the leadership campaigns to come – memorably summed up the crisis as “Paterson, Partygate and Pincher.”
Johnson had whipped his MPs to vote against ethics sanctions on a colleague, Owen Paterson, caught lobbying during the pandemic for a medical company which paid him.
Johnson had partied through a pandemic while royals and plebeians alike sat alone at funerals. He had appointed an ally, Chris Pincher, to the post of Deputy Chief Whip, despite being briefed on allegations that Pincher was a groper, then fatally lied about his knowledge of this when Pincher was caught groping two men at the Tory Carlton Club.
As Atkins affirmed in her resignation letter, Johnson’s handling of each incident only further revealed his “fracturing” of “values such as integrity, decency, respect and professionalism”.
To voters, it seemed to confirm an old narrative – that there is no national emergency so serious, no fatalities so shocking, that Tory MPs will not use it to line their pockets or indulge their desires.
Johnson, with his own incontinent appetites and Falstaffian cover of bonhomie, was its face. Last week’s drubbing of the Tories, reflected not only in a Labour ascendency but by anti-Tory tactical voting in every region, was its long, stinging tail.
As Tory feuds are set blossom like mushroom clouds in the coming weeks, we can expect to see the events of July 2022 relitigated feverishly, picked apart every bit as passionately as the apocalypse of July 2024.
Nadine Dorries has already begun. “Was it worth it?”, she asked her former colleagues, tweeting out a graphic which compared the votes and seats won by Johnson and Sunak respectively in 2019 and 2024. Johnson won 365 seats while Sunak managed barely a third of that number, with 121. The implication is that Johnson should not have been dethroned.
This is bogus, dangerous thinking for the Tories. Johnson may have seduced the electorate in 2019, but the punishment inflicted by disillusioned voters last week was a judgement on his own toxic betrayal of public trust as much on the interim leadership of hopeless Sunak and hapless Truss. Yet we’re going to hear a lot of Dorries-style pap. Tories looking to rebuild the Tory party should reject it.
Much of Johnson’s self-made myth resonated, briefly. He built his political mystique by convincing colleagues that he could appeal to parts of the country that other Tories couldn’t touch. In 2019, he looked like proving that true, assembling a coalition of voters which allowed him to seize former Labour heartlands everywhere from the post-industrial zones of the North East to the former mining towns of North Wales.
Excited Tory journalists termed this “the “Red Wall”; critics, such as the analyst Lewis Baston, quietly warned that this was “a way of making a patronising generalisation about a huge swathe of England (and a corner of Wales)”. Such voices were ignored. They ignored, too, the result of poll after poll which showed that the electorate had voted not so much for Johnson, but against Corbyn. Polling for More In Common, for example, found that more Tory voters – 43 per cent of those polled – listed “Stopping Jeremy Corbyn” as a key factor for their decision to vote Tory in 2019 than listed any other reason.
Throughout Boris’ disastrous premiership, his outriders pointed back to the exceptional electoral map of 2019. Skip five Cobra meetings before the country’s pandemic shutdown? Perhaps, they conceded, this was sub-optimal. But which other leader would win seats from Redcar to Redditch?
Boris Johnson’s leadership, his team told Tory MPs, didn’t just guarantee the continuation of Tory government. It guaranteed them holding onto their seats.
Yet there was a price paid when the Tory Party sold its soul to Boris Johnson. A once great party shrivelled, condemned not only to moral shrinkage but to an intellectual shallowing-out.
Although Johnson claimed to build his coalition by reaching across the nation, he was less interested in reaching across ideological divisions – even in his own party.
Back in my Tory think tank years, under David Cameron, the Cameroons were in the ascent but the Tory party remained a broad church. Cameron modernised his cabinet, embraced gay marriage, and talked to the press about deprivation and the environment. But he never purged the hard right or took control of the local party apparatus.
If any mistake haunts the Cameron-Osborne legacy almost as heavily as calling the Brexit referendum, it was that they never had the guts to take on the blue-rinse Tory associations, which resisted their attempts to select more women and routinely selected critics of the more liberal leadership. Keir Starmer has learned from their mistakes.
By contrast, Johnson had no qualms about purging his enemies. In his party, it became commonplace to tell “wets” – as one current leadership contender once told me – that as liberal Tories, the party should reject our votes. While it is not the case that social moderates and anti-Brexiters in the party are always the same people – Penny Mordaunt voted for Brexit; Liz Truss voted Remain – when Johnson purged 21 MPs in September 2019 for refusing to support a no-deal Brexit, he was banishing the party’s One Nation for a generation. And he knew it.
Ten were eventually restored, briefly, to the whip. Only one, the leading liberal Caroline Noakes, who made her distance to Boris central to her public pitch, remains an MP after the election. Other MPs who have claimed the One Nation mantle – Damian Green, Bim Afolami - bent the knee to Johnson in the summer 2019. It has not served them well.
The Tory Party will spend the next Parliament dreaming of how to win again. For many, Johnson remains their model of a “winner”.
The Sunak machine was driven by a desperation to prove it could win the same electoral map as Boris in 2019 – this was repeatedly the justification given to journalists for appointing Lee Anderson as Deputy Chair, or pushing through with the inhumane attempt to send migrants to Rwanda.
But if the intention was to shore up the party’s populist credentials, it had the opposite effect. Anderson defected to Reform, and last week Reform took millions of votes from the Tories who had obligingly opened the door to them.
Yet the truth is, you can throw all the red meat you want at the “Red Wall”, but the British people – every stratified electoral segment of them – can still tell when they have been sold a con.
Whoever the next leader of the Conservatives is, the party will have to convince voters that they’re not in it for themselves. Boris Johnson’s ethical morass of a reign made that harder, not easier. He lumbered Rishi Sunak with an almost unwinnable hand. The next successor, too, should avoid his shadow.