Boris Johnson’s government loves to boast. Often it seems to do little else. Talking up its achievements, real or not, gives the impression of momentum where there is more often chaos and indecision – as there was this week, with the government twice changing its position on LGBT conversion practices. With a prime minister not known for his administrative abilities, and yet many voters and newspapers still invested in the idea that the Tories are the natural party of government, for today’s Conservatives, constant bragging plays a crucial distracting role.
One of the government’s more potent claims is that it represents a wider range of Britons than its predecessors. In some ways, this is actually true. Johnson has a bigger majority, drawn from more parts of England and Wales – if not Scotland – than any Tory government since the early 90s. Most strikingly, he has a more multiracial cabinet than any previous prime minister.
In other ways, his government is much less representative, with a huge reliance on support from pensioners and twice the proportion of privately educated cabinet ministers as served under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Yet there is just enough substance in Johnson’s claim to speak for “the people of this country” to unsettle Labour, with its mainly urban MPs and succession of leaders from north London. A relatively inclusive Conservative government can be presented as a change from the discredited Tory regimes that ran Britain from 2010 to 2019. If enough voters believe in this change, the Conservatives may get re-elected yet again.
So it has been strange in recent weeks to watch the government seemingly happy to alienate so many groups of voters. From public sector workers to people who followed the lockdown rules; from university students to people who export to the EU; from Covid shielders to benefits claimants, including pensioners: the government’s combination of cuts, tax rises and insouciance about the pandemic threatens to enrage them all. Meanwhile, promises made to millions of new Tory supporters during Johnson’s first year in office have been allowed to wither. In his spring statement the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, only mentioned levelling up once, in passing.
All governments eventually disappoint people. But Johnson has been in power less than three years. The speed with which his government has let voters down, the unapologetic way it has done so – “we can’t do everything”, as Sunak sulkily put it – and the scale of the disconnect between rhetoric and reality have all been pretty startling. These brazen shortcomings also tell us important things about Johnson’s rule.
Most obviously, as all his careers have shown, he always lets people down. Second, his party is feeling almost invincible. After surviving – or thinking they have survived – Brexit, the pandemic and countless other policy disasters and scandals, many Conservatives find it hard to imagine any crisis that would be fatal, not least because they see Labour and Keir Starmer as such toothless rivals.
A similar overconfidence is shaping how the Tories govern. They seem more interested in trying to control the country’s political conversations – about patriotism, for example – than in more tangible goals such as making the public safer or protecting standards of living. Meanwhile, the material beneficiaries of Johnson’s rule seem ever fewer: rich party donors, crony companies winning government contracts, crooks fraudulently claiming barely supervised Covid support payments, and a minority of homeowners able to exploit a price bubble.
Conservative governments used to think it was in their interests to spread the incentives and rewards for voting Tory much more widely. As housing minister during the 1950s, Harold Macmillan was so keen to get more homes built, to demonstrate that the Tories were creating a “property-owning democracy”, that the construction totals were displayed in his department like the scores at a cricket match. In 1992, the Conservative election manifesto promised “to encourage the wider distribution of wealth throughout society”. It claimed that under them, Britain had already become “a capital-owning democracy”: “10 million people own shares, 6 million of them in newly privatised industries.”
This more expansive Toryism should not be romanticised. Many of the homes built during Macmillan’s housing ministry were small and shoddy. Over four-fifths of Britons still did not own shares in 1992. But these Tory governments at least made serious attempts to soften the tension between conservatism and democracy – namely that a belief system based on hierarchies is always potentially threatened by every adult having one vote. As the US political theorist Corey Robin wrote in his book The Reactionary Mind, serious conservatives are always looking for ways “to make privilege popular”.
Johnson is not serious about anything except himself. For all his populist talk, and his government’s initially broad support, the Tories’ electoral strategy now looks increasingly narrow. Their party co-chairman Oliver Dowden recently said that their next general election campaign would be “building on the experience of [our] campaign in 2015”. The Conservatives won that election with a skimpy 37% of the vote – almost exactly their poll rating now – by focusing on small numbers of voters in a few dozen swing seats, adding them to the party’s core support and essentially ignoring everyone else. The architect and overseer of this strategy was the Australian consultant Lynton Crosby. He has been hired to advise the Conservatives again.
There is a chance that this methodical, minimal, often cynical approach, which uses scare stories about other parties in order to push voters towards the Tories, will work less well at the next election. Politics has become less predictable since 2015, and after all the chaos under Johnson it is harder to present the Conservatives as the safe option.
Eventually, the Tory support from older voters may also weaken. Last year, the sociologist Phil Burton-Cartledge published Falling Down, a counterintuitive but quite convincing book about “the decline of Tory Britain”. It argues that there is “a crisis of Conservative political reproduction”: today’s pensioners, many of them beneficiaries of past Tory policies such as right to buy, will gradually be replaced by more liberal Britons who owe the Conservatives little.
Anticipating a better future is often a coping mechanism for the left. But already under Johnson the Conservatives are in a reckless, possibly self-destructive phase: treating most voters as expendable, offering the country not coherent government but the spectacle of their own manoeuvring and shamelessness. Explaining Johnson’s U-turns on conversion practices, a Downing Street spokesperson said: “On reflection, it was something he cared passionately about.” Such slipperiness still impresses some commentators and other political professionals. Voters may want more.
Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist
