The jubilee coup is under way. The rumbling turmoil in the Tory party is a wonder to behold – but it runs deep, stretching far further back in time than Boris Johnson’s brief calamitous leadership.
The old chameleon party used to pick itself up and start all over again with some new face and logo, feigning ignorance of all that went before. Not this time. This is a party riddled with eccentric ideologues too remote from moderate election-winning ground to select any leader but one of their ilk. The 54 MPs’ letters required to trigger a vote against their leader have arrived on the doormat of the 1922 Committee’s chair, Graham Brady. The vote will take place tonight. “Red wall” MPs have turned white at the latest JL Partners Wakefield poll putting Labour 20 points ahead. “Blue wall” MPs face the even more astounding prospect of the Liberal Democrats upending a massive 24,000 majority in Tiverton and Honiton. The stampede to save themselves seems to be on.
Julius Caesar and Macbeth quotes litter the airwaves. I might add A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Titania awakening to find she’s been sleeping with Bottom. Boris Johnson’s defenders raise only guffaws when they tell the Sun: “While these self-obsessed rebels stir up trouble, Boris is working hard to ease the cost of living.”
Boos from royalists outside St Paul’s as Johnson arrived for the Queen’s jubilee thanksgiving service, and the indignity of Mumsnet questioners impugning his honesty chime with polls and the public mood. Which malicious cleric made the PM read that punishingly inappropriate Bible passage extolling, “Whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is just, whatever is pure”? No one believes him – nor that he’s working hard for us. He is busted with the public, his ratings abysmal, a bourn, one pollster tells me, from which no politician has ever returned.
They say he will have to be dragged out, clinging to No 10’s handle. Now the vote has been triggered, the rebels need 180 backers to oust him, but allies say a one-vote win is enough, defying Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May, who won but departed with dignity and tears after losing support. For now, watch the dangerous spectacle of Johnson hurling everything at shoring up Tory MPs’ votes. Grammar schools are back, he says, but that doesn’t fly with the public, only with Tory cultists. The absurdity of imperial measurements appals business and even makes the Sun, tussling with bushels, groats and chains, laugh incredulously: “It’s firkin hard,” it said.
Johnson’s latest desperate effort reprises a Thatcher triumph that turned to disaster: he will sell millions of housing association homes to bribe voters with a 70% discount, demolishing what’s left of Harold Macmillan’s social housing building bonanza.
And then, reckless and feckless, he may this week unveil his law to override the Northern Ireland protocol. The EU warns that would trigger a trade war, but he may wrongly think breaking apart the Good Friday agreement could be his Falklands moment. Pull it all down, the more mayhem the better, revive that Brexit enthusiasm. It’s where to go when all else fails.
Rebels warn that if he won’t budge, they will boycott all his legislation. Johnsonites retaliate by warning the whip will be withdrawn from rebels, so they can’t stand as Conservatives again. And then there is the nuclear threat: if too many vote against him, he might launch a shock general election, just to lose them all their seats in revenge. Après moi, le déluge – the thinking of every megalomaniac.
We see the battle played out in arch-Tory newspapers, where MPs and ministers attack and counterattack. Noticeably few defend their leader – only the desperados, Nadine Dorries, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Grant Shapps and Priti Patel, deficients who would be swept away by any newcomer. But all critics and loyalists are grappling with the same hard question: is there any further point to Johnson? Is he – in the face of a perfect political storm – still the best way for them to save themselves and keep their seats?
And if they cut him loose, what next? Civil war? Disintegration? Old Labour hands see their plight. They recognise a party seized by ideologues and fanatics, just as Labour has been to varying degrees in the past. They recognise a party not just infiltrated but devoured by the Brexit party and all the viruses attached to their Brexit-mania. Tory moderates are largely driven out, even the most distinguished. Johnson dithered over joining the Brexit side in the referendum, but once he helped win it by a whisker, the party hired him as its jockey to ride Brexit across the line, to “get it done”. But here we are and Brexit seems not to be done after all. Which way now, but chaos?
There is a brokenness in everything they touch, an anti-Midas touch. Pollsters tell me that there is no appetite in red or blue walls for their libertarian retro tunes of deregulation: cut the green crap, forget the climate crisis and pollution, axe Kitemarks and food standards. Those wild things only excite the Tory hardcore. But the cultists hold sway, so any leadership candidate will still need to cleave to their free-market and culture war obsessions.
It means they will struggle to align themselves with the public, for ordinary British voters want what they have basically always wanted: rules, laws, regulations to keep them safe and leaders who can deliver them. These Tories are as rebarbative to voters as once were Michael Foot and Jeremy Corbyn.
Think hard, Johnson says. Come up with something. So their latest brainwave is to target an imaginary Waitrose woman. You can see why, as under Johnson the Tories have a “huge” woman problem, says Patrick English of YouGov. Forty-five per cent of women back Labour, only 29% the Conservatives. But everything about this latest desperate ploy is wrong. Waitrose has just 4.8% of grocery sales, and its shoppers won’t like being class-tagged and politically pigeonholed. The archetype, we are told, is called “Catherine” – so the party has probably just lost a lot of Catherines too. And what of all non-Waitrose shoppers, especially those who saw their Waitrose stores in Wolverhampton, Marlow, Scarborough and Stevenage close down? Catherine won’t save them and neither, you must now assume, will the hitherto lauded dark political skills of Johnson’s go-to strategist Lynton Crosby. He has dug Johnson out before, but some holes are just too deep.
I may be wrong. How often have Labour people stood on the brink of toppling Tory hegemony, only to watch Conservatives rescue themselves with their ruthless instinct for survival? But talk to people, read the runes, feel the shifting ground. This time the ruling party’s breathtaking incompetence and hubris is weighed down by public service failures and a brutal cost of living crisis. I see no sign these cultists know how to abandon their alien creeds to save themselves.
• Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
