Sir Lindsay Hoyle said when he was elected Speaker that he would not let PMQs run for up to 40 or 50 minutes, as his predecessor John Bercow used to, but on Wednesday afternoon Hoyle made an exception to mark Boris Johnson’s final day at the despatch box.
Towards the end, after a long and often tedious session that mostly illuminated how threadbare Johnson’s legacy was, Hoyle must have been thinking it might have been better to pull the plug at 12.30 sharpish. But then, in his final answer, to Sir Edward Leigh, Johnson suddenly shifted gear and said something interesting.
It was the political equivalent of his last will and testament, and it is worth reproducing in full. He said:
I want to use the last few seconds to give some words of advice to my successor, whoever he or she may be.
Number one: Stay close to the Americans, stick up for the Ukrainians, stick up for freedom and democracy everywhere. Cut taxes and deregulate wherever you can to make this the greatest place to live and invest, which it is.
I love the Treasury but remember that if we’d always listened to the Treasury we wouldn’t have built the M25 or the Channel Tunnel.
Focus on the road ahead but always remember to check the rear view mirror.
And remember, above all, it’s not Twitter that counts, it’s the people that sent us here.
The last few years have been the greatest privilege of my life, and it is true that I helped to get the biggest Tory majority for 40 years, and a huge realignment in UK politics. We have transformed our politics and restored our national independence.
We’ve helped – I’ve helped – get this country through a pandemic, and helped save another country from barbarism. And, frankly, that’s enough to be going on with. Mission largely accomplished – for now.
I want to thank you, Mr Speaker, I want to thank all the wonderful staff of the House of Commons, I want to thank all my friends and colleagues, I want to thank my friend opposite, I want to thank everybody here, and hasta la vista, baby, thank you.
Johnson shows little interest in introspection, and the speech he gave on Monday afternoon, at the opening of the debate on the motion of confidence in the government, was mostly a trite and unreliable catalogue of boasts. Wednesday afternoon’s statement was much more revealing, for three reasons.
First, it is a useful guide to what Johnson’s political convictions actually are: Atlanticism, low taxes and deregulation – conventional Conservatism, in other words, leavened with support for big spending projects of the kind the Treasury dislikes. Levelling up didn’t get a mention, nor the environment. But his advice to politicians (focus on the future, and don’t take Twitter too seriously) was sound.
Second, although Johnson has never publicly acknowledged that he was the cause of his own downfall, there was a hint here that his achievements have been limited. Listening to his speech on Monday, you would assume that his government was the most successful ever. But here he boiled it all down to a big election victory, Brexit, getting through Covid, and Ukraine. “That’s enough to be going on with,” he added, suggesting there was much left undone.
And that leads on to the third, and most interesting, feature of his valedictory: the very strong hint that he wants to stage a comeback. “Mission largely accomplished – for now,” he said. And he concluded with a line from Terminator 2 normally translated as “See you later.”
Another famous line from the same film is “I’ll be back.”
The Tory applause for Johnson at the end seemed quite genuine, according to colleagues who were watching from the gallery. But that might just be a function of good manners, as much as anything else, and it doesn’t mean they want him to stay on.
Keir Starmer did a good job at explaining quite what a mess Johnson had left his party in, and there is no evidence at all that the voters would welcome a second Johnson premiership. Britain has not seen an outgoing PM return to Downing Street after a period out of office for almost 50 years, since Harold Wilson in 1974. But, like his quasi US counterpart Donald Trump, Johnson is clearly mulling over the possibility of a comeback one day. It might not be the last PMQs after all.
