Friday 10 April 2015

Johnson At The Helm?

Martin Kettle writes:

Scotland is getting a lion’s share of attention in this election, and with excellent reason.

Yet London, with its 73 seats, will send more MPs to Westminster in a month’s time than Scotland with its 59.

And party politics is changing pretty fast in London too, with consequences that could be almost as significant for Britain as those in Scotland.

Five years ago, in an election it lost, Labour finished two points ahead of the Conservatives in the capital.

Yet now, five years on, according to the two most recent opinion polls, Labour leads in London by either 10 points with YouGov or 14 according to ComRes.

If those polls stay more or less where they are, Labour will make significant gains in London from both the Conservatives and the Lib Dems.

If the election goes really well for Labour, Ed Miliband could gain as many as 10 new MPs from London.

The election in London matters for another reason.

London is the power base of Boris Johnson, to whom many Tories look as their next leader and as a more effective vote-winner than David Cameron. 

Johnson – I refuse absolutely to capitulate to the habit of calling him by his first name in print and hereby urge all fellow members of the Society of Columnists and Allied Trades to do the same – has won two successive head-to-head contests against Labour in a city that has been moving leftwards in most other recent elections.

Johnson is massively lauded by his party for his ability to attract swing voters and undecideds and to eat into Labour support.

He remains London’s mayor for up to a year, and he continues to have good job ratings (61% approval in the last Evening Standard poll) in that role.

He is also now spearheading the Tory campaign effort in the capital in the run-up to 7 May – and he is himself a candidate in Uxbridge and South Ruislip.

All in all, Johnson has some serious involvement in and responsibility for the Tory performance.

So if Johnson is as effective a campaigner and vote-getter as many Tories suppose, why are the Conservatives set to do as badly in London as it appears?

If I were a Tory, I would be genuinely concerned about this question and would want a good answer.

I would certainly want to take a long and hard look at the detailed results in London before assuming that Johnson is the answer to the party’s electoral problems. 

Having studied those results, I would also ask myself whether having Johnson at the helm would address the questions that deter people from voting Conservative.

If I were an MP, I would be very tempted, as things stand, to stop the Johnson bandwagon from getting to the membership stage of the ballot.

Four weeks from now, as the election results come in, David Cameron will be learning about his future chances as Tory leader.

If he is able to form a government of any kind, Cameron will stay at No 10 until sometime in the second half of the parliament.

If Miliband gets to be prime minister, however, Cameron is likely to return to Chipping Norton to write his memoirs.

That’s the modern way after a defeat. And it’s probably what Cameron himself would prefer.

So we are only a month away from a general election in which Johnson’s electoral reach will be tested as never before, and perhaps from a Conservative leadership contest in which his presumed popularity would be a potent factor.

This latter is a contest for which many in the Tory party are already actively preparing. It is a very live issue in the party.

It is widely assumed that an early contest would favour Johnson while a later one, after the putative EU referendum, would be less advantageous. Though not yet an MP, Johnson is the bookies’ favourite at 5/2.

According to his backers, Johnson would be the one person in the field – which would probably include Theresa May, George Osborne and a candidate from the unreconstructed right – who could attract the voters whom Cameron would have twice failed to persuade.

Johnson’s team have already prepared a campaign slogan that sums all this up: hope, happiness and Heineken.

Yet Johnson’s ability to refresh the voters others cannot reach rests on a substantial amount of electoral sand.

In a nationwide YouGov poll taken last month after Cameron had indicated he would not serve a third term, more voters thought Johnson was up to the job of being PM than May and Osborne.

But Londoners, who have lived under a Johnson regime since 2008, had much the lowest view of his prime ministerial abilities, with just 20% support.

It’s the traditional Tories in the south of England – who vote Tory anyway – who were most likely to think Johnson was up to it. Scots, for instance, think he is even more out of touch than May.

Johnson’s popularity is beyond question.

People recognise him, they think he is likeable and they don’t think he is like other politicians. This means they give him the benefit of the doubt in ways that more traditional politicians can only dream of.

But surveys put him behind Miliband, not ahead of him, on whether he understands ordinary people, an issue that has dogged the Cameron Tory party to this day.

There is no guarantee that the groups of voters with whom the Tories struggle – women, black and minority ethnics, northerners or Scots – will respond favourably to Johnson.

The danger from the Tories’ point of view is that they may persuade themselves that Johnson is a more attractive potential leader than those voters whom the Tories need believe he is.

Lord Ashcroft warned his party of this danger two years ago. The question voters would ask is “Are You Serious?” he cautioned.

When Ken Livingstone was the alternative, Johnson was attractive, and the fact that he was a Tory more incidental.

When the traditional Labour party is the alternative, the attraction diminishes and the unattractive aspects – including his Toryness – may even loom larger.

That is why the Tory party should listen carefully to London.

Johnson supporters may argue that any Tory failures are more Cameron’s fault that anyone else’s. But London has been Johnson’s town for seven years without it benefiting the Tories more generally.

It would be an enormous gamble for the Tory party to assume that Johnson is a game changer when so many voters seem to think he is not the change they would welcome.

Boris Johnson is a candidate as far out of London as you can go without leaving it. But not actually outside London. And a safe seat. He is so popular, isn't he? And he wants to abrogate the presumption of innocence. In which case, what would we be fighting for?

Not only has Johnson expressed the universal recognition that the Conservatives are going to be looking for a new Leader after having lost this General Election, but he has also demonstrated that the position of Mayor of London is a non-job, theoretically capable of being done for a year by the Leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition.

Why, then, is attention lavished on him, as it also was on his predecessor, while most MPs, and everyone with real political responsibilities in local government, are ignored completely? What on earth makes him think that he is qualified to lead the Conservative Party? Or, indeed, that he might be allowed to do so?

Johnson has now been out of Parliament for as long as he was ever in. After this Election, more or less any seat still held by the Conservative Party will by definition be a safe seat, often occupied by an MP of very long standing.

Will MPs who had toiled for decades, in good times and in bad, be supposed to waft into the Leadership a man who had only just re-entered Parliament, and that on the specific understanding in his own mind that he would instantly be made Leader?

Johnson, like Michael Gove, is given no scrutiny whatever, in both cases because they are the media's own. But Gove is a spectacularly unsuccessful politician, while Johnson is not really a politician at all.

In 2010, Labour decided that it, and not the media, was going to chose its Leader. That party has been ahead in the polls for almost the entire period since, and it remains so.

2015 might very well be the year when the Conservatives came to the same decision.

In any case, Johnson is unfit for public office.

He has admitted that he always knew the case for the Iraq War was a load of rubbish, but that he voted for it anyway.

No doubt this admission is true of many then-MPs, some of whom are still there. They, too, were and are unfit for office.

The Conservative rebellion was proportionately as well as absolutely far smaller than the Labour one, although it included the now-retired MP for Uxbridge and South Ruislip, Sir John Randall, who had resigned as a Whip in order to vote against the war, and whose shoes Johnson is therefore unworthy to fill.

But the Conservative Party was the Official Opposition, making its failure to oppose an even greater dereliction of duty. The same was true of the Labour Party, as such, over Libya.

Has this country ever gone to war without the support of the Official Opposition? I cannot think of a case. The Conservatives could have kept us out of Iraq, as Labour could have kept us out of Libya.

That said, Labour MPs, as individuals, who voted for war while knowing that it was all lies, as most of the general public had no difficulty in recognising, were and are no better than any other MPs who did so.

It is one thing to have been hoodwinked, although MPs ought not to be. But this was, and is, something else.

Any party that could seriously consider being led by Boris Johnson is itself profoundly unserious.

We are famous the world over for our humour. That is because we are fundamentally a serious country. There are joke countries, and they are not remotely funny to live in.

But Britain is not a joke country, and it does not want a joke Prime Minister. Not Neil Hamilton. Not Nigel Farage. Not Jacob Rees-Mogg. And not Boris Johnson.

Who votes for Jacob Rees-Mogg? Who wants their Member of Parliament to be an object of ridicule? There is no qualitative difference between voting for him and voting for the Monster Raving Loony Party. Indeed, at least that party is an intentional joke. It does not see itself as serious.

The same will be true of voting for Neil Hamilton, or of voting for Nigel Farage, or of voting for Boris Johnson. But that is what the Right in Britain now is. A public school lark. A parade of contrived eccentrics.

Adding to the gaiety of the nation, at least in small doses.

But never, under any circumstances, to be allowed anywhere near the running of anything.

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