Key Election Task for U.K. Tories: Tame Boris Johnson

Anger isn’t a facet of Johnson’s character that many people are familiar with. He made his name as a lighthearted journalist and TV personality who won fans for his performances as a lovably shambolic buffoon. The self-deprecating, boyish, and occasionally gaffe-prone character never took himself too seriously.

Johnson has been campaigning again, this time as prime minister, hoping the voters will give him a handsome majority so he can shape the country to his will. The stakes are as high as they could be, and he can take no risks. No longer just an entertaining media personality, he’s a highly divisive and controversial figure who’s likely to bring profound and historic change to the U.K. and its people. His charisma helped him lead his Vote Leave campaign to victory in the 2016 referendum, despite what his critics say was a willingness to lie to the electorate. But a flash of temper could have potentially cataclysmic political repercussions, even if he wins. Running a country in serious economic transition while trying to master anger management will be a complicated business. (The prime minister’s office declined to comment for this story.)

Johnson pushed Parliament to hold a snap election (the next one wasn’t due until 2022) after trying and failing to persuade lawmakers to rush the new Brexit deal he’d struck with the European Union into law. His ruling Conservative Party began the contest with a healthy double-digit lead in the polls over Jeremy Corbyn’s radical, left-wing Labour opposition. One major survey put the Tories on course for a 68-seat majority, a result that would fully reward Johnson’s gamble in triggering the early election.

For Tories like Johnson, fighting an early poll is fraught with danger. Two years ago, his predecessor Theresa May called a snap election, expecting to win in a landslide. But her bet backfired, and she lost the majority in Parliament she’d started with.

During that campaign, Johnson’s anger got the better of him again. Labour MP Andrew Gwynne was heckling him during a live TV interview with Sky News on the campaign trail. Johnson invited Gwynne to join the debate. “Come on then, you big girl’s blouse,” Johnson, then foreign secretary, called out. As they spoke, Gwynne put his hand on Johnson’s shoulder, instantly riling the Tory. Johnson then wrapped his beefy arm around Gwynne and pushed him over toward the camera. At the last moment, he pulled Gwynne back up again, apologizing.

“Don’t be a pillock,” Gwynne responded, using local slang for “idiot.”

The overriding preoccupation for Johnson’s team in 2019 is to avoid repeating May’s mistakes—including radical new policy announcements and an overly presidential style—in her disastrous campaign two years ago. Equally vital is to lock away Johnson’s inner pillock, keeping the candidate on message and making sure he doesn’t step out of line in front of a camera. Johnson has managed to pull it off so far through a highly stage-managed campaign in which he’s been criticized for dodging difficult interviews. If he can maintain the discipline, he stands to win the biggest majority for the Tories in more than 30 years.
 
 
Britain usually holds its elections in May or June, so candidates can campaign in the optimistic atmosphere of sun-filled spring days, knocking on voters’ doors on warm, bright evenings. This contest is the first election held in December in almost a century. Flooding in northern England led crowds to heckle Johnson in the early part of the campaign and put the prime minister on the defensive.

The weather was foul again and set to get worse as Johnson boarded the 9:48 a.m. train from London’s Euston Station on Nov. 24. Cold drizzle hung in the air and clung to the overcoats of politicians and their aides who traveled with him. The green English hills faded behind a watery veil as the train sped north toward Telford, a town in the center of the country where Johnson would introduce his manifesto.

As supporters and the media arrived at Telford’s International Centre, a low-rise conference venue surrounded by car parks, a small protest had formed. Trade union members and Labour activists booed as the bus passed, chanting, “Tories out! Tories out!”

Johnson was already inside. When he appeared to rapturous cries of “Boris! Boris!,” he responded with a typically rousing speech and an anodyne manifesto that aimed to eradicate political risks. He promised tax cuts for 31 million “working people,” funding to hire 50,000 extra nurses for the National Health Service, and to “get Brexit done” so the country can finally move on.

The safety-first blueprint for government was quite deliberate. In 2017, May’s campaign fell apart when she sprang a contentious policy on funding care for elderly people in the middle of the campaign. Instantly labeled the “dementia tax,” the unpopular policy—which was tied to the value of people’s assets—frightened voters who thought they were going to lose their family homes. May was forced to abandon it just four days after hailing it as the key to her social vision. From that point her premiership went from bad to worse, until she was forced out after failing to deliver Brexit last summer.

May’s manifesto crisis revealed her to be weak rather than the “strong and stable” leader she claimed to be, and voters lost trust in her leadership. For Johnson, the risk is that voters don’t trust him enough to start with.

Even former Tory prime ministers have questioned Johnson’s reliability with the truth. David Cameron, who’s known the man since their days at Eton College and the University of Oxford, accused Johnson’s Brexit campaign of peddling lies. During the referendum, former Conservative Prime Minister John Major condemned Vote Leave’s “deceitful” campaign and suggested Johnson couldn’t be trusted with the health service. “The NHS is about as safe with them as a pet hamster would be with a hungry python,” he said.

Johnson has attracted unwelcome attention for his private life, too. He refuses to answer questions on how many children he has, was the subject of headlines after leaving his second wife, and made news again for a late-night row with his new girlfriend as he contested the party leadership in June.

Johnson was fired as a journalist from the London Times for making up a quote and dismissed as a Conservative shadow minister for lying about an extramarital affair to his party leader, Michael Howard. When confronted with claims that he can’t be trusted, he says that as a politician he always does what he says he’ll do.

Corbyn and his Labour Party have tried to turn the election into a referendum on whether Johnson can be trusted with a majority government that will allow him to do as he pleases. Specifically, they’re playing up voters’ fears over what Johnson and his “billionaire” Tory friends will do to cherished public services such as state-run health care. After Brexit, the NHS is voters’ single biggest concern. Johnson is betting that they’re weary with waiting to resolve the Brexit crisis, while Corbyn hopes the electorate fears the prime minister will wreck the NHS.

The Labour leader’s claim that Johnson would sell out the NHS to U.S. companies in a post-Brexit trade deal with Donald Trump has resonated in the country, according to Conservative insiders. Tories argue that the allegation isn’t true and that voters don’t really believe it, but they know this doesn’t mean it can’t hurt them.

One senior minister in Johnson’s team says that even in some safe Tory-held seats, voters question whether they can trust the prime minister. These skeptics don’t believe Johnson’s claims that he’s building 40 hospitals (in fact, he’s just committed “seed money” to get them started). Nor are they wholly persuaded he’ll make good on his promise to “get Brexit done,” according to the minister. Johnson vowed to “die in a ditch” rather than delay Britain’s departure beyond the Oct. 31 deadline, only to be forced into asking the EU to give him till the end of January.

One saving grace for Johnson is that many voters appear not to trust Corbyn, either. Labour is promising spending—including free university tuition and free broadband internet—and plans to tax the rich. The Institute for Fiscal Studies says such promises are simply not credible. Canvassers from both parties say that while Corbyn’s proposals are attractive, voters don’t think he’ll deliver them.

Set against the radical Corbyn, the Tory project to make Johnson seem tame is perhaps easier. But trust is hard to win. And Johnson has a huge task to persuade lifelong Labour supporters to abandon their tribe and vote for the party they’ve always seen as the enemy. These families blame Margaret Thatcher and her successor, Major, for closing coal mines, privatizing state-run industries, and putting them out of work.

With the polls tightening, nerves among Johnson’s team are likely to increase in the days leading up to Dec. 12. One Conservative cabinet minister says the fear is that while the party is ahead in many key target seats Johnson needs to win from Labour, that lead is too narrow and the outcome too close to call. Another cabinet minister says the biggest risk is that voters who don’t want Corbyn to be prime minister fail to turn out to vote for Johnson. While support for Johnson in the key seats is “strong,” the minister says, voters must not be allowed to think the election is already won. “The biggest risk to us is complacency,” the minister says. “Not just complacency in the campaign, which is extremely well-run. But it’s people who haven’t voted Conservative before thinking somebody else will vote Conservative for them.”

Two weeks before polling day, Johnson pulled off a remarkable political stunt. On Nov. 29 he called a press conference on the 29th floor of Millbank Tower, with its views over the River Thames to the Houses of Parliament, the London Eye, and the skyscrapers of the City of London. As winter sunshine flooded in through the windows, he took the stage flanked by two leading allies from his Vote Leave campaign—Michael Gove, now a minister in his cabinet, and Gisela Stuart, the former Labour MP. It was Stuart whose message Johnson most wanted to be heard, as she spoke to “traditional Labour voters” who backed Brexit. “A vote for Boris Johnson this time around is a vote to get Brexit done,” she said. “But let me be clear, voting for Brexit this time does not make me a Tory now or in the future.”

So far, the polls suggest Johnson’s Conservatives are likely to win a majority on Dec. 12, giving him at last the chance to finish the job he started, completing Britain’s divorce from the EU and shaping the country to his vision. People responding to party canvassers and pollsters say they rate Johnson more highly on leadership than Corbyn and are more likely to vote Conservative than Labour.

But first they have to enter the polling booths. And there they will weigh whether they can trust Johnson or not. If he’s blown off course by events, or fails to convince voters in key seats that he’s a stable, trustworthy steward for the country, he’ll suffer the same fate as May and could fall short of the majority he desperately needs.
 
Read more: The End of the United Kingdom May Be Nearing

©2019 Bloomberg L.P.