(Bloomberg Opinion) -- In the aftermath of Sue Gray's brief report, Boris Johnson continues to fight on. But the scandal is far from behind him. So far this week alone, three Conservative MPs submitted letters of no confidence in the prime minister to the 1922 Committee. A Metropolitan Police investigation will no doubt keep Partygate at the forefront of voters' minds for a while yet. Bloomberg Opinion columnists Therese Raphael and Adrian Wooldridge got together with Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary, University of London, to discuss where things stand.
Therese Raphael: It's only Tuesday, and yet it's already possible to say what a week it's been in British politics. On Monday, after weeks of waiting, the Sue Gray report was released. Only as reports go, there really wasn't much to it: It was a meager 12 pages and only six of them were really anything of substance.
There were two things that stuck out for me. The first was that the Metropolitan Police have decided to investigate 12 of the 16 gatherings that Sue Gray looked into. The second thing that stuck out for me were two words she used in her brief general summary, and that was “serious failure.”
She didn't name names, she didn't have details, but she effectively said, in the sort of language we are used to hearing from Whitehall that government officials broke the rules. There was, she said, a “serious failure” to observe not just the high standards expected of those at the highest level of government, but the standards followed by the British people at the time.
What followed was a pretty dramatic few hours in parliament. At the end of the day though, Boris Johnson fights on and perhaps even looks a bit safer for now. I've written that with him, the situation often looks desperate, but not serious. Tim, how do you see it?
Tim Bale: I think it is pretty serious for him. If you look at the opinion polling and particularly at his personal ratings, things are looking pretty bad for him. Keir Starmer appears to be gaining a little as well, which wasn't the case before when Boris Johnson ran into trouble. This is having an effect, I think, on people's judgment of Johnson's ability to deliver any kind of program, including even Brexit. That, in conjunction with the Conservative Party's ratings dropping pretty severely and Labour assuming a reasonably solid lead, means that his MPs will be thinking very seriously about whether he is the right person to lead them into the the next election.
Having said that, of course, the Labour lead has only been going on for a short while. So it's perfectly possible that Conservative MPs will still see this, rightly or wrongly, as a temporary blip.
Therese: Adrian, what's your view on that?
Adrian Wooldridge: I think it's pretty serious. He is beginning to be a drag on his party in the sense that the party doesn't believe he's the right person to implement an agenda. It's worried that he alienates more people than he attracts and it's worried that he's a distraction to the overall message. Remember, this is a very ruthless party — it's very good at getting rid of people who it doesn't think will be useful to it.
In some ways, the Tory party is in the worst of all possible worlds, because it's not absolutely certain that it wants to get rid of him. It's not absolutely certain that he is a liability or that the next part of the report will be a disaster for him. So it can't bring itself to put the bullet in the chamber and pull the trigger.
Therese: Yes, it's in that halfway house where one foot already is on the side of moving past Boris Johnson, the other is still hoping that maybe the old magic will return one more time. Time has seemed to play to his advantage up to now. How does the sequencing now play out for Johnson? The Met says the investigation will proceed at pace, but that could be weeks, it could be months. Is this just buying Boris Johnson more time? Or will a constant drip, drip of allegation revelation make it worse?
Adrian: Everything depends on the context in which the final police verdict comes. The police say they will do things as quickly as they possibly can, but the Metropolitan Police Force is a very odd beast. It has behaved very oddly over this report. First it took no interest and suddenly it decided that it was very interested and that Sue Gray had to almost stand aside to let it do its work. If the final police verdict comes out in the middle of a very bad set of circumstances with the cost of living crisis, taxes going up, and people feeling off, then that's a problem. If it comes at a time, let's say when Russia has invaded Ukraine and Britain has taken a powerful stand on the world stage, that's a different thing.
There was one paragraph in the report which stuck me as being very interesting in which she said that these people all work together, the Downing Street garden was an extension of a workplace where people went because there wasn't so much of a danger of getting Covid and that people were working under an enormous amount of pressure. It struck me that you can construct a case that this was a reasonable extension of working. Alcohol has always been part of working for politicians and it's slightly rich for the House of Commons to be disapproving of all this drinking going on in Downing Street and then leaving the chamber to go to one of the very many subsidized bars in the House of Commons.
Therese: That's certainly true; I don't think we can avoid the phrase “grey areas” here. One of the things that stuck out for me though is that the police are investigating three events that Boris Johnson supposedly attended, one of which was not in the Downing Street offices or the garden, but in the Downing Street flat. Downing Street has repeatedly said that there was no party there and Johnson has never admitted that he was there. Presumably the police will interview Boris Johnson himself on this. I wonder if that's the most serious of the allegations.
Tim, where do you think the “gotcha” moment in this is? Is it one of those 300 photographs that Sue Gray has turned over to the police?
Tim: We can't guarantee that those photographs won't come out anyway. There are enough people wanting to get rid of Boris Johnson who may have submitted those photographs and there's no guarantee that they'll stay with the police or Sue Gray, particularly if those people get rather impatient with the situation. You're right to point to the party in the flat as being one allegation that I think most people weren't aware of and would be regarded as pretty serious. If you look at the polling, funnily enough it's the gathering that Boris Johnson wasn't at that seems to have really infuriated people, partly because of the conjunction with the photograph of the Queen sitting on her own at her husband's funeral. That testifies to the power of the image.
It's a conglomeration of parties, if that's the right collective noun, that bothers people, but those particular individual incidents do resonate with people. What worries some people is that the police officer in charge of the investigation has said that the process will take no longer than a year now. I'm not sure whether people's patience will hold, particularly those wanting to get rid of Boris Johnson, if it does take that long. That returns us to the possibility that more will come out and not out of the official process, but out of people leaking information as a result of their frustration.
Sue Gray chose the most wounding option in some ways, because the other option would have been to produce a fairly detailed version of her report with obvious redactions. But instead she's made very clear that she doesn't want to do that. She's simply given us some conclusions and said that she can't really produce anything meaningful until she's allowed to. That's perhaps more problematic for Boris Johnson because it leaves a vacuum which others will fill.
Therese: “Febrile” is a word is that's used a lot when we talk about British politics, but that was a really heated debate in the Commons on Monday. Boris Johnson came out and made an apology, then right after his apology, went back to being defensive and boosterish. He then met with a group of Tory MPs and did that charm thing that he does so well. Presumably, he said to them: “I'm here because of you and you know what you've done for me,” but the subtext would be: “Look what I've done for you. The 2019 election wasn't really down to the Tory party, it was all me.” Is that true?
Tim: Well, my book on the 2019 election makes it pretty clear that Boris Johnson did play a part, but he is nowhere near as popular as some people think he is. Even in the Red Wall, he wasn't a particularly popular candidate for prime minister. He was less popular more generally than Theresa May was back in 2017 and actually even less popular than Jeremy Corbyn was back in 2017. What helped him of course, was that he was far more popular than Corbyn in 2019, because by that time all the things that people had said about Corbyn were beginning to resonate big time with the electorate.
It's also very difficult to separate Boris Johnson from Brexit. The Brexit effect was enormously important in that particular election. It's probably wrong to say that Brexit is disappearing in the rear view mirror, but as that begins to wane slightly in people's electoral calculus, then Boris Johnson himself begins to be less important to the Conservative Party.
Adrian: One thing that happened in 2017 was that people thought: “Please make it stop!” They were so sick of hearing about Brexit that they thought, who's the person who's going to make this stop? That's Boris. I think now voters can't stand hearing about Partygate any longer and at some point they're going to want to get rid of the man who's keeping this right at the front of the news.
Tim: We could well see that in the local elections in May, although a caveat to that is in the equivalent elections, four years ago, the Conservative Party didn't do very well. Even if they get hammered, it might not be so easy to tell. But obviously MPs will be looking at those and they'll also be getting feedback from their local councilors who lose seats. We have to remember that, although the party boasts a membership of around 190,000, the activist core is pretty small and most of them are councilors' friends and relations of councilors. We could find that the party on the ground begins to turn against Boris Johnson, if they suffer.
Adrian: Are you seeing that yet? The party on the ground turning against him?
Tim: Not yet, in as much as we can tell. For example, the website Conservative Home, which surveys readers who are members of the Conservative Party, suggests many of them are still very much inclined to go with Boris Johnson and believe his version of events or at least, even if they don't believe his version of events, they think that he's an election winner and therefore worth carrying on supporting.
It's very interesting as well to hear the justifications of conservative MPs on the media. They will say that “if he comes to my constituency, he's box office.” But that seems to me to be mistaking someone's ability to draw a crowd with someone's ability to actually win over people at an election. Conservative party members on the ground and MPs do have to think more seriously about his role in winning their seats in 2019 and in his continued ability to do that in future.
Therese: Some of that ambiguity and concern was really reflected in the body language of what we saw in the house yesterday. You would normally expect the back benches to be nodding vigorously and cheering. But there were so many signs that indicated this party is uncomfortable with what they were hearing. There were a number of MPs who stood up to challenge the prime minister; not least the former Prime Minister Theresa May, who I thought asked a very biting question, but there was also Andrew Mitchell, a former chief whip, and a prominent, Conservative Party voice. He said he was withdrawing his support. You have to think that a former whip has a pretty keen sense of when a certain threshold has been met.
Adrian: Every day seems to bring some new voice against Johnson and the number of letters is accumulating. The Tory Party is going to go through some very difficult times this summer with taxes going up and incomes effectively going down.
Therese: What do we think of how Keir Starmer emerges from all of this? He couldn't do anything right six months ago. But what a powerful speech he gave in the House of Commons — it was a a lawyer summing things up for the jury. One of the most powerful lines was: “I cannot tell you how many times people have said to me, this prime minister's lack of integrity is somehow priced in and that his behavior and character don't matter. I have never accepted that…whatever your politics, whichever party you vote for, honesty and decency matters, our great democracy depends on it.” He has equated the decision that Tory MPs face with the future of Britain's democracy. Is that an overstatement, or is that really what's at stake here?
Adrian: Keir Starmer has been preparing for this moment exceptionally well. His strategy to be a normal, decent person and go after the Red Wall voters are paying off extremely well at the moment. He calculated that the Tories wouldn't be able to hold onto the Red Wall, because things were going to be economically tough and that leveling up is very difficult to deliver. It was interesting that Boris Johnson's response to was to throw the dead cat on the table by accusing Starmer of not going after Jimmy Savile.
Therese : I'm not sure that went down that well with his party.
Tim: On what it says about British democracy, there is a serious point here because accountability ultimately is exercised at general elections. But you have to presume that there is some accountability between general elections and I'm afraid that if Boris Johnson gets away with it, then you do wonder really where accountability is anymore. If you have someone who is responsible for making the laws, breaking the laws, in most democracies, I don't think that would be tolerated. If in the U.K., somehow, that is tolerated, then there is rather a slippery slope.
There are also other concerns apart from Partygate about what the Conservative government is doing, in terms of the electoral bill, for example, the elections bill which is making people produce voter ID, which some people think has to do with voter suppression. There is still talk about maybe restricting the rights of the judiciary, there are restrictions on the right to protest — all of which make some people and particularly liberal commentators worry about the direction this so-called liberal democracy is heading.
Therese: Would you say that there are any sort of historical comparisons that give us an indication of how this would go?
Tim: Adrian's quite right to say that the Conservative Party can be quite brutal when it comes to ditching its leaders. But on the other hand, it's not as easy to ditch a prime minister, partly because they've got this patronage, partly because people are worried about who might take over, which is less of a concern if you are in opposition. If you think back to Ted Heath, they did manage to get rid of him fairly quickly, but it'd been four years of pretty chaotic government. John Major survived quite a long time and called a leadership contest in 1995, won it and therefore took the party into a disastrous election in 1997. Even Theresa May survived a confidence vote.
Therese: If I were going to bet on one thing it's that, if he were pushed out, Boris Johnson won't spend 18 years on the backbenches as Health, referred to as the “Incredible Sulk,” did.
More From Bloomberg Opinion:
- Boris Johnson Is Spared But Hardly Off the Hook Yet: Therese Raphael
- Why the U.K.'s Ruling Party Can't Rule Itself: Adrian Wooldridge
- Has Boris Johnson Just Given Labour Its Big Chance?: Therese Raphael
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Therese Raphael is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. She was editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal Europe.
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