Where does Boris Johnson stand so far in the pantheon of prime ministers?

Despite unique challenges, this prime minister has done the same as most before him and lost the public’s approval within his first year, writes Sean O'Grady

Thursday 23 July 2020 21:27 BST
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Johnson has turned around a remarkably high approval rating in the space of a few months
Johnson has turned around a remarkably high approval rating in the space of a few months (AFP/Getty)

It’s been a turbulent 12 months, no one needs reminding, and no previous prime minister has had to face the lethal mixture of challenges thrown at Boris Johnson.

Looking just a little further ahead, things, as the old New Labour theme song didn’t go, can only get worse. The Ministry of Defence has apparently been asked to make contingency plans for a quadruple whammy of disasters that will slam into the country simultaneously this winter – a second wave of Covid, the end of the Brexit transition period, an outbreak of flu and seasonal flooding.

It is an almost biblical concatenation of horrors, and not everyone sees Boris Johnson as the nation’s saviour. His trials are only just beginning. His place in history may be assured, but for all the wrong reasons. Where then does he stand in the great pantheon of premiers?

Strange to say, but the overwhelming feature for much of Johnson’s first year as prime minister has been his remarkable popularity. He enjoyed positive approval ratings until well into the coronavirus crisis, but recent public dissatisfaction and the arrival of Keir Starmer as Labour leader has badly dented his ratings. It is fair to say that the Conservatives would still win a general election if it were held now, but Johnson now trails his party, in contrast to Starmer, who is more popular than his.

Partly, Johnson has been flattered by his political opponents – Jeremy Corbyn and Jo Swinson were comprehensively outplayed by him. He also looked good next to the latterly dismal record of his immediate predecessor. When the hapless Theresa May left office, driven out by her own party, she was suffering from the lowest approval ratings since the fall of Margaret Thatcher in 1990, but with none of Thatcher’s scale of achievements to show for it. May collected record-breaking Commons defeats and was unable to get her Brexit deal through the Commons; through fair means or foul, Johnson did do so.

Johnson, for a brief unhappy interlude as May’s foreign secretary, didn’t do much to help her, just as he didn’t do David Cameron any favours; and indeed Johnson's role in the victory of the 2016 Brexit campaign is now returning to haunt him too. Still, Johnson did, unlike May, David Cameron or John Major, manage to secure a near-landslide victory in his general election campaign in December 2019. It was the biggest victory for the Tories since Thatcher’s third win of 1987, but smaller than the three-figure landslides enjoyed by Clement Attlee, Harold Macmillan, Harold Wilson and Tony Blair since the Second World War. Johnson enjoys winning, and winning big, and he has against-the-odds victories as the mayor of London and the 2016 referendum to look back on, but his parliamentary performance is not yet quite in the first rank.

Johnson used his majority, coupled with a brutal purge of dissidents in his own party to get his “oven ready” deal through parliament in time for the 31 January Brexit date. That, before the sheer awful scale of Covid-19 became clear, was the brief high point of the Johnson administration – the “DUDE” promises fulfilled – Deliver Brexit, Unite the country, Defeat Jeremy Corbyn and Energise the country (though the “E” had been added to the original acronym for obvious reasons, and is debatable).

Despite Brexit, as they say, when Johnson took over in the summer of 2019, the immediate economic outlook for the UK was surprisingly benign. Unlike, say, James Callaghan (1976), Gordon Brown (2007) or Cameron (2010), Johnson did not run straight into virtual national bankruptcy, a global banking crisis or its aftermath. He did not even have to clear up the economic mess so often left behind by a predecessor, as was the usual pattern. For Wilson it was the quadrupling of oil prices, rampant inflation, rapidly rising unemployment and strikes in 1974; for Thatcher it was seemingly intractable stagflation and the collapse of Britain’s industrial relations and whole international competitiveness in 1979. Few premiers – Blair in 1997 being a significant and lucky example – have inherited an economy in booming good shape, because winning an election usually means the last lot failed.

Nor did Johnson have to face an existential war. Bad as this first year has been, with some unprecedented privations, it is worth reminding ourselves that the UK is not fighting off a possible invasion or domination by a foreign power, recent Russian and Chinese mischief notwithstanding. David Lloyd George in 1916 and Churchill in 1940 had to do precisely that. And just consider what Johnson’s great hero worked through after May 1940, as Britain stood alone: the formation of a war time cabinet with Labour; Dunkirk, the fall of France and German occupation of Europe from the Pyrenees to Russia; the Battle of Britain; the Blitz; Lend Lease and, a little beyond Churchill’s first year, Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s invasion of Russia.

The British situation post-Brexit and post-Covid might more accurately mirror the huge task of post-war reconstruction undertaken by the Attlee government in 1945 – that too placed a huge additional strain in the public finances. So some perspective there, you’ll grant, for our current travails.

As for a pandemic, we have to go back a century to find the last one. The Spanish Flu swept through the world from 1918 to 1920, but in Britain, as everywhere else, it was hardly a political matter. In modern terms, the role of the state and public expectations were obviously much lower then in our time. For the Liberal premier David Lloyd George, just returned to power at the head of a Conservative-dominated coalition in the 1918 election, there were no daily press conferences, no National Heath Service and no testing crisis for the media to focus attention on. Instead, Lloyd George spent much of his first year after his election redrawing the boundaries of Europe, perhaps much as Johnson would like to do.

Now, though, Britain is no longer a Great Power at the head of a mighty global empire, and nor is it a leading player in the European Union, the role it sought for itself for the last six decades and more. Very many of Johnson’s predecessors spent their first years after an election using that political capital to try and get Britain a deal, or a better deal, in Europe, though usually to public indifference. Macmillan used his mandate to try and negotiate entry into what was then the European Community shortly after his 1959 victory, as did Wilson after 1966 and Heath (successfully) after 1970. Wilson, in 1974-75 and Cameron in 2015-16 sought modest renegotiations, both followed by referenda, though with the suffering outcomes we know very well. Johnson, by contrast, has been using his first year to get Britain a better deal outside Europe, and about the best that can be said about that is that it has not yet been achieved, and nor have any other major free trade deals.

The Johnson political honeymoon, then, is well and truly over, and as quickly as any of his predecessors, among whom only Blair stands out as having sustained high personal ratings for many years (almost uninterrupted from 1997 to the Iraq war in 2003). Prime ministers such as Wilson, Callaghan, Thatcher and Cameron went through nuclear winters of appalling poll ratings, devastating by-election and local election defeats and general humiliation before picking up support as an ejection approached. It is not always downhill all the way, which is what makes life and politics interesting.

The question now is whether the centralising, cronyistic, populist style and (mostly so far absent) substance of the Johnson administration will eventually lift the government out of the depths of unpopularity most prime ministers have had to endure. Given that the electorate is more volatile than ever and the circumstances so novel, history can be at best only a partial guide, but the precedents are not all negative. At this juncture, a second Johnson term in 2024 leading to a decade in power seems as likely, or unlikely, as seeing him usurped in a palace coup by Rishi Sunak in the second year of Johnson’s troubled and unlucky premiership.

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