Is Boris Johnson the most left-wing Tory prime minister ever?

Where on the spectrum do you place a government that spent billions on furlough, and on recruiting nurses, doctors and police officers, asks John Rentoul

The PM’s not as right-wing as you may think (PA)

I did an “ask me anything” last week, where readers asked questions and I tried to answer as many as possible in two hours. There were a lot of questions about whether Boris Johnson was going to get away with what many Independent readers think is deplorable behaviour (yes, of course).

And there were one or two unexpected questions, such as from “MrRazza”, who asked if Johnson was “the most left-leaning prime minister since Heath; the most right-leaning since Thatcher; both at once; or somewhere in between?”

I think this identifies one of the big puzzles of current politics, which is that the terms “left” and “right” have become harder to define than ever. There has always been a certain amount of cross-dressing in successful British leaders – it is what I see as one of the advantages of a pluralitarian voting system. Tony Blair stole some of the right’s themes, on crime, the family, and defence; David Cameron stole some of the left’s, on gay marriage and greenery.

Trying to fit Boris Johnson on a left-right scale is complicated by Brexit, which ended up as a “right-wing” cause, but there is no intrinsic reason why it should be – it used to be Labour policy (without a referendum!) when Blair became an MP.

Johnson and Rishi Sunak’s response to the Covid-19 crisis has been as “left wing” as any Labour government’s would have been. If you define left wing as egalitarian, then the furlough scheme and the vast increase in public spending, paid for by borrowing, are basically socialism.

Even before the pandemic struck, the 2019 Conservative manifesto was a thoroughly New Labour document, all about setting targets for schools, the NHS and the police that implied significantly higher levels of public spending.

I would say that you would have to go back to Harold Macmillan, who built hundreds of thousands of council houses and who once wrote a book called The Third Way, to find a Tory prime minister as “left wing” as Johnson.

Naturally, some readers objected, saying that cutting foreign aid and allowing Priti Patel’s rhetoric against asylum seekers proves that Johnson’s is a hard-right government.

Again, this comes down to the definition of terms. Cutting aid is hugely popular, and if two-thirds of the British people support something, can it really be described as a hard right-wing policy? Even Patel’s frankly absurd plan to build an asylum processing centre on Ascension Island had more support than opposition among the British public.

So of course there will be people who think of themselves as left wing who vehemently disagree with some of Johnson’s policies, but I think that the answer to MrRazza’s question is that Johnson is the most left-wing Tory prime minister not just since Ted Heath but possibly ever.

Yours,

John Rentoul

Chief political commentator