Boris Johnson is fortunate to have survived a year – but he is good at being lucky

The prime minister has shown remarkable personal and political resilience. His approval ratings in opinion polls have fallen back, but he remains relatively popular for a midterm leader, writes John Rentoul

Johnson has been lucky, but that is not entirely accidental (AFP)

In the days before Boris Johnson’s arrival at Buckingham Palace to accept the invitation of the Queen to form a government, a year ago, I ran a sweepstake online on how many days he would be prime minister.

Of the 500 entries, the average guess was that he would last 409 days, which, given that he has now done 366 (yes, this is a leap year), he looks set to exceed. He just has to make it through the first week of September to outlast the collective expectation of the admittedly biased sample of people on my part of Twitter.

The predictions in that sweepstake were heavily tilted towards the short end, which is a reminder of the extraordinary circumstances in which Johnson took over what looked to many people like a doomed enterprise. Half of the entries predicted he would last fewer than 135 days, which was not (just) anti-Johnson sentiment: when he became prime minister he was heading for a brick wall.

He had promised to get Britain out of the EU by the end of October, a deadline that was just 100 days away. It was not unreasonable to assume that failure to deliver that promise would have negative consequences for him. Hence the sudden interest at the time in the briefest premiership in British history, of George Canning, who died in office after 119 days in 1827.

When Johnson faced the House of Commons for the first time as prime minister, on 25 July, he seemed trapped. After the failure of Theresa May’s Brexit deal, there seemed no alternative deal that parliament would accept. Nor would parliament allow a no-deal exit, and it had invented a mechanism to pass laws from the back benches to prevent the government from trying it. But parliament would not allow an election either – either by the two-thirds majority required by the Fixed-term Parliaments Act, which was how May got her early election in 2017, or by a simple majority passing a new law to override the act.

It seems a long time ago now that Johnson seemed to be blundering about in a prison of his own making. He failed to stop the bill devised by Hilary Benn, the Labour MP, which required him to ask the EU for an extension to the Brexit deadline. Conservative peers in the House of Lords began a filibuster that could have blocked it, but then gave up. He prorogued parliament, but to no purpose, as the Benn bill had been passed, and it was struck down by the Supreme Court in any case.

Chaos, confusion and error are always to be preferred to conspiracy as explanations for the inexplicable, because if Johnson had a cunning plan it was only to provoke the Remainers, to present them as obstructing the will of the people as expressed in the 2016 referendum, and to hope that something would break.

But as the deadline of 31 October approached, things did start to break. He seemed lucky, in that Jo Swinson, elected leader of the Liberal Democrats the day before he became prime minister, decided to give him the general election he wanted. But he had also made his own luck. The decisive moment came on 10 October, when he met Leo Varadkar, the Irish prime minister, in a Cheshire hotel, and they agreed the outline of a new Brexit deal. This involved selling the Democratic Unionist Party down the river, putting border posts in Northern Irish ports to check goods arriving from the rest of the UK, but as the DUP had refused to vote for May’s sensible compromise, Johnson hadn’t lost anything – and he had gained a deal that could unite much more of his own party.

As a result, Labour MPs who were reluctant to stand against the referendum result started to crack. When Johnson brought in legislation to enact his withdrawal agreement, they were forced to face the logic presented by Keir Starmer, the shadow Brexit secretary. They had to back Johnson’s Brexit or a second referendum, and several who had not already backed May’s deal started to waver.

This was the setting in which Swinson made her mistake. She thought Brexit was about to happen – she was probably right about that – and that the only way to stop it was an election. It was the second part that was a miscalculation, a disastrous one from her point of view. It would have been in her interest to have allowed Johnson to struggle on with Brexit and then to find himself tied down by a Remainer parliament as it tried to dictate the terms of the trade negotiations that followed.

Instead, with one bound Johnson was free, and within two months was pitched into his next apparently career-limiting crisis.

Readers will have noticed that the entries in my sweepstake on the length of Johnson’s tenure of office were heavily skewed. If half of the entries predicted fewer than 135 days and yet the average (the mean) was 409, that means there were a small but significant number of people who thought that Johnson would survive for a full parliament or even two. Those predictions – even after I excluded one entry that predicted he would still be prime minister by the heat death of the Sun – lifted the average to its year-and-a-bit conclusion.

For two months after the election, during which he was indeed able to “get Brexit done”, Johnson was able to contemplate the prospect of a long time in office. The end of our EU membership on 31 January will go down in history as a moment of his premiership, but he is already struggling to shape how he will be remembered for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

For a while it seemed that he was in serious trouble. He has presided over one of the highest death tolls in the world, while Dominic Cummings’s apparent breach of lockdown rules seemed to mark a negative and significant turn in public opinion. For a second time, sober Westminster observers were predicting he would be “gone by Christmas”.

And yet Johnson has shown remarkable personal and political resilience. His approval rating in opinion polls has fallen back from the highs recorded in the early phase of the crisis, when there was a strong feeling that everyone should unite behind the government, but he remains relatively popular for a midterm prime minister, and the Conservatives are still ahead of an opposition that is, as Keir Starmer put it this week, “under new management”.

Johnson has no achievements to his name after a year in power, except leaving the EU, which by definition disappoints half the population – and which is unfinished business until the trade talks are concluded (or not) by the end of this year. He started to set out a plan to rebuild the public services – NHS, schools and police – after a decade of what he refuses to call austerity, but that has all been swept aside by the coronavirus crisis. Even if his handling of that crisis is not judged as harshly as once seemed inevitable, it will make it hard for him to deliver anything more than higher unemployment and a bigger national debt.

Yet he is still there. Half the job of a prime minister is mere survival. He has been lucky, but that is not entirely accidental. Anyone who entered my sweepstake to predict that he would still be prime minister this time next year is already doing much better than the majority who predicted he would crash and burn.