Boris Johnson is failing to learn from the Tory prime ministers who came before him

There are drawbacks to being the third Conservative administration in a row but one advantage is that it should come with lessons already learnt, writes Marie Le Conte

Boris Johnson speaks with officers on a constituency visit to Uxbridge police station last week (Getty)

There’s a lot to focus on at the moment, isn’t there? Between Omicron threatening to blow up everyone’s Christmases, Omicron threatening to blow up the Conservative Party and the 24/7 piss up Whitehall was apparently attending while we were in lockdown, it’s hard to know where to look.

Take the – disastrous, self-inflicted, hilarious – North Shropshire by-election; it happened last week yet already feels like it belongs to a different, long dead world. Who even was this “Owen Paterson”?

More seriously, something happened on the day of the results which feels worth coming back to, especially as it immediately got buried under an avalanche of news. Speaking on camera on Friday, Boris Johnson told journalists: “Basically what’s been going wrong… is that in the last few weeks some things have been going very well, but what the people have been hearing… is just a constant litany of stuff about politics and politicians and stuff that isn’t about them and isn’t about the things that we can do to make life better."

This feels somewhat rich coming from a former columnist, but seems par for the course. He continued: “I think the job of the government is to make people like you… interested in the booster rollout and in skills, and in housing, and in everything else that we’re doing. I’ve got to put my hands up and say, ‘Have I failed to get that message across in the last few weeks? Has it been obscured by all this other stuff?’ Yes, I’m afraid that it has.”

This is interesting because it really does feel like stating the obvious. Of course governments would rather the media focus on press releases of good news, and of course the media is not keen on doing that. None of that is new.

In fact, it is such an old problem that past governments had found ways of dealing with that particular quandary. They had a Downing Street media grid, for example, which allowed them to plan policy announcements and arrange media coverage of them. They also built good working relationships with journalists across the board, and kept an eye on what the newspapers were getting grumpy about.

For all its faults, David Cameron’s administration had been especially good at it, having learnt from being opponents of ruthless New Labour. Johnson’s people could have built on their predecessors’ work but instead they junked it. When the prime minister came in, endless sneering from senior spads appeared in the papers, directed at past Tory governments and how stupidly obsessed they had been with chasing headlines.

Dominic Cummings forbade advisers from talking to journalists in an informal and relaxed manner, and only a few handpicked hacks were given access to ministers. Is it really a surprise, then, that the government now keeps failing to get its message across? An attempt at coordination was made recently with “crime week”, but it both looked incongruous and utterly failed as the crimes were, it turns out, coming from inside the house.

Still, past governments aren’t only useful for the things they were good at; they can also provide good cautionary tales. Theresa May’s government, for example, ultimately failed because she could not tame her own backbenches.

The whipping operation slowly but surely alienated more MPs than it soothed, and No 10 found itself in near-constant opposition to the parliamentary party. Surely, some lessons can be learnt from those years, especially since Johnson himself was one of the main rebels. Are they being learnt? It is not obvious that they are.

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This government may be winning more votes than the one that came before it, thanks to its majority, but with each close call, new rebels are made. It will be hard to bring them back into the fold. It is true that the party has more breathing space now than it did before the 2019 election, but it still does not mean that the prime minister will remain untouchable forever.

These are only two recent examples but the list could be endless. Boris Johnson’s government is increasingly being defined by its unforced errors, which feels absurd. There are drawbacks to being the third Conservative administration in a row but surely one advantage is that it should come with lessons already learnt. What is the point otherwise?