Boris Johnson is stepping out of the frying pan, into the fire

The leadership qualities needed in times like these include a fine sense of diplomacy, a natural talent for prioritising, and a flair for the bigger picture. It is not clear that he has any of them, writes Marie Le Conte

Governments rarely want to end up being remembered for the few large crises they were blighted with (AP)

There is no greater betrayal than falling ill on your first day off work. You spend endless weeks at your desk dreaming of free time and, the second you escape, your body collapses. It can be a cold or unexpected headaches; a perplexing rash or sinuses going wild. You thought you were in for a good time but it turns out, your need to focus and be productive was the only thing keeping you together.

It is not something that has happened to me in a long time – who even remembers holidays? – but it is a dynamic I keep being drawn to when looking at British politics. As I see it, there are currently two strands of stories coming out of Westminster.

On one side, there are increasingly optimistic noises being made about the pandemic. The government refused to introduce stringent restrictions in England and, somehow, the gamble paid off; Omicron really is milder than previous variants, and cases are already going down in several parts of the country. There is a light at the end of the tunnel, and it is getting brighter.

On the other, the grumbles emerging from both newspaper front pages and Conservative benches are getting louder. Yesterday, both The Daily Mail and the Daily Express hammered Boris Johnson on the impending cost-of-living crisis, and not for the first time. Elsewhere, battle lines are being drawn between Tory MPs on numerous issues.

One that springs to mind is net zero; the Net Zero Scrutiny Group was launched a few months ago by Craig Mackinlay, and aimed at parliamentarians critical of current and future green policies. In response, a net zero support group was started by Chris Skidmore last week.

Elsewhere, there is bickering on taxes and how they should be spent, house building, what “levelling up” means, the culture wars, and whatever else happens to be the news of the day. It is not surprising; all the oxygen in SW1 was taken up by Brexit, the pandemic or both for over five years. Things returning to normal means that there is now, finally, going to be space for everything else. The annual leave has begun and your forehead has started to burn up.

There is a world in which this could be a good thing. After all, governments rarely want to end up being remembered for the few large crises they were blighted with. Sadly, Boris Johnson seems uniquely ill-suited to deal with this great political reopening.

The leadership qualities needed in times like these include a fine sense of diplomacy, a natural talent for prioritising, and a flair for the bigger picture. It is not clear that he has any of them.

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If his own MPs suddenly start making a lot of noise about a wide variety of topics, Johnson will have to rely on a deft and conciliatory whipping operation, both to see problems coming and to make them as manageable as possible. Will this really happen, given that the whips’ office has alienated dozens of those MPs over the past year or so?

Another way to deal with them, given his party’s majority, would be to impose his own bold, coherent and popular policy agenda – presenting a confident government to the public and telling his benches to put up or shut up. Can he do this, given that he usually lacks the attention span to care about most issues at length? That he is known for changing his mind depending on who he was talking to last? That, two years on, we still do not really know what “levelling up” even means?

Finally – even if we were to view Johnson in the kindest possible light, and assume he could instate a domestic agenda neat enough to shut down his critics – could he do so while No 10 insiders are leaking everything around him? Even the best prime minister – which, let’s be honest, he is not – will end up looking messy and weak if their every move, hesitation and fraught meeting ends up in the papers.

In short, Boris Johnson’s government is now slowly walking out of the frying pan, mostly unscathed. It shouldn’t rejoice yet – the fire is waiting.