What is Boris Johnson’s political philosophy?

The prime minister appears to be taking the lead from Michael Heseltine, writes Sean O'Grady

Perhaps a Johnson government would have done more to save the steel industry last year than May’s (PA)

Last September, Boris Johnson gave his cabinet an outline of his political philosophy. Unlike some of his colleagues’ dilations on their “vision for Britain”, Mr Johnson’s was succinct. He was, he vouchsafed to his top team, “basically a Brexity Hezza”. It is turning out to be an accurate description.

The “Brexity” adjective is easy to understand – and it is becoming increasingly apparent how Brexity the government is. Mr Johnson believes, quite simply, that the only point to Brexit is if Britain can design its own rules and laws to suit itself and gain a global competitive advantage, and that harmonising or aligning them with the EU is counterproductive. Thus, we are headed for a more difficult, harder Brexit than seemed possible in the referendum of 2016. It will entail quite a radical and painful restructuring of the economy when, or if, it transpires. Yet it will be tempered – in places – by the kind of state intervention the EU frowns on under its “state aid” rules.

The “Hezza” bit refers to Michael Heseltine. In the 1970s to the 1990s he was, like Mr Johnson today, the darling of the party grassroots. Since then, Lord Heseltine’s brand of conservatism has drifted so far away from the contemporary party that he was sacked as an adviser to the government by Theresa May, and later had the Tory whip withdrawn – all over differences about Brexit.

Lord Heseltine’s commitment to Britain’s place in Europe is sincere, long-standing and well-known, and has alienated him from the architects of Brexit, including Mr Johnson. But Lord Heseltine is also a Conservative, though of a particularly pragmatic type. When he was running the Department for Trade and Industry (DTI) in John Major’s administration a quarter of a century ago, he famously promised to intervene, if needs be, in the economy “before breakfast, lunch, tea and dinner”. He was nicknamed “Tarzan” for his blond locks and free-wheeling, energetic political style. Heseltine explained at the time: “The truth is the word ‘intervention’ is the subject of a huge debate and enormous political reaction, knee-jerk reactions in many cases. It means all things to all people, quite different things – there is no consistent interpretation.

“What I mean by intervention is doing whatever I can to so order the priorities of government as to help British companies win; now that is not just about the DTI, that is about first of all knowing what our competitors are doing, knowing where we’re ahead, knowing where we’re behind and trying to work out how we change that.”

The point here is that Heseltine placed himself in contradiction to the pure free-market ethos of Thatcherism – and he had already resigned in the 1986 from the Thatcher cabinet over an industrial policy issue, one where Mrs Thatcher preferred market forces to take their course, but one where Heseltine preferred a British/European solution to the problems of a stricken British helicopter maker named Westland. Heseltine’s approach was one where the state did not sit back, nor nationalise industries, but used its powers to target aid and assistance, protecting the national interests and trying to win new markets and jobs in the process. It was, he argued, what the Japanese, French, Germans, even the Americans had been doing for years – to great effect.

Still, it was an approach that, despite Heseltine’s efforts, remained out of favour in the Tory party and indeed in the New Labour years. (The forced nationalisation of the banks by Gordon Brown in the financial crisis was the notable exception.) Heseltine was capable of closing down industries too – notoriously what remained of coal mining in 1994 – but in Liverpool he is remembered for trying to save the city from a seemingly inexorable decline in the 1980s. The Heseltine philosophy was a little hard to pin down at times, but it was usually taken to be active and interventionist.

Only when prime minister May hatched her “modern industrial strategy” a few years ago was it revived. It built on the coalition’s policies, and Vince Cable’s mild efforts to use the power of the state to rein in market forces in areas such as executive pay and mergers. Now state intervention is set to be stepped up even further, and laissez-faire left behind.

Yesterday’s small state subsidy for Flybe – some tax forbearance and the promise of a reform to air passenger duty – is a small but emblematic example of the Johnson government’s new approach. Whereas Johnson’s ministers stood to one side in the collapse of Thomas Cook and Debenhams, Flybe, with its network of regional airports, was potentially significant in the government’s mission to “level up” Britain’s regional economies and invest in them – and, it should be appreciated, helpful in cementing the remarkable political gains seen in the north, the southwest and Wales in December’s general election. Perhaps a Johnson government would have done more to save the steel industry last year than did Ms May’s.

Much the same can be glimpsed in the other priorities. Public spending increases are targeted on the well-known campaign pledges on the police, schools and hospitals – elsewhere the state will be squeezed. If state intervention is required in order to achieve some wider national goal, then that’s exactly what will happen – and the cost, unless prohibitive, will be accommodated by public spending and borrowing, under relaxed HM Treasury rules. Austerity, as we knew it under George Osborne and Philip Hammond, has been buried. The future approach to borrowing and spending money – to be confirmed in Sajid Javid’s budget on 11 March – will no longer be as strictly constrained in an era of ultra-low interest rates (and they may even go lower if the rumours emerging from the Bank of England prove true).

There is no yet a political philosophy worth of the label “Johnsonism” or, maybe, “Borisism”. Maybe there never will be one, because the prime minister’s very pragmatism, balanced with a sincere belief in free markets and enterprise, pulls in so many different directions. He also calls himself a One Nation Conservative which, again, is a term that has been used and misused ever since Benjamin Disraeli coined it almost two centuries ago. What it may simply amount to is a modern version of populism, a willingness to have the state do whatever it necessary to keep the electorate reasonably onside with the government; and to ignore any dogma or any -isms – Thatcherism, capitalism – that might get in the way of that.

It will be, if the money doesn’t run out, a Britain where there will be Victorian-style grand projects, such as HS2 and Heathrow expansion; a bridge between Northern Ireland and Scotland; and, once mooted, an underground system for the city of Leeds. It will be a nation where all else is suborned to the overriding goal of sustaining the Conservatives in power for as long as possible. It is, indeed, a modern iteration of the ancient instinct, indeed lust, for power that has made the Conservative Party (as Lord Heseltine was so often fond of pointing out) the oldest and thus most successful organisation in the history of democracy anywhere in the world.

Johnsonism, then, is less any kind of creed, still less a novel one, and is more simply a statement of blond personal ambition – and in its way not so very different to that of the vaulting ambition of the once-blond Michael Heseltine himself.