Long Boris: with by-election collapse imminent, Johnson is the political sickness the Tory party can’t shake off

Two out of three of the impending by-election disasters would never have happened if Johnson hadn’t flounced out of parliament, writes Sean O’Grady

Perhaps some thought that Johnson’s departure from Number 10 a year ago would cure the malaise, but his scandals simply multiplied (Getty/AP)

Without wishing to make light of long Covid, an all-too genuine and debilitating illness that has wrecked lives, the permanent crisis the Conservative Party finds itself in does suggest a kind of political sickness that just cannot be shaken off.

Some call it, admittedly in poor taste, “long Boris”, though this sums up the pathology of the condition quite well.

This is because so many of the Sunak government’s problems date back to Johnson’s time in office: his chaotic, irrational decision making, his “style of government” (to put it politely), the lies, Partygate, wallpaper-gate – and all manner of scandals that just keep coming, seemingly without end.

Of course, Sunak – like Liz Truss during her brief time – is perfectly capable of making his own blunders, but the lingering influence of Boris Johnson on public life is a near-constant feature. Perhaps some thought that Johnson’s departure from Number 10 a year ago would cure the malaise, but his scandals simply multiplied.

Even his departure from the Commons hasn’t stopped the miseries. Scarcely a day passes by without some fresh questions about Partygate or the Covid crisis or his honours list, always there to distract and inflict a kind of collective brain fog on the present party leadership.

Take the impending disastrous by-elections. Two out of three – and likely the most grievous losses – would never have happened if Johnson hadn’t flounced out of parliament when it dared to sanction him for lying to the Commons, and one of his most loyal disciples, Nigel Adams, hadn’t quit in solidarity (and sans promised peerage).

That is the sole reason why the government is about to suffer these damaging, humiliating defeats in Uxbridge and in Selby. They will obliterate the relatively good news on inflation and the passage of the so-called Illegal Migration Bill. Had Johnson and Adams stayed in the Commons, Sunak might now be gracefully gliding towards the summer recess.

It would just have been the loss of one seat in Somerset to the Liberal Democrats, something that could be almost laughed off as a routine protest vote – and the Lib Dems aren’t the rivals to form the next government. Indeed, due to tactical voting, the Labour vote will be squeezed, something Keir Starmer would have to make excuses about.

Instead, Johnson and his friend have, seemingly without a care for the party’s interests and those of former colleagues, subjected them to another bout of what one might term Borrhagic Fever.

There is also a deeper and even more insidious “Johnson effect” working among the voters, one that started to emerge during his premiership and which still persists to this day – a deep hatred of the Tories that is so visceral voters will abandon strong loyalties to “their” party and vote tactically for whoever has the best chance of getting the Conservatives out.

In 2019, Boris was popular; now, with his lies, his hypocrisy, and his candyfloss manifesto blown away, he is despised. Where is the levelling up? Where are the new hospitals? Where is Global Britain? People rightly blame Johnson – and his boosterish cakeism has gone sour.

The sheer scale of anti-Tory tactical voting by Labour and Liberal Democrat voters glimpsed in by-elections and local elections in this parliament may even exceed what was seen in 1997 when the general election comes round. Such a pattern promises to leave the Tories critically weakened after the next general election. We’ve seen it in by-elections in Chesham & Amersham, Bexley, Shropshire, Wakefield and Tiverton, and – prospectively – in the latest triple whammy.

It is as if the electorate were behaving like an immune system, and at last learning to organise itself more effectively in order to expunge the political system of the vestigial fragments of Johnson’s political RNA. His “spike protein”, which fooled us for so long, was his special ability to make so many mutually incompatible and impossible promises to so many for so long.

Johnson’s strain of political manipulation penetrated the cells of his hosts (us lot) so effectively that we mistook his deceptions for rogueish charm. When they rumbled him during Partygate as a cynical hypocrite, the counterreaction began.

After the anguish of the pandemics and the forced lockdowns he imposed on others while he and his associates partied, we decided to be rid of him. When he lied repeatedly and brazenly over a sex pest, Chris Pincher, a man he knowingly appointed and then protected, his entire government collapsed under his feet.

And, of course, Pincher’s disgrace and suspension from parliament will surely inevitably lead to another by-election, in Tamworth, and yet another setback for Sunak in the autumn. The same obviously goes for Johnson’s ally Nadine Dorries, a sort of new variant of Boris, who seems to be even more virulent and aggressive – apparently looking to trigger a by-election in Mid Bedfordshire to maximum devastating effect.

What else? Well, there’s the saga of Johnson’s WhatsApp messages and his testimony to the Covid inquiry. There are rumours of a Johnson “Covid memoir” out in the summer. A weekly column in the Daily Mail has proved to be fairly anodyne thus far, but has the potential to cause much trouble. Will he go to the party conference?

And many more of his honours nominations and other appointments may yet unravel themselves, just as embarrassingly as did the appointment of Richard Sharp as chair of the BBC. The Tory body politic barely has time to revive itself before some other bit of dormant Johnson virus flares up and attacks it.

Yet the most pernicious aspect of “long Boris’ is how it has triggered a recrudescence of “the British disease” of poor economic performance. That is down to the most abiding of Johnson’s legacies: Brexit.

From a distance of seven years to add perspective, it seems indisputable now that the Leave campaign couldn’t have won the EU referendum in 2016 without having this (at the time) mainstream politician on board to dispel the image of the Brexiteers as fruitcakes, borderline racists and bores. Then, in 2019, Johnson once again tricked and bullied his way into securing an early general election to “get Brexit done”.

More than anyone else, Brexit belongs to Johnson – and, to mix the metaphor, it is the malign gift that keeps giving. And Sunak has spent too much of his time trying to sort out the mess that Johnson’s botched and hurried negotiations left behind.

Today, Brexit remains a permanent drag on British economic growth, guaranteeing stagnant living standards and declining public services for decades to come – whoever is in power.

Because Johnson and Brexit traumatised and divided Britain so badly, and semi-permanently, it cannot be reversed in the short to medium term, and thus it is damn near incurable. (Brexit did, however, inoculate the rest of Europe against any delusions about life outside the EU.)

Brexit has made us poorer, and we can’t do anything about it. Indeed, such is the despondency that there is now a new and depressing consensus across the two main parties – that “there is no money”.

That observation, however, isn’t quite true of everybody, and, in his comfortable, freshly-acquired Oxfordshire mansion – soon to have a swimming pool – with his latest family and no need to worry about the cost of living crisis, Johnson has never had it so good.

He, for one, has natural immunity from the terrible disease of ‘long Boris’.