Worried Tories say they’re fighting on a ‘manifesto for nothing’ – voters deserve better from Boris Johnson

The prime minister talks about ‘a new government, not a continuity government’, because he knows voters want change. But change to what?

To its credit, in this election campaign the Labour Party is clear about the direction it would take the country. Its promise of “real change” is not another meaningless slogan. Its manifesto would redistribute wealth, hike public spending and taxes for the top 5 per cent of earners and result in a big expansion of the state.

In contrast, we know remarkably little about what a Boris Johnson administration would do.

The prime minister talks about “a new government, not a continuity government”, because he knows voters want change. He has distanced himself from the Tories’ record on Brexit and did the same on sentencing after the London Bridge attack – with unseemly haste. On public spending cuts, he told The Spectator that, in 2010, “I thought austerity was just not the right way forward for the UK.” That was news to some cabinet ministers.

But change to what? There are not many clues in the Tories’ programme. “It’s a manifesto for nothing,” one Tory insider admitted. “It’s about getting us across the winning line on 12 December.” Johnson describes his mission as “sensible, moderate, One Nation conservatism”, but it is deliberately opaque.

If he wins the race, senior Tories expect a battle royal between the free-market, low-tax libertarians who currently dominate his cabinet and liberal Tory pragmatists, who will urge him to revert to his “London mayor mode” in order to hold on to the working-class voters who would have delivered his majority.

Would the right-wing ideologues such as Jacob Rees-Mogg and Liz Truss, who have been put in their box for the election, then be allowed out as Johnson adopted their deregulatory agenda to reform public services and slim the role of the state?

Or would they be dropped from the team? Some ministers believe the cabinet could soon look very different, especially if Johnson won a healthy majority of more than 50, allowing him a free hand and to worry less about creating backbench enemies.

The make-up of Johnson’s parliamentary party will change. All Tory candidates have signed a pledge to support his Brexit deal. Only four of the 21 Tory MPs who lost the whip for opposing no deal are standing as Tory candidates. The founders of the One Nation caucus – Amber Rudd and Nicky Morgan – are leaving the Commons altogether.

Modernisers hope that a new cohort of MPs from towns the Tories have not won for decades (or ever) will tip the party’s centre of gravity towards pragmatism. They believe Johnson would revert to his City Hall type, using the Tories’ new working-class base to remake the party, and even redraw the political battle lines.

Although the Tories are urging traditional Labour supporters to “lend us your vote to get Brexit done”, Johnson’s party will need them in future elections to stay in power. Although right of centre on issues like crime and immigration, these voters will often be left of centre on the economy. So a right-wing, laissez-faire agenda would not play well.

In an interesting clue, Johnson hinted at a more interventionist approach post-Brexit, including a “buy British” policy and state aid to protect firms at risk. That’s a far cry from the free market agenda trumpeted by the Brexiteers during the 2016 referendum; it echoes Donald Trump’s appeal to blue collar America.

Although Johnson wants this to be a “Brexit election”, there is the same lack of clarity on his favourite issue. To secure Nigel Farage’s decision to stand down his candidates in Tory-held seats, Johnson boxed himself in by ruling out an extension to EU-UK trade talks beyond December 2020. Without agreement by then, the libertarians would leave on World Trade Organisation terms and pursue their “Global Britain” agenda. There’s been surprisingly little election debate about this new no-deal threat, partly because Labour wants to talk about anything but Brexit.

The Tory pragmatists want to ensure an EU trade agreement to protect the economy, rather than gamble on unbankable deals round the world, and are rightly wary of relying on Trump. An EU deal would probably take three years, but Johnson might find a way to fudge his unrealistic December 2020 deadline by reaching an outline agreement by then and finalising the details afterwards.

Johnson is not a member of either of the Tories’ two tribes. “He doesn’t really have an ideology,” one Tory aide admitted, predicting Johnson would go where his close advisers pushed him. The battle over the party’s direction would be joined by Tory pressure groups and think tanks.

When will the real Boris Johnson stand up? On 13 December, probably. But voters deserve to know much more before then.