The Boris Johnson fallout could have a devastating effect on Sunak’s electoral chances

The PM cannot operate effectively when the skeleton of the old, discredited regime is still rattling around, writes Andrew Grice

Johnson’s latest woes are also bad news for Rishi Sunak (PA)

The new inquiries by two police forces into whether Boris Johnson broke lockdown rules by meeting friends and family is very bad news for Johnson. The diminishing fan club that still dreams he will return to Downing Street will shrink even further. The investigation by the Commons privileges committee into whether he lied to parliament over Partygate, which was due to report shortly, might now be prolonged.

Like allies of Suella Braverman, under fire for allegedly asking her civil servants secure her special treatment after a speeding offence, Johnson is crying foul and playing the victim of a “politically motivated stitch-up”. It’s a very familiar, Trump-like response we get when Tory populists are accused of breaking the rules but who usually give voters the impression they think they should be above them. There are dark warnings Johnson might sue the Cabinet Office for referring to police that his diary disclosed potential further breaches of lockdown rules. I’ll believe that one when legal action happens.

Johnson’s latest woes are also bad news for Rishi Sunak. He is struggling to escape the shadow cast over his government by his predecessor. Even on the backbenches, Johnson sometimes seems to garner as many headlines as the person now in No 10.

In recent weeks, we have seen the first conference of Johnson’s disciples, the Conservative Democratic Organisation, whose leaders say it is not about “bringing back Boris” and then go on to say that would be a good thing. We’ve seen Richard Sharp resign as chair of the BBC for not fully disclosing his role in helping Johnson secure a £800,000 loan facility just before the then-PM appointed him. We’ve had spicy revelations from Guto Harri, Johnson’s former director of communications, claiming the then PM clashed with King Charles over the government’s plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, called Emmanuel Macron “Putin’s lickspittle” and regarded Sue Gray as a “psycho” when she was carrying out her Partygate inquiry.

We’ve had a withering verdict, Johnson at 10: The Inside Story, by the historian Anthony Seldon, whose book rightly concluded: “Johnson had the potential, the aspirations and the opportunity to be one of Britain’s great prime ministers. His unequivocal exclusion from that club can be laid at the feet of no one else, but himself.”

Why do the latest revelations matter for Sunak? Because his only route to avoiding defeat at next year’s general election is to persuade voters they have a “new” government. As one senior Labour figure told me: “The Tories have been very good at reinventing themselves under a new leader since 2010, and we have been very bad at stopping them.” Labour has “got personal” against Sunak to try to make him “own” the Tories’ record in the past 13 years rather than offer the voters another fresh start.

Sunak can’t do that when the skeleton of the old, discredited regime is still rattling around. Johnson’s presence on the scene is also destroying the Tories’ fragile unity, as right-wingers accuse the PM of failing to stand up to a civil service “blob” out to damage Johnson and Braverman. The claim is ludicrous: the controversies engulfing both figures show civil servants sticking to their code of conduct, even if some Tory ministers are insouciant about theirs.

Sunak can’t be blamed for what Johnson did during the pandemic. But the PM bemused even loyalist Tory MPs with his painfully slow response to the latest allegations engulfing Braverman. Her actions probably fell into the grey zone where if there was a breach of the ministerial code, it would be a relatively minor one. So Sunak had to weigh the political upside and downside of firing Braverman.

As I wrote last week, many Tories are convinced she will resign at some point, probably over Sunak’s “failure” to control immigration, to boost her chances of succeeding him after a Tory election defeat. So in deciding whether to order a formal inquiry into her actions, Sunak had to calculate whether it would be better for him to remove her for allegedly breaking the code to deny her a “principled resignation”.

On the other side of the ledger is the reason he appointed Braverman in the first place – to keep his noisy right-wingers onside. He knew they might have declared war on him if she had been sacked. Although his decision today not to order a full inquiry opened him up to Labour’s favourite attack line– that he is “weak” – the PM appears to have judged that was the lesser of two evils.

The suspicion among Tory and Labour MPs is that Sunak in effect found out what a formal investigation into the home secretary by Laurie Magnus, his ethics adviser, would conclude before deciding whether to launch one. That is back to front, and hardly an “independent” process or the “integrity, professionalism and accountability at every level” Sunak promised.

That pledge was intended to draw a line under the Johnson era. The latest developments on both Johnson and Braverman are a painful reminder that he has failed to do so.