No, Boris Johnson is not going to come back to politics – as London mayor or anything else

The Daily Mail’s new light essayist has found his level, writes John Rentoul

If Johnson stood as an independent, he would blow up the chances of the Tory candidate (AFP/Getty)

I wasn’t going to write about Boris Johnson again, because I think it is over for him. His attempt, aided by the tiny band of his remaining supporters, to suggest that the masses will turn to him once more should not be taken seriously. It is a distraction from more important matters, which is almost everything else.

But I found myself in conversation with a wise analyst of politics who said that Johnson is a zombie politician, one who just keeps coming through the hail of bullets: “I don’t know how he will do it, but he will find a way.” So I will allow myself to be distracted one more time, just to explain why this article is unnecessary.

The first obstacle to a Johnson comeback is that he doesn’t have enough support among MPs, and never will. In fact, for most of his career, his support among the parliamentary Conservative Party has been precarious. Look how quickly he withdrew from the leadership contest in 2016 after Michael Gove challenged him.

He became prime minister in 2019 only because the Tory party faced extinction if it couldn’t get Brexit done, and he was the only person with the unusual qualities demanded by that moment. “We are in deep peril,” as Rishi Sunak, Robert Jenrick and Oliver Dowden argued. “We believe there really is only one logical answer: Boris Johnson.”

It worked, but it won’t work again. It was surprising that, after Johnson was forced out of office, and after the collapse of Liz Truss’s government, there were still 110 Tory MPs – nearly one-third of the total – willing to nominate him to return to office in a leadership contest against Sunak. (We know this because Graham Brady – the chair of the 1922 Committee, which supervises leadership elections – revealed it four months later.)

But he knew it wasn’t enough, because the other two-thirds were opposed to him – and, as he admitted, “You can’t govern effectively unless you have a united party in parliament.”

Now he knows that the number of his supporters has dwindled – so much so that he has asked them not to vote against the privileges committee report on Monday, because that would reveal how few there are. A total of eight have gone public in his defence; even if three times as many voted against the report – and there may be some MPs who thought the committee overdid the righteous indignation, even if they don’t care for Johnson – that would be a (further) humiliation for the former prime minister.

Hence there may be some procedural fun and games on Monday, as Labour MPs seek to embarrass Johnson by forcing a division in which zero MPs vote against the report. Normally, if there is no opposition to a motion, it will be approved without counting the votes. But if enough Labour or SNP MPs shout “No” when Lindsay Hoyle, the speaker, asks for their opinion, he could call a division.

This would require two Labour or other opposition MPs to volunteer as tellers to count the votes (although that is done electronically now, so they just have to supervise). Hoyle may not allow such an obvious manipulation of Commons rules, but he has some discretion about how selectively deaf he can be.

Johnson will remember, even as he pretends to have been stitched up by a “tiny minority” of MPs, that the only reason he was investigated by the privileges committee in the first place was that in April last year, as prime minister, he didn’t dare put the Labour motion authorising the inquiry to a vote, so it was approved “on the nod”.

So, no, he couldn’t come back even if he were in the Commons. Now that he is out, it will be so much harder, and it will not be made easier by the passage of time. In order to return, he would have to secure selection as the official Conservative candidate in a safe seat. That is not going to happen in any of the imminent by-elections, or at the general election.

Even if Johnson could find a local association that wanted him – and only one-fifth of Tory party members say he should come back as prime minister – Sunak would block him on the grounds that the privileges committee report means he would bring the party into disrepute.

The grassroots movement to bring back Boris is mainly a figment of Lord Cruddas’s chequebook, so the next parliament will not see a wave of Tory MPs selected for their Borisolatry. Lord Cruddas, given a peerage by Johnson against the advice of the House of Lords Appointments Commission, along with the Conservative Democratic Organisation he helped to set up, and the rest of the caravan, will move on.

Hence the loser-talk of a bid for the London mayoralty. But the second obstacle to a Johnson comeback, after the paucity of MPs willing to support him in parliament, is the shortage of voters wanting him back in parliament or anywhere else, whether in London or the red wall.

It is true that the new first-past-the-post voting system for mayor of London increases the potential for wrecking candidates. The Conservative government has changed the rules from a system allowing people to cast first- and second-preference votes to the simple “most votes wins” system used for electing MPs, presumably in search of party-political advantage.

If Johnson stood as an independent, he would blow up the chances of the Tory candidate, and he might even come second, but it would be hard for him to win – unless, for example, Jeremy Corbyn stood as an independent on the other side (which he won’t do either, I think, for similar reasons). Paradoxically, given that first-past-the-post makes it hard for small parties to break through in national parliamentary elections, it makes it easier for an independent to break into a single elected post such as a mayoralty.

But Johnson is not going to do it. The risk of losing an election – and for a post he has held before – is too great. London is even more a Labour city than when he was mayor; and it was a Remainer city when he left to lead the Leave campaign.

Boris Johnson has a remunerative twilight career ahead of him as a light essayist dispensing weight-loss tips, but his political career will fail to revive, zombie-like, after the hail of bullets that has cut him down.