Daze of Blunder.

The clock is ticking down to the end of polling in the Shropshire North by-election in England and those of us who take an interest in such things are awaiting the result to see how much destruction follows in the wake. Not all by-elections register or are indicative of a change in mood but this one certainly feels like it is a harbinger of Conservative doom and gloom.

Currently all but one of the bookmakers who are giving odds on this have the Liberal Democrats as slight favourites, however even a narrow Conservative victory would be seen as a disaster for the ruling party and its hapless leader in what would historically be one of the safest seats in the country. North Shropshire is one of those parliamentary seats where the proverbial ‘monkey with a blue rosette’ would expect to win handsomely. How did it come about that this most bankable tory constituency has been transformed into the edgiest of knife edge battlegrounds?

Bringing in a candidate from Birmingham rather than standing a local has certainly caused some rancour but most attention has been focused, rightly on Alexander Boris Johnson. The Prime Minister has been confronted with MacMillan’s ‘Events, dear boy. Events’ and has been found wanting. 

All leaders can expect at least one major challenge during their time in office and how they handle those challenges is generally how they are judged both at the time and by history. Johnson has had two crises, one largely of his own making in Brexit and one that swept the world in Covid. 

The first garnered him a bit of credit from the ‘Leave’ cohorts for signing off on a deal. This credit though is pretty much exhausted as the compromises he signed up to (and lied about at the time) become ever more apparent. The drop in UK industrial investment since 2016 is significant and will cause problems but it is still barely on the cabinet’s radar and this is just a single Brexit problem. There are many others. 

The Covid pandemic has perversely, allowed the government to ignore large parts of UK industrial and business strategy. As the death toll and waves of infections progress, the public have pressing, personal issues to worry about. Coping with Covid restrictions, avoiding illness and caring for others has become a default for the majority of the population and so long as the governments was seen as being on the same page as the little people then they got the benefit of the doubt from voters. Most of us wouldn’t expect to be perfect at pandemic management and so we are prepared to cut our leaders some slack at a difficult time in history.

This all falls apart when it turns out that those leaders are having parties in defiance of their own rules; that friends of ministers have made small fortunes on dodgy government deals and that our representatives have been helping themselves to freebies rather than sticking to the day job. The dissatisfaction came to a head when Johnson whipped his party into supporting a change in parliamentary rules so that his ally could avoid censure for corruption. The failure of his plan and the subsequent resignation of Owen Paterson precipitated the North Shropshire by-election and a change in the zeitgeist of British politics may perhaps hang on tonight’s outcome.

So, what next?

Barring a miracle of biblical proportions, it is now clear that Johnson is toast. He has burned many bridges with his own party and they have indulged him because of his, much touted, election winning ability, but now that there are many signs that he is no longer electorally Teflon then they will dispense with his services in a heartbeat. The problem for the parliamentary tory party is that there aren’t many senior MPs ready to step into the role who would do any better than Johnson. Yes, there would be less extra-curricular shagging and the new PM would turn up to meetings and pay attention to briefings but it is hard to see any current cabinet member who could command the party and carry it forward. Tory factionalism has gone too far for easy agreement between the ERG, traditional One-nation tories and the Red Wall newcomers. 

The succession is a nightmare in waiting for the party. Johnson assembled the weakest cabinet in living memory, purging and overlooking anyone who might have entertained an opinion or who could possibly have represented a threat to his position. The body of parliamentary MPs contains a chunk of newbies, many of whom probably won’t survive the next election, a rump of Moggalikes living in an imagined past where Britain’s wondrous empire stands forever unchallenged . . . and a large pile of constituency MPs who have neither the desire nor the ability to drag the party forward into the future.

In a similar situation Labour once turned to Neil Kinnock. An MP with significant experience he took on the job of fighting back the fringe extremists in his own party before setting in train the reforms that ultimately led to over a decade of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Who wants to be the tory Kinnock? Which of the blue suited benches will step forward to become a political John the Baptist heralding the advent of the latest messiah? More to the point, who is going to follow this putative evangelist because without followers, the greatest leader will go nowhere?

The questions are easier to find than the answers and so I, like many others will grab the popcorn, sit back and wait to see where future episodes of this soap opera take us. Starting tonight when the polls close.