Five members of Cabinet have suggested they will back Boris Johnson to return as Tory leader and Prime Minister, hinting he may just be able to muster enough support to make the membership ballot.
Johnson, who was finally ousted as Prime Minister not even two months ago, would romp home in a ballot of ordinary Conservative Party members as he did in 2019, if polls are accurate — but the party’s parliamentary elite have set it up so that would-be candidates cannot even stand without the endorsement of 100 Members of Parliament (MPs).
While a Johnson comeback appeared fanciful in the immediate aftermath of Liz Truss’s ouster, his endorsement by a second Cabinet minister — the first was Jacob Rees-Mogg, the Secretary of State for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy — in the form of Simon Clarke, the so-called Secretary of State for Levelling Up, suggested he would indeed be able to at least make a fight of it.
To those two Johnson can now add Alok Sharma, who holds Cabinet status as President of the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26), Anne-Marie Trevelyan, the Secretary of State for Transport, and possibly even Ben Wallace, the respected Secretary of State for Defence — who has at least tentatively suggested that Johnson’s leadership during the Tories’ 2019 election win gave him “a mandate [from the public] and I think that’s an important thing for all of us to bear in mind.”
“Boris is the person we need to lead our country and our party,” explained the aforementioned Clarke in a joint statement with Ben Houchen, the Mayor of Tees Valley — who previously backed Rishi Sunak for the leadership — provided to The Telegraph, which is close to the Conservative Party.
“He won the greatest election victory for years on a mandate to unite and level up the UK, and inspired millions of people who had never voted Conservative before to get behind a generous, optimistic vision of what Britain can be,” the pair continued — not entirely untruthfully, although the so-called ‘Red Wall’ of former Labour strongholds that fell to the Johnson-led Tories in 2019 were perhaps most strongly motivated by his half-fulfiled promise to “get Brexit done”.
“People on Teesside love Boris because he recognised that while talent is evenly distributed across the country, opportunity is not. Boris gave us that opportunity,” they claimed.
“People who have felt left behind from [sic] Governments of both colours want their Prime Minister to make a success of Brexit, control illegal immigration and invest in our communities.
“That’s what Boris would do and it’s why he is so popular right across the Red Wall seats that will decide the next election,” they concluded — although attempts to control illegal immigration were actually very thin on the ground during his tenure, with the boat migrants crisis inherited from Theresa May growing exponentially worse on his watch.
Even if Johnson earns the 100 MP endorsements necessary to move forward in the contest, he will face an uphill struggle to reclaim the Tory crown.
Most MPs, as in the leadership contest won by Liz Truss mere weeks ago, likely want Rishi Sunak, who played Brutus to Johnson’s Caesar during his downfall, and the party establishment may well coordinate to prevent the former premier from reaching the final two where ordinary members would have the opportunity to vote for him — risky though that may be for them, in terms of potentially infuriating party activists.
It seems likely Johnson’s foes will seek to emphasise the dark cloud that still hangs over him in the form of an ongoing inquiry by the Committee of Privileges of the House of Commons into whether he misled Parliament as premier — which is perhaps unlikely to be impartial, given it is led by Harriet Harman, a former acting leader of the Labour Party.
Johnson, for his part, appears set to try and win over the party establishment by appealing to Rishi Sunak for a shock rapprochement, with “allies” of the former premier saying he wants the pair to put aside their differences and “get back together” to unite the party and defeat Labour in the next general election.
It seems highly likely that the price will be adopting the same high-tax, managed decline agenda favoured by Sunak and his supporters and imposed on Liz Truss by Sunak’s proxy, the anti-Brexit lockdown authoritarian Jeremy Hunt, in the dying days of her brief premiership.
But this prospect may not trouble Johnson, who governed as a green agenda, pro-immigration social liberal rather than a conservative anyway, and seems more interested in occupying high office for the status and sheer sport of it than in trying to implement any particular set of policies.