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Is his luck turning? Credit: LEON NEAL/POOL/AFP/Getty
Boris Johnson is in trouble. Public support for his government is tanking. His approval ratings have slumped. His own voters are fed up. His MPs are livid. His former advisors have declared war. The Great Reopening is rapidly making way for what some are calling his “Summer of Discontent”.
“The Tories are blundering and the vaccine bounce is wearing off amid rows over pay rises for nurses and police officers,” writes The Mirror, “as well as cuts to foreign aid and the planned undoing of the pensions triple lock”. Speaking for many, Robert Shrimsley at the Financial Times similarly asks: “Is it possible that the UK will look back on the last few months as the moment we reached Peak Johnson?”
There is no doubt that dark clouds are hovering above No 10. There is the infighting in Downing Street. The U-turn on self-isolation. The Pingdemic. The unpopularity of vaccine passports on the right-wing flank. The failure to define “levelling-up”. Two by-election defeats. And then the former consiglieri who is repeatedly undermining the credibility and authority of his former Capo.
But are things really that bad for Johnson? I’m not convinced. In the polls, the Conservatives have certainly taken a knock. In the last two weeks alone, their lead is down by 9 points with both YouGov and Survation and 5 points with Redfield & Wilton. Across all polls, at the start of July the average Conservative lead was 8 points. In the very latest polls, it has fallen below 5 points.
In fact, they have led in every single one of the last 130 polls. When it comes to Conservatives only Theresa May and Margaret Thatcher know what this feels like and neither of them had to deal with a global pandemic.
Johnson has already achieved a level of stability and support in the polls that neither David Cameron nor John Major ever achieved. He has only fallen below 40% on 16 occasions this year. Labour has not held a lead outside of the margin of error since January. If I were Johnson’s strategist and woke up to find this as my bad day, then I’d grab it with both hands.
Look under the bonnet and you will see why. There are certainly some things for Team Johnson to worry about. Public approval of the performance of the Government and Johnson himself are both down by 10 points. Only this week, pollsters Redfield and Wilton put Johnson’s net approval rating at minus 15, his lowest since they began asking the question in March 2020.
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SubscribeThe Tories are going to have to seriously tackle immigration before the next election – between now and then the census results will be released (next Spring, I believe) and will show just how many more millions are living here and how much the demographics have changed.
I suspect that even those who are somewhat ambivalent may be alarmed.
I agree – particularly these small boats. Problem is that Labour has worse instincts than the Tories on this issue so there is no one putting pressure on the gov. I read that Priti Patel is raring to go on offshore processing but Boris is on the fence. Can Nigel F and GB News push him?
Why does the Conservative Party need pressure to deal with something as fundamental as control of our borders? I am beginning to think that it doesn’t really want to.
Because they are useless. In terms of dealing with the disastrous effects of the left/progressives/wokedom (call it what you will) their instincts are craven, to kick the can down the road and do nothing. Paradoxically the only group they have scant regard for is those who maintain common sense small c conservative values.
The trouble with tackling mass immigration is that we when it goes beyond a certain level it can’t be stopped.
I agree, the fundamental problem is since the early 1950s, all Governments have relied on importing labour, both cheap and skilled to keep the economy expanding. It’s high time we sorted out our education and skills training to produce the people needed for a modern economy. The answers so far have been ridiculous massive expansion of university education with emphasis on academic education slewed heavily toward the humanities, when the economy screams out for more technical and trade training. Why should we have plumbers from Poland?
The latest mess was so obvious after 23 June 2016 to anyone who knew about transport, we need between 50 and 70,000 HGV drivers to replace the EU ones who have gone home.
Some of this is the fault of the Tories who rabidly cut our skills based eduction in the 1960s and 1970s, then Thatcher turned our polytechnics who turned out hoards of excellent graduates with practically based degrees into Universities which then made everything more academic. Blair then decreed that at least 50% of school leavers should go to University.
There needs to be some tough decisions made on this our education system, currently it is elitist and focuses at the top end on humanities like classics, rather than how to provide services and goods that will make the country wealthier. Lowering immigration has to be a long term plan to reduce the need for people from overseas to come here to work.
But we are told that the NHS and social care needs immigrants because we will not do the work. Fruit picking is seasonal and we will not do that. Now there is no money for pay rises and I suspect another winter of discontent is coming.
It was Major who converted the polytechnics into universities.
Technically yes but the proposal went back to 1989.
And none of the immigrants want to work on the farms.
that’s why you always need new, low skill, immigrants – that and caring for the old. Population Ponzi
Boris was never a leader, with a grasp of policy and detail. He prefers to wing it and rely on people’s not remembering what he says. I’m not sure what he stands for, if anything.
So now he is the thrall of Carrie Antoinette and the woke lobby he is drifting aimlessly.
Also I’m not sure he has fully recovered from being ill.
Now people are cottoning on to the lirs and exaggerations over Covid, which is real enough but nothing like as serious as we have been told (1600 + people die every day of other things) his ratings will drop further.
LOL @ “Carrie Antoinette”
Personally I think the eventual explosion when people find how Tory-legislated ecofascism is stripping them of mobility and affordable heating will make any COVID spat pale.
I know I keep banging on about this but only once since 1945 has a government with a working majority gone into a general election and lost to an opposition that won its own working majority. That was in 1970, after the franchise had changed, so the aberrant result was returned by a different demos.
In every other case the government was re-elected.
Johnson thus won the Tories at least two terms in 2019. You don’t go into an election with an 80-seat majority and lose. If you’re Gordon Brown, you may go in with a 60-seat majority and lose, but the winner won’t get a majority. Furthermore, if this were about to happen, it would have been obvious long beforehand. The opposition would be topping the polls, smashing it out of the park, and generally looking very obviously like a government-in-waiting led by the next prime minister. We are seeing none of that.
The rest is conversation, as Gordon Gekko said.
I’ve been saying since about 2008 that the next Labour PM was not in the House of Commons yet. I still think this. Johnson will win another two terms next time, Labour will lose more MPs. Those it still has will be abjectly mediocre token women and minorities, Stalinist chavs, anti-Semites in denial, cretins, racists, toxic woke hatemongers, and Corbynite revanchists. Many, such as Diane Abbott, will be literally all of those.
You can gauge how successful and effective a Conservative leader is by the level of hate from the left. The left didn’t really hate Heath, Major, Hague, IDS, Howard, Cameron or May because it saw them, not inaccurately, as centrist nonentities who would not trounce them at the polls, who wouldn’t roll back the left, and who always and reliably looked beatable. They were leftists’ rightists, if you like.
The left reserves especial vitriol – real visceral, psychotic hatred – for Thatcher and Johnson, because it has an unbroken record of failure against them at the polls and because both are capable of very seriously setting back Maoism in this country.
The psephology and the volume of hate are all you need to pay attention to. The message from both is that Johnson will be just fine.
I think you are right about the electoral arithmetic. It’s very hard to see Labour overturning an 80 seat majority in a single term, even if they had made a start on recovery immediately after the last election. Johnson is potentially vulnerable on several fronts (besides immigration): the heavy handed and disjointed response to Covid perhaps; nanny state authoritarianism; the lack of push-back against rampant wokery; and the terrifying cost of net zero policies. I may be wrong about these being electoral vulnerabilities, but one thing is certain, and that is that in each of these areas Labour would be far worse.
I agree Trevor. It frankly does not matter how badly Boris governs; whether he governs badly through indolence, groupthink or any other reason, he’s back in next time.
So his missteps are not going to cost him, and they may not even cost his successor either, so long as Labour continues to look even worse.
Surely this is the most dispiriting political prospect: socialism-lite from an incompetent, versus a neo-Marxist alternative. And whilst you might say, quite properly, that we must always pursue the lesser evil, such an argument may well not sway the disenchanted multitude. How many times in history have concession and sweet reason argued themselves impeccably into horrible defeat? This is why Liberalism, ushering in the age of mass politics, ended by destroying its own prospects. And even then, there’s an argument that by not breaking with Johnson we merely encourage a leftwards drift which takes us to neo-Marxism anyway. Finally, whilst you rightly note the foul hatred directed from the left to Mrs Thatcher, comparing this with the similar levels of toxic spite directed towards Johnson cannot mean that he represents another she. It merely demonstrates that for the left hatred has become routine.
This is brutal, but probably true.
I reckon it is. Even if Labour were not a shower of spiteful and envious moral incompetents, their numbers are so low, their internal machinations so woeful and their electoral prospects so poor that nobody of any talent with ambitions of getting into government is going to see Labour as the route to doing so.
Compounding this is that Labour does not really want to govern. It wants to preach, sermonise and hector, which is why it is so heavily over-represented in unelected places of influence like charities, quangoes, the BBC and the National Trust, where it can do so unaccountably to anyone.
Meanwhile, as an actual political party, in the last 55 years it has produced exactly one leader capable of winning working majorities. This is a feature, not a bug.
Being picky Wilson won both the 1974 elections so two leaders who could win although Heath was so awful the bar was lower at the time.
He didn’t win a working majority off – and displace – a sitting government that had its own, though. Attlee likewise lost a 5-seat majority in 1951 and was replaced by Churchill with a 6-seat majority. Neither is a working majority.
Sorry a comparison that groups Johnson and Thatcher together is very questionable. The former is a lazy chancer with no plan and if it is true pranced about in front of the mirror whilst Foreign Secretary pretending to be Churchill, a narcissist. The latter was an intelligent hard worker dedicated to the job of running the country. I often disagreed with her but like many I respected her totally. Johnson will outlive his usefulness to the Tory Party probably before the next election in 2024, simply because he has no plan or ideology. Sooner or later the Tory Party will wake up to the fact that Conservative values mean nothing to the current leadership. When that happens Johnson will be toast!
Notwithstanding the dissimilarities, Labour hates them both for winning all the time.
Labour hate Thatcher for what she did, however, with Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock refusing to silence the left, they could never win. Middle England never votes for Labour when the left is in the ascendancy, as happened in the 2019 election. Corbyn was just a modern version of Micheal Foot. Boris has found a way of winning the elections using modern communications via social media, fair dues to him but in comparison with Thatcher who would never have allowed him on the front bench he is a non starter. The competition to become Tory Leader is pretty poor nowadays. My Dad, a proper Tory thought Cameron was clueless. As a party member he could not stand Boris, sadly in April 2020 he died of Covid infected by a former resident of his care home who was forced back into the home from hospital untested. Six other residents also died.
“Corbyn was just a modern version of Micheal Foot.” – more like an archaic version.
Sorry to hear about your dad.
Half of his problems would evaporate if he started acting like a fiscal and social conservative, defended our culture and values, kicked the green nonsense into touch and stopped bullying people who don’t want the vaccine (I am jabbed btw).
Well said, But it ain’t going to happen. A lot if not most Tory MPs seem more akin to SDP/LibDem/Blue Labour/Greens in disguise.
I’m watching Mr Farage. He has been gifted a potentially phenomenal platform in the form of GB News – Nicola eat your heart out – and has started bang on the money. Reform has the right ideas, but needs more political nous to be electable. The return of NF would jump start it into any election cycle, and then the Tories would have a run for their money. A party that was genuinely for smaller state (than today’s ~50% of GDP, up from 9% 110yrs ago), the ambitious and self-employed? It would have my vote.
‘The return of NF’ haha, I thought you meant the National Front…
And speaking of them, it is interesting to see how the search algorithms play ‘hide the right’ with a search on them, and how WIKI is totally a tool of the Left:
The first entry was the National Front of Iran – Then it was wiki and this line was the first:
from wiki:
“The NationalFront (NF) is an extreme-right, fascist political party in the United Kingdom.”
(Wikipedia is an extreme-left, Marxist, political propaganda outlet of the Global internet. (is how they should list themselves if truthful))
If I vote at all, it will be for Reform UK (warts and all) because between Tories trying to control internet (Online Harms), the utterly insane Net Zero malarkey, and the preposterous ruinous lockdowns, it is hard to see how this shower are much better that Labour or the Greens..
There are only two voting options – vote for an independent candidate, or if there isn’t one, then spoil the ballot paper. If we all did that the Westminster swamp would get the message.
The problem for the Conservatives is that Boris Johnson’s credibility is shot. He has proved to be a gross disappointment, clearly unfit for the top job, and should be replaced if the Conservatives are to be assured of a majority at the next election.
Nonsense! When Covid cases go up, polls go down and vice versa. Boris will be back to +10 once cases drop below 10k per day. We went through this “Peak Boris” cycle in autumn 2020. He will secure a decent majority in the next GE.
Maybe you are right, but all I see is a gibbering, incompetent, mouldering mess of a government that I could not vote for. And it isn’t just Johnson.
Liz Truss excepted perhaps – quietly getting with her critical brief. And Penny Mordaunt – quiet but perhaps not out of ink?
Well said. Across the board, he has side stepped massively to the left. The man who once joked about burqas, asserted the value of British imperialism, teased authority, resented regulation, urged liberty and hymned enterprise has ducked the culture war, imposed masks, spent money we don’t have and trashed the economy. Disappointment is an understatement. Likewise, according to Migration Watch, he has moved left on immigration, too – his bill on the subject making it easier, not more difficult, for newcomers to settle in this country. How such an obvious political dunce expects to do more than shatter the right wing alliance with this raft of betrayals is a mystery, best left to his unthinking supporters to explain.
I think he has just been overwhelmed and shattered by the pandemic. We might see a return to his old self next year.
In policy terms, apart from severing the Gordian knot of Brexit, I saw little other reason to vote for him and he is now exceeding my negative expectations.
Oh dear, not this old chestnut! He’d ratted on properly Conservative government before falling ill – HS2, for example – big spend, big build, bid disaster. IR35? 5G? Lockdown itself? The “green” agenda? High taxes? Borrowing to the hilt and beyond? You can’t put this down to a bug.
I seem to recall he was relaxed about immigration when he was editor of the Spectator.
I always thought Boris was an unprincipled charlatan, back to when he was a poor London Mayor, even then spraying public money around on ridiculous projects with no noticeable strategy at all. I know, I worked on some of them! But he seems popular with the British public and, while I know it must grate with many of the almost unhinged anti-Leftists on here, the British public is well to the left of most Tories on economic issues if not identity and national ones.
I agree that Labour on its own does not seem a real threat. However, if large sections of the Conservatives core support base remain seriously disenchanted with Boris Johnson ( as I sense is now the case), then Tory Abstainers, plus others such as Lib Dems and a new Farage type party might eviscerate the Tory voting base, and whilst not securing a victory for themselves, could hand it to the Socialists. This is surely not a time for any Tory complacency.
Who cares what it is like for Johnson? Johnson is bad for the country and that is the real issue and the worst of it is that nobody can see an alternative leader in the Tory Party. The opposition is entirely useless and I doubt that anybody wants a general election at this time even if it was possible.
This government reminds me of the floundering idiots who were carousing and filling their boots with the publics’ coin in the final John Major govt. Remember he won because no matter how many archers, aitkens and hamiltons escaped the woodwork there were always the men behind the men behind Neil Kinnock to scare the voters away
You overlook the fact that the “green agenda” or rather climate hoax, is beginning to cause disturbance amongst those who think and write about it. I for one am convinced that the science is still unsettled, and the party should be encouraging more public debate – including instructing the BBC to take a more balanced approach. Never forget that climate change – the aspect in question is whether it is man-made, not whether it exists – has been weaponized by he Left. This should be enough to discredit the agenda in he minds of all right-thinking people.
To summarize, Johnson will win a second term because the opposition is so dire. I’m no psephologist, but surely this is not an enviable position to be in?
Oh dear. Has England lost its way? With Johnson at the helm seems a rudderless country on the way to breaking up.
It’s easy to forget there is such a thing as ‘the Opposition’ these days, but Keir Starmer popped up from his bunker a couple of days ago to opine on the ‘pingdemic’.
Up to now he has been a loyal supporter of lockdown rules, so it was rather surprising when he called for the ‘ping’ rules to be relaxed a week before the govt intends.
1) the fuss about millions being pinged was 10 days before this, so that would have been the time to comment, and 2) if he thinks rules should be relaxed, why not now?
Yes, Boris supporters like me know he can dither, but that’s why we need a strong opposition to get him off his fence!
Still happy with my vote for Johnson and the Conservatives in 2019 and will vote Conservative again on the basis of what has been achieved to date.
It was Johnson who led on Vaccine Task Force being set up in March 2020, Kate Bingham being appointed as in charge with the instruction to save lives & no cap on what needed to be spent to get the vaccines.
The result of that leadership is that the U.K. has the most vaccinated citizens of any Country in Europe. 71% with 2 jabs. Over 90% with 1 jab. We are now nearly at herd immunity therefore and well placed to take advantage of the bounce back.
I like Johnson’s optimism. Am ok with him not being a details man. In a crisis like this we needed a leader who saw the bigger picture.
As for Cummings… hell hath no fury like a sacked SPAD. Johnson will survive his loopy tweeting I think.
It’s high time we had an emergency government to deal with ecological collapse. COVID is a symptom of this collapse and unless we begin to seriously address both the ecological and the climate crisis then we are all toast. Even Johnson’s own government has urged that we move to new style of economics which permits nature to regenerate, I refer to the Das Gupta Review about the Economics of Biodiversity. We urgently need voluntary degrowth both with regard to our parenting and our purchasing decisions, we have been in ecological overshoot since 1970 and the recent Earth Overshoot Day indicates our current ecological consumption is running at 1.7 Earths. We are all contributing to this problem by buying into the unsustainable principles of growth economics. About Earth Overshoot Day – #MoveTheDate of Earth Overshoot Day
I doubt there will be anything “voluntary” about “degrowth” in the future, just as there was nothing voluntary about the last year & a half of ruinous & frankly tyrannous “degrowth”.
See David Craig’s book “There is no climate crisis”
There isn’t any climate crisis. There are just ecofascists.