LANE: Every Possible Outcome of the Boris Leadership Challenge is Bad for Britain

LONDON, ENGLAND - MAY 10: British Labour Party opposition leader Keir Starmer and Britain&
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Oliver JJ Lane

While Westminster plotting goes into overdrive as Boris Johnson faces a snap leadership challenge, the country at large must not lose sight of the fact there is not one single positive outcome that could be reasonably expected to arise from today’s events. Here’s why.

Sir Graham Brady, the Member of Parliament (MP) and Conservative Party procedural officer responsible for handling leadership challenges, is once again enjoying one of his brief, meteoric forrays into Westminster-stardom, if any such thing exists. Very little less than three years after he was duly elected to lead Britain’s largest political party, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson will today face a vote of no confidence among his party colleagues, a ballot that will decide whether it is now time to have a leadership competition.

Assuming Boris loses his confidence vote today, whoever won that would — however briefly — be the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. There is no denying this is engaging stuff: this political churn is what sells newspapers and will have the Westminster dwellers wetting themselves with excitement.

But while plotters in the pro- and anti-Boris camps will have their best-case scenarios plotted out, their medium-term plans decided, for ordinary Britons who want their nation well-governed by honest elected officials with the best interests of the people at heart there is absolutely no king in the wings waiting to save the day. Whatever happens tonight, the future of our ruling political class is every bit as bleak as it was before and quite possibly worse.

So what might happen?

Boris wins today but loses the next general election

In truth, this feels like a likely outcome. The way the rules on Conservative leadership challenges are constituted hands advantages to the incumbent: you only need 15 per cent of the parliamentary party to hand in letters to trigger one. That remaining 85 per cent who haven’t yet got tired enough of the Prime Minister to move against him by this point forms a big status quo bloc the rebels have a remarkably short time to convince.

Even embattled and ineffectual Theresa May won her vote of no confidence, although little good it did her in the end.

In purely Westminster terms, winning the no-confidence vote also bolsters the position of the leader, as the party’s rules state they then become immune to further challenges for one year. That’d take Boris Johnson to one and a half years short of the next general election in January 2025 at the latest, and whether that would be enough time to then try to depose Boris again, select a new leader, and get the country used to him or her in time for the vote is a serious gamble rebels would be faced with.

But convincing 180 Conservative MPs that Boris should stay Prime Minister is a wholly different matter to convincing the country. Mr Johnson has had a very bad year of public perception souring and this leadership challenge will do more damage. For the public, it seems the fact a leadership challenge is happening is more of a story than whether Boris actually wins or not: the damage is done.

Looking at the past, prime ministers who survive votes of no confidence do not go on to win subsequent general elections. It hardly needs saying but a Labour-led government, either as an outright majority or, more likely, as a coalition with any combination imaginable of the dreary malcontents that make up the remainder of Britain’s smaller parties is an appalling prospect.

The Liberal Democrats seem to take an impish glee in wrecking the British constitution: their 2011 parliamentary reforms coming home to roost and hamstringing the Brexit process in the Theresa May era hasn’t been forgotten. The Scottish National Party (SNP) don’t want the United Kingdom to exist. The Green Party doesn’t want Western civilisation to exist. And that’s all without considering Labour themselves, who in their last period of office set to work with brutal efficiency remaking this nation in their own image and now are led by a man who, for presumably cynical political ends, professes to not even know what a woman is.

That is no future Britain deserves.

Boris loses and is replaced

Johnson’s colleagues might take the view — quite reasonably, you might argue — that his personal brand is too damaged and selecting a new leader now will draw a line under his leadership and give his replacement time to put distance between them before the next election. This could come today with the no-confidence vote, or in the case of a close-run thing, in the weeks and months to come behind closed doors by the ‘men in grey suits’, as happened to Mrs Thatcher.

There is certainly no escaping the fact that, to any reasonable standard, Boris Johnson has failed as a conservative. On those few things that matter particularly to conservative voters, like a small state, low taxation, and controlling immigration, he has not only failed to succeed but made great strides in doing the work of the left for them.

And this is to say nothing of his unforgivable blunder over lockdown. While many will doubtless remember Boris Johnson in decades to come for having broken his own lockdown rules, surely the true crime here was creating rules so fiendishly convoluted that no reasonable person — even the people who wrote the law — could hope to cleave to them. That was malevolent government.

One big problem here: the Conservative Party is not presently a rich pool teeming with well presenting, high-calibre talent endowed with good public recognition. Indeed, the roster of names occasionally floated is despair making: none could be reasonably said to present the prospect of a brighter future for Britain.

Frying-pan-to-fire candidates include Jeremy Hunt, a Cameron-era hangover who could comfortably be a Labour MP; Michael Gove, whose limitless ambition is matched only by his own failings; Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor whose debt our children will still be paying back.

Whoever could replace Boris would immediately face the question of a general election. While the latest date for the next vote is far off in 2025, and there is no legal obligation to hold one for a new Prime Minister, in effect this is all but expected. Even the new generation of young MPs in Parliament will remember Gordon Brown’s ill-fated attempt to govern as Prime Minister earlier this century without calling a confirmatory national vote to ratify his premiership.

The Conservatives are not riding high in the polls at the moment and going to the country early after a leadership election carries a risk for the Conservatives of losing power — see above. But even if a new leader was able to credibly turn the tide and carry the party to victory again, what could that possibly mean for the country? Don’t hold your breath for tax cuts and border control.

This is no future Britain deserves.

Boris wins today and wins the next general election

Anything is possible, after all. Johnson’s supporters have always pointed out his ability to cut through politics and reach ordinary people in a way few others can — he is the golden boy of the Conservative party precisely because he won two terms as mayor in left-wing London and then won a thumping majority as Prime Minister in 2019.

That is no mean feat and nobody else in the Conservative party has such a track record. In his letter to his parliamentary colleagues today, Boris wrote that he wanted to draw a line under the whole sorry partygate affair and get back to the business of governing, not worrying about inward-looking leadership questions. Could the country be convinced in time for the next general election?

So there we have it, the best-case scenario for team Boris. What does that mean for us? More sleaze, very likely. Leadership by the golden boy from whom all the shine seems to have worn and tarnished, and more empty words on the border crisis. Absolutely no work to dig in, build strength in depth, to create institutions to keep this country well-governed in the years after this government vanishes.

This is no future Britain deserves.

So what now?

Boris Johnson has been an appalling Prime Minister who has persistently failed to deliver on the things that matter to his own voters. When faced with Covid, he immediately forgot his long-vaunted libertarian principles and jumped with both feet into an authoritarian lockdown so restrictive and complex he, if his own account is to be believed, didn’t even realise when he was breaking the rules he’d created.

He has no business remaining in office. But should he be removed today, there really can be no cause for celebration for anyone who has the best interests of the United Kingdom at heart.

There is no white knight in British politics, no great hope, no plausible alternative. For the Tory MPs voting tonight, whether to support Boris Johnson or not is a damned if you do, damned if you don’t decision. For the rest of us, well, we’re just damned. Good luck.

Oliver JJ Lane is Breitbart News’ Europe Editor and London Bureau Chief

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