From Billy Bragg
Okay, it’s late and I have had a very long day toiling at the Brexit shit/fan interface, but as Boris Johnson seems likely to launch his bid to be Prime Minister tomorrow, I’m going to share my crazy hunch about what is happening here.
This all goes back to March 2015, when David Cameron said he would not serve a third term as PM if the Tories won a second term in office. Johnson at the time was out of parliament and, as Mayor of London, had developed a cosmopolitan image of someone at ease with multiculturalism. Sniffing the possibility of becoming PM, he got himself elected as an MP and set about trying to ingratiate himself with the Conservative Party membership whose votes will ultimately decide who is the next leader of the party.
Now the Tory grassroots are old, serious and overwhelmingly Euro-sceptic, with a broadly anti-cosmopolitan outlook. How could the cuddly Boris who won London convince the Tory faithful that he was a worthy candidate for their support? The EU referendum seemed to offer a way of squaring that particular circle. All he needed to do was to take a leading role in the Leave campaign, travel the country tickling the belly of the Tory faithful and, when the country voted to Remain – as it surely would, to do otherwise would be suicidal – he could portray himself as martyr to the grassroots favourite cause and so sweep up their votes when Cameron resigned ahead of the election in 2020.
That explains why Johnson has no plan. He never expected the Leave campaign to win, so it didn’t really matter if he made outrageous claims on the campaign trail – as he’d never be called to deliver on them, who would really care? Now everything has gone pear-shaped in the worse possible way. Johnson is being ushered to the front by the majority of pro-Remain Tory MPs who expect him to explain how he is going to take Britain out of the EU. If he is elected leader, he will have to face an electorate, the majority of whom are not happy about being turfed out of the EU (yes it might have been 52% vs 48% on the day, but by the next election, many of the the 64% of 18-24 yr olds who didn’t vote in the referendum will surely want to have their say).
What once looked like a relatively straight forward path to No10 now seems fraught with danger. A Conservative Party led by the architect of Brexit is likely to be heavily punished at the ballot box in October. Holding on till 2020 will be ever more precarious as his current batch of MPs are predominantly Remainers who could potentially make serious mischief given Johnson has a parliamentary majority of just 12.
As I say, this is all just a crazy theory cobbled together as a way to try and make sense of what is happening right now. It may be preposterous. But it may also be that, in Boris Johnson’s desperate attempt to have his cake and eat it, the Blonde Bombshell might just have bitten off more than he can chew.
