With Jacob Rees-Mogg now the bookies’ favourite to be the next Tory leader, 7-1 is too good a price not to have a Christmas bet on Boris Johnson making perhaps his biggest comeback yet, just as many are writing him off.
My guess is that not being the front-runner to succeed Theresa May will suit Boris just fine for now. His recent trip to Iran did not immediately secure the release of British-Iranian mother Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe. But with her court hearing postponed there is now “light at the end of the tunnel”.
Personally, I think Boris may yet pull off his greatest Houdini act yet in securing her release on “humanitarian grounds” (helped by a payment of £400 million to pay off an old government debt to Iran for Chieftain tanks).
We shall see. I am of the camp that believes that, should there be a Tory leadership contest before the next election, then Tory MPs (and not only those with small majorities) will vote on grounds of self-interest. That may well mean putting Boris’s name on the ballot sheet that goes to the party’s 150,000 members. Backed by Jacob Rees-Mogg – who would make an excellent Chancellor or Foreign Secretary – he could prove to be the leader of a formidable winning team, reaching out to floating voters in a way that no other Tory could.
Of course, Boris’s ability to win two mayoral elections and the Brexit vote has resulted in opprobrium being heaped on him by Left and Right. But both sides do so only because they fear him. When I bring up the personal attacks on Boris by fellow Tories with Rees-Mogg, he replies: “They are perhaps the ones within the party who realise how charismatic and popular Boris is. They think he must be neutralised because he is so popular. Boris is one of the few genuinely charismatic politicians of our age. There is an element of envy in the attacks on him. Some people wish they were as popular as Boris.”
In regards to the suggestion that the Johnson parliamentary stock is currently low, Rees-Mogg says that this is irrelevant right now as there is no election in sight. “There are some MPs who have never been fans of Boris who are still not fans,” he says. “But there are many who have never considered whether they are fans of Boris. And his stock will rise or fall depending on what people think of his electability. If you look at his success as Mayor of London and success with Brexit, he is the most popular electoral asset that the Conservatives have.
“For those MPs that have majorities of less than 500, they are quite likely to vote for the candidate they think is most likely for them to hold on to their seat.”
One myth about Boris that needs demolishing is the idea that he is not a vrai Eurosceptic and that he only became chef de bande of the Brexiteer cause to further his own career.
This simply doesn’t add up to my recollection of him as the Daily Telegraph’s Brussels correspondent in the early 1990s, around the time my father was leading the Maastricht rebellion against John Major’s beleaguered government. When Boris was throwing rocks into the imperial glass palace of Brussels and taking considerable glee in hearing the panes smash, he was almost alone among journalists in doing something that correspondents rarely achieve: he moved the political agenda, helping to make the “loony” Right Eurosceptic front a mainstream cause, rather than a debating subject for fringe political outfits like the Bruges Group.
Boris’s work was so valued by Eurosceptic politicians that Thatcher called him her favourite journalist. My father – who invited Boris to visit our home in Shropshire for anti-EU plotting sessions over several bottles of wine – even went so far as to appoint him as literary executor of his political papers (including his diaries dealing with every political detail, turn and treachery over the EU dating back to 1985).
Historians of Brexit may well conclude that without Boris’s javelin-throwing towards Brussels – as well as Jimmy Goldsmith’s all-important Referendum Party, which spent more on the 1997 election campaign than either the Conservatives or Labour – Brexit could never have happened.
Boris needs to get serious now, and that means more than just sharpening up his haircut and suits. Corbyn’s continued rise in the polls is Boris’s best opportunity to grab power. If there is one thing that Tories do agree on it is that the main point of the Conservative Party is staying in government, at all costs. Even if that means – through gritted teeth – electing Boris as leader when Theresa May steps down or is ousted.
As Alan Clark wrote in The Tories, his history of the Conservative Party: “A tacit article of faith among serious Conservative politicians being this: that the interests of the British nation are best served by contriving the perpetuity of a Tory administration whatever apparent sacrifices of principle or policy this may entail.”
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