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CM Regular ColumnistOpinion

Boris Johnson PM again by next election

file photo: britain's queen elizabeth
Boris Johnson with the late Queen Elizabeth

There is no space for losers at the head of the Conservative party

A week is a long time in politics but it was an eternity last week in the UK when the Queen died two days after accepting the resignation of one prime minister and appointing his successor.

She hung in there to complete the transition from Boris Johnson to Liz Truss and then let go after she had performed her last duty as monarch – a very tidy exit indeed for her son and heir Charles III.

Johnson hinted that he had discussed the geopolitical state of the world with HM when he handed in his resignation but stopped himself from going further. What passes between the British monarch and her prime minister remains confidential even after the death of the former and the resignation of the latter.

But being a talkative playful man, Johnson talked in metaphors and riddles as he left Downing Street on the Tuesday before seeing the Queen. He likened himself to booster rockets that fall into the Pacific Ocean after reentering the atmosphere.

In the US space rockets are launched from Cape Kennedy on the Atlantic coast but as the Earth rotates on its axis West to East at speed, the boosters fall in the Pacific – an acknowledgment perhaps by Johnson that he accepted that the world of politics has moved on since he got Brexit done, and, like booster rockets, he was now a spent force politically.

But then he left the door ajar about the possibility of a return to the helm sooner rather than later. He said that like Cincinnatus, he would now return to his plough. It sent journalists on internet searches about who the hell Cincinnatus was and what the metaphor of the return to one’s plough meant.

Johnson is well known for such pretentious affectations by classical allusions but on close examination this one was more interesting. The BBC rolled out a professor of classics from Cambridge University to inform us that Cincinnatus was a Roman general of a noble disposition who was also a farmer. While ploughing his land he was called upon by the senate to save the Roman republic from invasion. Leaving his plough deeply embedded in furrow mode, he rushed back to fight for Rome but then, mission accomplished, returned to his plough instead of assuming political power that was his for the taking.

My knowledge of the classics is confined to Ancient Greece, which I picked up from the classical iconographic series of children’s books (klassika ikonographimena), so I confess I had never heard of Cincinnatus. However, having attended the American Academy in Larnaca, which in my day was more American than it is nowadays, I knew there was a city called Cincinnati in Ohio state in the US.

There must be a link between Cincinnatus and Cincinnati, I thought. Further research revealed that Cincinnati does indeed derive from Cincinnatus; it was the name by which George Washington was known for his noble nature in eschewing political power and preferring the life of a gentleman farmer.

After leading the American war of independence as commander in chief he was not interested in power or public life and retired to his farm in 1783. Reluctantly, he was persuaded to be elected America’s first president in 1789 but after serving two terms he retired to his farm. He could have been president for life but was not interested in power.

In the modern world only Nelson Mandela matches such nobility of spirit, and certainly not Boris Johnson, who apparently wanted to be king of the world and left Downing Street kicking and screaming.

However, both Cincinnatus and Washington were persuaded by others to return to public life because of their unique leadership skills and perhaps Johnson was likening himself to Cincinnatus aka George Washington, not to Cincinnatus the Roman. He secured independence from the unrepresentative government of the EU like Washington had done from the British Crown, and still fancies his chances of being called upon to win the next general election for the Conservatives. It is a bit of a long shot for his party to recall him after forcing him to resign for telling lies to parliament but stranger things have happened.

Different considerations apply if Liz Truss loses the next general election, as seems likely. Last time the Conservatives lost power, when John Major lost to Tony Blair’s New Labour in 1997, they changed their leaders with embarrassing regularity: William Hague and Michael Howard were replaced after losing and Iain Duncan Smith was replaced by Michael Howard in anticipation of defeat.

In 2010 David Cameron, who succeeded Howard, won the largest number of seats but no overall majority. He agreed to a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats until 2015 when he won by a small overall majority. He then stupidly gambled on an in/out referendum on membership of the EU and had to resign after losing in 2016.

He was succeeded by Teresa May who threw away Cameron’s overall majority in 2017 when she thought she would rout Labour under Jeremy Corbyn but lost her overall majority instead and was replaced by Johnson in 2019.

The point of that brief history of Tory leaders over the last 20 years is that there is no place for losers in the Conservative Party. The difficulty for Johnson having to wait for the general election after next is that he only fancies himself as prime minister not leader of the opposition. So it is either this time round or he would have to disappear for a while in the hope he would be called upon to lead again the next time. By then, however, the magic of his blonde mop of hair and the passions wrought by Brexit will probably have faded. As the Elvis Presley song goes: It’s Now or Never.

 

Alper Ali Riza is a king’s counsel in the UK and a retired part time judge

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