Boris the menace: wipe-out or landslide

The Conservative party’s collective nervous breakdown began with Brexit

By Alper Ali Riza

Boris Johnson is the ultimate Come Back Kid. Hasta La Vista Baby indeed! Who would have thought it? Out in August back in October.

As I write he is en route from the Caribbean to reclaim his throne. He may or may not succeed, but he is in with a chance and that speaks volumes about the mental state of the ruling Conservative party. It is having a collective nervous breakdown, the onset of which began with Brexit and climaxed with the Kwasi Kwarteng’s kamikaze budget in September 2022.

Breakdowns can and do happen to political parties, but in the end democracy comes to the rescue and they recover and reinvent themselves. It happened to the Labour Party in the late 1970s and lasted until New Labour swept to power in 1997. The problem this time, however, is that the Conservative party is in power, and its breakdown has damaged the UK’s good name as a fiscally responsible country.

I realised Liz Truss would resign when she told Parliament on Wednesday she was “a fighter not a quitter.” The cliche is associated with US president Rixhard Nixon; he used it in his resignation speech on August 8, 1974 at the end of the Watergate scandal, although he also used it at the beginning of his political career in 1952 when he ran for the office of vice president on Dwight Eisenhower’s ticket.

What made Liz Truss resign was loss of support in parliament, which she must have sensed was ebbing away after she was forced to sack her finance minister, chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng, for carrying out her ill-conceived policy of unfunded tax cuts.

She was obviously the wrong choice to be prime minister, but she laid out her stall of unfunded tax cuts to Conservative party members during the leadership contest in the summer and they chose her instead of the more responsible policies of Rishi Sunak who knew what he was talking about.

He warned that unfunded tax cuts would be catastrophic, and he was proven right by subsequent events. It doesn’t require great economic expertise to know that you cannot cut taxes and fund the cut by borrowing when the cost of borrowing is rising steeply. Not only that but it is politically very stupid to provide tax cuts for the rich at the expense of the poor, especially when the rich neither sought nor wanted tax cuts.

It was not just fairy tale economics it was cretin politics as well. And yet Conservative party members bought it for their own selfish reasons, and they are as much to blame for the present dire economic catastrophe as Liz Truss was for inflicting it on Britain.

She and her finance minister announced their barmy tax cuts in a mini budget in September. Then the markets spooked, government debt spiked, the pound tumbled, inflation rose, and Truss resigned claiming she could not deliver the mandate of the Conservative party of a low tax economy.

Since when does a British prime minister resign for failing to deliver on the mandate owed to her party? You would think that after taking over her predecessor’s mandate to the country her role was not to cut taxes of the rich but to level-up the poor. Actually she did deliver tax cuts but the policy was rejected by the financial markets and she had to U-turn on pain of ruining the UK’s reputation for financial stability completely.

In the end, the Bank of England had to intervene to steady the ship; the finance minister was replaced; the low tax policy was ditched; and the government went into a meltdown culminating in the resignation of Suella Braverman, her right-wing minister of interior, who ratted the day before Liz Truss herself resigned.

In a parliamentary party system such as exists in the UK, command of parliament by the party in power is essential. Usually party discipline ensures that the government is able to carry out government business under the leadership of the prime minister.

However, a prime minister cannot govern if his ministers resign en masse, which is what forced Boris Johnson to resign earlier in the year, or loses control of her party in parliament, which is what forced Liz Truss to resign.

Resignation of a prime minister does not mean a general election in the UK even though fixed-term parliaments were repealed last March. The position at present is as it used to be in the past when calling a snap general election was in the gift of the prime minister whose request for a dissolution from the monarch cannot be refused. No Conservative leader is likely to ask for a dissolution any time soon, but it is a weapon in the hands of a prime minister.

A constitutional crisis, however, is possible if the Conservatives elect Boris Johnson as their leader. He was removed from power for allegedly misleading parliament, and it is by no means certain that he would be welcomed back with open arms by many members of the parliamentary party. Conservative MP Sir Roger Gale told BBC TV on Thursday that he and others like him would resign from the Conservative party in parliament if Johnson were elected leader. If that happens in sufficiently large numbers and the Conservatives lose their overall majority and the Labour party forces a no confidence motion in HM government a general election would follow.

So supporters of Boris should be careful what they wish for because the opinion polls suggest if there were an election now the Conservative party could be wiped out.

There are landslides and wipe-outs. The best-known landslide was New Labour’s victory in 1997 and the best-known wipe-out was of the Conservative party of Canada in 1993.

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