The Meaning of Boris Johnson

TALKING POLITICS

Catherine Carr

News, News & Politics

4.7 • 2.5K Ratings

🗓️ 10 February 2022

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

David, Helen and Chris Brooke have one more go at making sense of the tangled web that is British politics. Can Johnson really survive, and even if he does, can his brand ever recover? Is this a scandal, is it a crisis, or is it something else entirely? Does history offer any guide to what comes next? Plus we explore what might be the really big lessons from the last two years of Covid-dominated politics.

Talking Points:

It’s obvious why Boris is a problem, but it’s not clear who would replace him.

There will probably need to be a decisive marker, either the May local elections or the police report could be it.
The strategic question for the Conservative party is, can it win enough seats to form a stable majority government?

Boris won’t go voluntarily. But can he survive?

Newer MPs are not loyal to Johnson, but older ones are more wary of defenestrating a leader who won big majorities.
A lot of people have left number 10. It will be hard for him to govern.

In 2015, Ed Miliband was leading in the headline polls. But there were signs of weakness.

Labour wasn’t winning local elections. And Cameron was polling better on two key questions: leadership and the economy.
Labour has now moved ahead on both.
It would still be hard for Labour to win an overall majority, but defeat in local elections might spook the Conservatives.

The politics of scandal are different from the politics of crisis.

Scandals change how politics are conducted, but they don’t usually trash the party’s reputation.
Helen thinks that it is a politics of chaos.

This particular scandal is bound up in Johnson’s appeal.

On most issues, the outrage of the other side works for Johnson.
Outrage about the parties is different: Johnson was a hypocrite.
He has trashed his own brand this time, but he still doesn’t think the game is over.

Were the pandemic years a dress rehearsal for the politics of climate change?

To reach net zero, governments will need to ask people to make sacrifices. Will future politics be a politics of limits?
The pandemic has also deepened generational divides.

Mentioned in this Episode:

Recent polling data

Further Learning:

And as ever, recommended reading curated by our friends at the LRB can be found here: lrb.co.uk/talking

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello my name is David Runseman and this is Talking Politics. Today we're going to have one last go at making sense of British politics and trying to understand the meaning of Boris Johnson.
0:20.0	Talking Politics has been brought to you for the last five years in partnership with the London Reviewer books, who are mourning the end of the podcast the only way they know how.
0:32.0	With one last unbeatable subscription offer for talking politics listeners, get six issues, that's three months of the LRB where I'll be continuing to write about politics and more, for just six pounds.
0:44.0	By using the URL lrb.me slash talk six, that's lrb.me slash talk six.
1:02.0	And thank you for having us in the show.
1:06.0	It is a great pleasure that Helen Knight are joined today by Chris Brook. I had the traditional daily ball of alp and with a banana chopped up on it, but it was my last banana.
1:16.0	We haven't spoken to about British politics or anything else for quite a long time. That raises our question about what I will have for breakfast tomorrow.
1:24.0	And we're also doing this in person, something else we haven't done for a long time.
1:30.0	I just got in here, so I had yogurt because it had no questions whatsoever.
1:37.0	I had breakfast in caffeine here.
1:40.0	And we're in the middle of the Boris Johnson story and we don't know how it's going to end and it will probably end after we've ended.
1:47.0	So all speculations have to come with we won't get the chance to correct ourselves.
1:52.0	If you were a Red Wall Blue Wall MP in a marginal, a lot of them aren't particularly marginal anymore constituency and you were looking at your decision tree.
2:04.0	I don't know if that's right image or doing the calculus of risk. How would you be thinking it through now? Keep him or dump him.
2:12.0	I think it's very difficult from the point of view of a marginal conservative MP, whether that they are in what's called the Red Wall seats or in a seat in the southeast with one of the smaller majorities.
2:29.0	Because while it's very obvious why Boris Johnson has become a problem, perhaps you might say particularly for though the Red Wall seat conservative MPs because he's clearly lost a lot of popularity with leave voters.
2:42.0	It's not so clear who can replace him.
2:46.0	I think that the problem in terms of just going with, well who's going to do any better for the conservative party thought is that there is now such chaos around Boris Johnson.
2:58.0	It was always there but the chaos is so visible that it's become quite difficult to see how he stabilises things.
3:07.0	I think a leadership election is coming. Whether it would make sense to wait from the point of view of a marginal seat conservative MP after the May local elections.
3:19.0	I think that it is important for the end of Boris Johnson to be tied up with elections and for that to be the case without, and I think if it doesn't, damages a conservative party then they've got to wait until May.
3:30.0	But as we know there's a lot of contingencies in play at the moment and could bring this crisis to a head more quickly than that.
	...

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