From Brexit to the NHS: Boris Johnson's 2020 brief after his landslide election win
This is a year-zero moment in politics. Everything’s been reset. Boris Johnson was just a backbencher at the start of the summer and now he’s in absolute control of his world.
There’s no opposition in the House of Commons. Labour is eating itself alive on Twitter and will be doing so for years. There’s no opposition in his party. Britain has tuned into the Johnson show and it can’t change channel. He’s the sole star and the only scriptwriter. He can take the plot in any direction.
This is amazingly strange. When Margaret Thatcher took over in 1979, Tory “Wets” faced her across the Cabinet table. John Major had to endure “the b******s”. Tony Blair faced checkmate with Gordon Brown. David Cameron was in coalition. As for Theresa May, the less said about the paralysis of her private hell the better.
But for Johnson? Each of the 365 Conservative MPs, one for every day of the year, owes their election to him. Every minister will answer to him. It’s been heavily briefed that there will be only a token reshuffle today, with the big changes in February. But really it doesn’t matter who gets appointed.
Related: 'The mastermind behind Brexit' has an even bigger goal in mind
All the power lies in No 10. If the PM’s
intellectual enforcer, Dominic Cummings, wants to muscle his way into the Ministry of Defence and scrap a pointless aircraft carrier, as reported today, no admiral can stop him.
This makes everything we thought we knew about politics irrelevant in an instant. The days of knife-edge Westminster votes, Speaker Bercow, acronyms with power like the ERG and the DUP, are over. Remember when, for the first few weeks of his prime ministership, Johnson was laughed at for losing every Commons vote he dared to hold? He’ll remember — and he won’t be losing any more. The people who’ll help him hold power are the Vote Leave campaigners he’s brought into No 10, and who ran the election.
Their first job will to be pass the Brexit withdrawal bill. Parliament is back on Thursday and
there could be a vote on Friday. It will be a formality. If you aren’t going to like the result, look away now. Brexit, or at least the divorce with the EU, will be done by the end of January.
Downing Street has a two-step strategy. Spend the next few weeks on Brexit and then, when that’s law, launch a different sort of Government with all sorts of exciting things to do. That’s one reason the reshuffle and rumoured reconstruction of departments is apparently being held back until then. It’s when we are likely to get a newsy spring budget, too. It is as if, in this show, the Brexit bit is just the tough-guy trailer before the real entertainment.
But of course the Prime Minister and his team know that Brexit won’t work like this. Aside from having to work out what follows the transition period when it ends on December 31 (probably an extension of the transition, though maybe Johnson will call it something else), just getting the laws though Parliament to make government work after Brexit will be a chewy process.
There will be tensions. Johnson is, at least in part, a liberal, but has just won this power thanks to lots of voters who aren’t
The detail of trade deals or the Agriculture Bill won’t make headlines like the battle to stop no-deal. That doesn’t make them easy. The Government could be swamped by Brexit rather than by the nation-changing hype all the new Tory MPs from old Labour seats have promised. And anyway, is this stuff about changing the nation real? Maybe. It’s a different sort of Tory party now: most MPs went to state schools, many are young, a record number are gay, a lot are up for radical change.
They will give Johnson a chance to prove he means it. But happy talk about Tory intentions in the hours after a landslide could fade fast if British Steel collapses, or Nissan pulls out of Sunderland because of a bad Brexit, or there is an NHS crisis as staff from the EU leave. So the PM needs to get moving.
The obvious thing is to spend money on eye-catching things. It’s what Johnson did as London Mayor. He didn’t have to pay for the Olympics in 2012 but it showed what you can do with £12 billion. So did digging Crossrail or buying a new type of Routemaster bus, or the cable car over the Thames, or Boris bikes or the Garden Bridge. They weren’t all his ideas and they didn’t all work but they were evidence that he wanted to be a can-do mayor. Expect the same, on a national scale.
No prime minister has ever been as interested in transport as Johnson, who once described himself as a Brexity version of Michael Heseltine, the Tory who saw the power of government to build big things. Treasury officials are reeling because No 10 has been asking for ideas and cash to make bus services better and, in their world, that’s not normal. They will be reeling all the more when big bills for infrastructure start to come in.
The Crossrail station at Liverpool Street, a project which Johnson first oversaw as Mayor for London
There’s already a battle between the need to get things going fast, and getting them right. The Oakervee report into HS2, which is complete but has not yet been formally submitted to the government, is scathing about errors. It proposes a rethink so that it’s part of a new network serving a Northern Powerhouse. This is the right advice and Johnson is being urged to listen.
But it won’t be much use if the government makes the same mistakes again by cracking on with other mega-projects before they have been thought through. There should be a new rail tunnel between Leeds and Manchester — but we’re not ready to start digging it next year.
So the search is on for things that can be got going fast and make a difference in the seats which have just elected Tory MPs for the first time. Johnson knows he has to show that they’ll get something back. That means helping places left behind by change: towns away from big cities where the high street is dying, jobs outside the public sector are low-paid and schools aren’t performing.
Credit Evening Standard - London.