This is a lovely time in British politics to be called Johnson. As Labour MPs grow more anxious about their prospects under the management of Ed Miliband, the trees whisper with a yearning for Alan Johnson. The former postie with the compelling poverty-to-cabinet life story is flattered by commentaries extolling his qualities and wistful sighing from within Labour’s own ranks. If only AJ was leading them, so it goes, things would be looking much better for the red team.
By a neat symmetry, a similar hankering for a prince over the water is to be found among many a Tory. As they grow more fearful about their future under Prime Minister David Cameron, there is a low moan of desire for Boris Johnson. If only BoJo was leading them, so it goes, things would be looking much better for the blue team.
These yearnings are not abated by the obvious obstacles to their fulfilment. The Labour Johnson could not make it much clearer that he is not interested in taking the helm. The Tory Johnson, while throbbing with barely camouflaged ambition to be leader, is currently not an MP and therefore not eligible to replace Cameron. That will not stop people in their parties aching for them. If anything, their lack of availability only makes the Johnsons seem more desirable to those promoting them as alternative chiefs.
I see why they appeal to those in their parties seeking relief and salvation from their current travails. There are many reasons to admire Alan Johnson, just one of them being that he is one of the few contemporary politicians who does a convincing job of speaking human. From a very different background and in a very different way, the Tory Johnson has fashioned an appeal that can reach beyond his party’s shrunken tribal following, a rare gift these days.
Some of this is about personality. In an interview with the mayor of London, my colleague Elizabeth Day rightly dwells on the crucial supporting role played by his hair in the creation of the act that is Boris. Alan can be described as “cool” without it sounding completely unhinged. As one of his former aides recently remarked: “He’s the only member of a Labour cabinet who could ever walk down Downing Street wearing a pair of Ray-Bans and look cool doing it.” That sort of personality, whether natural or artfully contrived, is a major political plus in the current climate of angry alienation from the Westminster class. In Britain’s anti-political age, there is a premium in not looking or sounding like the conventional politician.
With all due respect to both men, their greatest advantage is not to do with whom they are. Their principal attraction is whom they are not. They are allowed to be popular because they are imaginary political leaders, not actual ones. Labour people can project on to Alan Johnson their ideas of what a successful figurehead would be like because he is not wrestling with the extremely challenging task of trying to take the party back to government.
Tories can fantasise about how sweet life would be if only they were led by Boris Johnson for the same reason. He floats above the fray. Given the opportunity to get stuck into the bitter Conservative battle with Ukip, by offering himself as the Tory champion in one of the byelections, he wisely decided to carry on floating instead. It is rather easier to be popular when you are not up to your eyebrows in the grinding, scary, compromising, messy, intense, numbing, despised, 24/7 business of trying to lead a major political party at a time when the business of party politics is held in such disdain and distrust.
The Tory Johnson may be aware of this; the Labour one certainly is. During one of the many crises of Gordon Brown’s premiership, when Alan Johnson was being touted as the man to save Labour, he told me he had sat on the government frontbench watching Brown at bay at prime minister’s questions. He had said to himself: “Christ, that could be me next week.” Recently explaining why he still is not interested in leading his party, he described it as a “God-awful job”.
I agree. It has never been easy, of course. And our empathy towards those who try their hand at leadership should be strictly rationed. No one made them do it. Ed Miliband could have chosen to stay at Harvard and be an academic; Cameron could have opted to stick with a career in PR. Yet, I confess to feeling a bat squeak of sympathy for both of them because it seems to me that this is a peculiarly challenging time to be trying to captain either of Britain’s principal political teams.
What is often called the decline of deference — but may now be more properly called the rise of contempt — means that both voters and MPs are much less biddable by those who would lead them. Listen to what his internal critics say about Ed and it is often remarkably similar to what Cameron’s enemies within say about him. Whatever the criticism of each leader, and however merited or not, it flows from this fundamental source: The fear in both parties that they have leaders who are not winners. Labour MPs would not care so much that Ed botched his conference speech if he were otherwise looking like a man assuredly taking them towards government. Tory MPs wouldn’t complain so much about how many of them have felt snubbed by Cameron were they confident that he was leading them to an election victory.
For the foreseeable future, it may be that Britain will be ruled by coalition or minority governments. Yet, both the Tory and Labour leaders addressed their recent party conferences in the old-fashioned manner, speaking as if they still led majoritarian parties capable of reaching for and obtaining solid national mandates and decent parliamentary majorities on the back of securing 40 per cent of the vote or more. It was the shared delusion of the conference season; a mutual deceit that is exposed as a lie by every opinion poll. The rise of multi-dimensional politics and the disintegration of traditional party loyalties lie behind the most important facet of contemporary British politics. Labour and the Tories together now only command the support of about two-thirds of the voters. It is a failing in both men that neither has found a way to restore a “One Nation” appeal to their respective parties. Neither is attracting broad support from across our country; both are shedding voters to the category formerly known as “Others”. Looking around both the Labour and Tory frontbenches, I find little evidence that anyone else on the frontline of British politics has a plausible plan for rebuilding them as majoritarian parties. It may be that someone will come along eventually; it may be that it is simply no longer possible.
The obvious explanation for the mutual struggles of both leaders, a reason so self-evident that it is often overlooked, is austerity. It’s the economy, stupid. There are many reasons for the simultaneous unpopularity of the two major parties, but the simplest and starkest explanation is that a lot of people are feeling beaten up economically and they blame both Tories and Labour for it. Across the democratic world, the traditional parties of government, all of them implicated in austerity in one way or another, have been losing chunks of support since the financial crisis of 2008. Across the democratic world, populist parties of the right and left, mostly of the right, have been gaining ground. The rise of UK Independence Party is both a particularly British phenomenon and part of an international trend.
No French president has ever plumbed such depths of disapproval as Francois Hollande. That speaks of his flaws, but probably says even more about the difficulties of being a leader at this time. US President Barack Obama, still, to my mind, an exceptionally gifted politician, is now regarded as so toxic by his colleagues that fellow Democrats do not want to be seen near him in the American midterm elections. Across Europe, unless you are German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the words ‘leader’ and ‘popular’ simply do not go together at the moment.
In Britain, it runs deeper than that. Austerity has sharpened and accelerated a much longer-term trend of disintegrating support for the two major parties. They have gone, the solid blocks of red and blue voters that the major party leaders used to be able to mobilise. There has been a decades-long decline in the blue-red duopoly. It is the bad luck of Cameron and Ed to be leaders of their parties when the music finally stopped.
That is why the Tory and Labour leaders can be simultaneously unpopular with the voters. That is why they can both be in trouble with their parties at the same time. That is why two parties accustomed to thinking of themselves as winners are gripped by mirroring terrors that they are led by losers. That is why, rather than confront the brutal truth that assembling convincing majorities may now be beyond either of them, they seek refuge from reality in dreaming of fantasy leaders.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
