Epilogue

The first anniversary of Boris’s premiership on 24 July was muted. There were no cheers, no celebrations and barely any praise. Not only did the media withhold even token compliments, but his own supporters appeared exhausted by the roller coaster of the last year.

Over the previous twelve months, Boris had steered the country through a political crisis, a general election, Brexit, and the worst pandemic in a century. At the same time, he managed his own divorce, watched his family splinter, had come close to death and celebrated the birth of his sixth child.

The media headlines on the morning of his December 2019 election victory pronounced Boris ‘unleashed’, with a mandate ‘to govern as he likes’. That morning, Boris imagined the beginning of a glorious decade. Instead, he quickly learned, the pause for self-congratulation was brief. The hours after his victory were as good as it got. The volume of criticism was to become painful, particularly for an entertainer so dependent on popularity.

To mark his first anniversary, Boris was interviewed in the Downing Street garden by Laura Kuenssberg. The result was a car crash. He reeled defensively, unable to articulate a focused message of even limited success, making it easier for the final edit to be chopped up to suit the BBC’s agenda that his management of the pandemic had failed. ‘Maybe there are things we could have done differently,’ he lamely admitted. ‘There will be plenty of opportunities to learn the lessons of what happened.’ But he refused to acknowledge specific mistakes or apologise. His enemies would not be handed that sound bite.

The great communicator had not been primed to deliver a convincing explanation about the crisis and his vision for recovery. After the harsh discipline of a year’s campaigning, Boris had forgotten the flourish of a witty speech or a charming phrase. Unlike Benjamin Disraeli, he could not deliver a bewitching truism. Rather, he was reduced to uttering colourless sound bites. So much that had been previously taken for granted about a barnstorming orator appeared to have disappeared.

Fatally for a politician, his sense of public opinion was diminished. Isolated in Downing Street, he no longer mingled in the streets as he had as London’s mayor, hearing people’s complaints and sensing their mood. To the dismay of his admirers, the Brexit prime minister had become a dithering Covid casualty, reluctant to believe that, like his Athenian hero Pericles, his political fortunes could be destroyed by a plague.

His solitariness was self-made. Unlike Abraham Lincoln who appointed his rivals to key posts in his administration after winning the 1860 election because he recognised their superior intellect, Boris had been unwilling to tolerate disagreement and criticism in the Cabinet and Downing Street. With the exception of a handful of trusted allies, he had surrounded himself with second-rate ‘yes-men’ unable and unwilling to engage in constructive discussions. Self-criticism, the essence of success, was noticeably missing from his inner sanctum. After a year, the weakness of a loner uninterested in the machinery of government and all the institutions of parliamentary democracy – the Whips’ Office, MPs, Tory Central Office and the Civil Service – was being slowly exposed. Boris had forgotten King Lear’s question, ‘Who is it that can tell me who I am?’

Repeatedly over the summer, he was wrong-footed by opponents. The trade unions outwitted him to keep the schools closed; Marcus Rashford, a twenty-two-year-old footballer, forced him to somersault and fund additional school-meal vouchers; the media ridiculed his indecision as to whether masks should be worn and whether social distancing should be reduced from two metres to one; Labour lambasted the government’s failure to hit its own track-and-trace targets; migrants crossing the Channel on dinghies made a mockery of his pledge to control Britain’s borders; and finally, Boris failed to deliver a defining speech to answer the culture war inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement who had pulled down a statue in Bristol, daubed the word ‘racist’ on Winston Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square, and disputed the traditional interpretation of British history. At critical moments, the student of ancient Greece and Rome was unable or not minded to deliver a memorable oration about his values and his vision. Conflict rather than creativity circumscribed his life. Cometh the hour, cometh the man is the saying which matched Boris’s proffered image of being ‘pulled like Cincinnatus from my plough’ to rebuild Britain. But without an explicit philosophy to govern through a recession, his ambition was threatened by Covid’s legacy, especially the vast £2 trillion national debt. That peril of a crisis plunged him into some personal despair.

Surrounded by new and unusual secrecy in order to evade scrutiny, Boris had become unpredictable. Observers seeking to make a rational judgement of him were confused by a man who, unlike at City Hall, offered turbulence rather than stability and encouraged dissension rather than loyalty. Boris had changed.

Before he left for his summer holiday in a remote Scottish cottage, his friends mentioned he was not enjoying the job. Life for him as prime minister, they whispered, had become a disappointment. His triumphalism had waned, no doubt exacerbated by his escape from death. Covid, some believed, had reduced his physical strength and eroded his magnetic ebullience. He was more serious and less spontaneous. Possibly, the enormity of the job had finally made Boris take life more seriously. Had his expensive ambitions to rebuild Britain, many asked, been sapped by the virus? Did he possess the intellectual strength to focus beyond Covid on the wider agenda? Covid was one reason for doubt; another was his new personal life.

Unusually complicated and conflicted, scandal and silence have dogged Boris’s bizarre marital relationships for many years. Throughout, he had danced with danger. So often, his ambitions seemed doomed by his amoral behaviour. Condemned to the wilderness several times over the past twenty years, his resurrection always infuriated his bewildered critics. No previous prime minister would have considered living in Downing Street with a woman twenty-four years younger whom he had so far refused to marry despite the birth of their young son. Inevitably, disparaging rumours surfaced about their relationship and their lack of common interests, not least after he decided to abandon modern fatherhood and sleep in another room to avoid being disturbed by Wilfred during the night. The fracturing during the first year of his premiership of relations with Stanley and his family ruled out a repeat celebration of Stanley’s birthday at Chequers in August, despite it being a landmark eightieth birthday. The divorce from Marina had destabilised his life. In her absence, his mother Charlotte was his trusted confidante. In the past, Boris’s happiness had depended on having a secret best friend. Obedient to the demands of his security, he was denied easy access to any new soulmate in a Shoreditch flat. That glaring vacancy in his life reduced his chance to live in peace with himself. The consequence, some speculated, might persuade him to forgo running for a second term.

The uncertainty caused Tory MPs to fret about the prime minister’s grip over Westminster and the government’s agenda. The indomitable belief in a cause to glue the government and party together – or Borisism – had frayed. Modern Conservatism was harder to define. The party’s ideology – so clearly defined in December 2019 – had become confused by the billions of pounds of state support to mitigate the pandemic’s backwash.

Downing Street’s poor communications obscured the Tory Party’s regeneration. The Red Wall Tories admired Boris’s patriotism and positivism. The northerners praised Britain’s role in the world, cherished British culture and distrusted the left’s damnation of Britain’s history. They had grown weary of the perpetual negativism spouted by Labour supporters and the BBC. Those new Tories suspected that Keir Starmer would fail to remove the Corbynistas from the party and fundamentally change the party’s left-wing policies on economics, immigration and British values. Unlike Tony Blair after 1994, Starmer has lacked, so far, the bravery to engage the left in a civil war to impose a new, vote-winning vision. Hampered by the poor quality of Labour MPs, he had damned himself among Labour traditionalists for kneeling in sympathy with Black Lives Matter rather than demand the reinstatement as a party member of Trevor Phillips, an outstanding public servant who was suspended from the party on a charge of Islamophobia but in reality for his challenge to Corbyn’s anti-Semitism. But those blips were irrelevant to voters irritated by Boris’s manner.

Since the election, many Remainers and liberals in the south who had voted Tory to defeat Jeremy Corbyn had switched to Keir Starmer (the Lib Dems had become irrelevant). Relying too often on misinformation, they uncompromisingly condemned Boris’s management of the pandemic. Short-sightedly, he had failed to explain the labyrinthine choices he faced in the weeks before and after the lockdown. Carelessly, he had fallen into the trap of confirming his critics’ accusation that he was not interested in grasping detail.

Despite their desertion, the Tories continued to poll around 43 per cent during July, the same as in December 2019. Boris remained ahead of Starmer by about 7 per cent. No previous modern Tory leader had maintained that popularity at the end of their first year, including Margaret Thatcher. Both Thatcher, castigated for wrecking the economy, and Tony Blair, vilified for sleaze, understood only at the end of their first year the unique demands of office. Thereafter, both flourished and won successive general elections. To win the next general election, due in 2024, Labour would need a landslide gain of 120 extra seats, including in Scotland where its leader, Richard Leonard, was an unpopular Marxist. The real threat to the government was Nicola Sturgeon’s demand for a second referendum. To defeat the nationalists, Boris revamped the leadership of the Scottish Tory Party. Just in time, Ruth Davidson, the popular Scottish Tory, was given a peerage and persuaded by Boris to resume the fight to save the Union. During August, Sturgeon’s approval rating rose to plus 50; Boris’s fell to minus 15, and Starmer’s popularity rose above Boris’s. The next battle for Scotland would be decided in the Holyrood elections in May 2021; the Westminster battle was four years away and the odds still favoured Boris. In autumn 2020, he remained the best Britain had. But to survive, he was forced to take a succession of gambles.

His biggest risk was Covid. Under pressure to relax the restrictions despite over 41,000 deaths (revised down from 46,000fn1 after PHE’s errors were accounted for), he had pledged at the end of June, ‘Our great national hibernation is coming to an end.’1 Patrick Vallance and Chris Whitty, he knew, opposed a general return to work.2 From the outset, the clinicians had warned about the danger of a second wave. During July, their caution proved credible. In towns across northern England, distancing rules had been breached, allowing new infections to erupt. Simultaneously, new outbreaks across Europe made crossing the Channel risky, just as in February’s ski season. Lockdowns imposed on the towns, and quarantine on returning tourists, were the only protection available for London. If the capital went back into lockdown, the economic consequences would be dire. Boris’s dilemma was real. Faced with 2 million more unemployed, the continued shutdown of key sectors of Britain’s service economy and billions of pounds of new debt, Boris gambled to reopen Britain. In his favour was the expansion and improvement of testing and tracing, and a steroid, dexamethasone, to limit the number of deaths of those seriously ill. The chance of a vaccine and the purchase of a vast stockpile of PPE equipment improved the odds to prevent another catastrophe.

Boris made his Covid gamble just as his Brexit gamble loomed. Throughout the year, Boris had dismissed Michel Barnier’s threat that the timetable to complete a deal was too short. Playing hard ball, he rejected Barnier’s offer of a two-year extension to leave the EU. Under no circumstances, Boris told Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, would he extend the transition period beyond December 2020. In a game of brinkmanship, the EU was told that Britain would not compromise on its sovereignty and refused to remain subject to the European Court of Justice. If necessary, Britain would leave the EU without a trade deal. Ostensibly, the negotiations were stalled on maintaning the EU’s rights to unlimited fishing in British waters and on continuing a ‘level playing field’ between Britain and the EU. Both demands were rejected by Britain. If Boris’s gamble failed and there were no agreement, Britain’s trade with the EU would be seriously disrupted. Not only would Britain’s fragile economy nosedive but Scottish independence would gain more supporters. Boris was betting that Europe did not want a trade war and problems on the Irish border and, at the last minute, would agree a deal.

His third gamble was discipline within the Tory Party. Weakened in May after the forty-five MPs demanded Dominic Cummings’ dismissal, he had been forced by about forty Tory MPs to cancel the agreement with Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications corporation, to build a national 5G fibre network. Despite his eighty-seat majority, he was vulnerable. Tory MPs agreed about Brexit but were disunited on much else. Their loyalty to Boris was limited. His appointment of Chris ‘Failing’ Grayling as chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee, presumably to suppress a report about Russian interference in British politics, confirmed his plight. Tory MPs were shocked that Grayling was endorsed by Boris. With Labour support on the committee, Julian Lewis, a Tory MP, outvoted Grayling and became the chairman. Boris was infuriated. As usual, the righteous who challenge him are never shown mercy. Petulantly, he ordered Lewis to be kicked out of the parliamentary party. Once published, the vacuous report proved that Boris’s fears about embarrassing revelations were unfounded. The prime minister’s limited grip over Westminster was exposed.

Over the winter months, Tory MPs suspected, he would be tested by the trade unions. The first battle would be to fully reopen the schools in September. Would teachers succumb to his orders? Boris’s confrontation with the teachers resembled Margaret Thatcher’s defining war against the miners’ leaders in the early 1980s. Without total victory against the teachers’ unions, his authority would be diminished. Tellingly, his triumph passed without any gestures.

Doubts about his competence nevertheless persisted following the government’s mismanagement of the A level and GCSE examinations in mid-August. Boris’s reliance on Gavin Williamson, an inadequate politician, to oversee the awarding of grades proved that Boris had not learnt the lessons of governance from the Covid saga. Just as Boris’s Downing Street advisers had failed to monitor and interrogate Public Health England and the Department of Health officials, they had failed to question the executives of Ofqual, the exams regulator, about the algorithm designed to award fair exam grades. Without sufficient thought, Boris endorsed Williamson’s guarantees that the system was ‘robust’. A cursory examination would have shown the opposite. Invisible throughout a sensational debacle, Boris again risked confirming his critics’ damnation that he was lazy and uninterested in detail. Worse, they questioned whether he was a leader with an astute understanding of consensual and practical government. Was he contemptuous of corruption and cronyism? Could he engineer radical but responsible reforms? The questions were asked only after doubts arose.

His answer was the emergence of a political programme despite the Covid crisis. The additional funds for more police, the NHS and education had been delivered. Trusted Tories in the Cabinet Office were implementing plans to level up the north, rebuild the country’s road and rail infrastructure and regenerate Britain’s commitment to science, not least by investing in a satellite to rival the EU’s Galileo programme. New planning laws had been announced to build more houses. Other Tories were conceiving laws to limit the judiciary’s abuse of power, protect academic freedom and a plan to rescue the BBC from declining into a shadow of its previous glory. Cummings’ threat to Whitehall – ‘A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall’, he sang after Bob Dylan – had begun with the purge of Simon McDonald from the Foreign Office, Jonathan Slater from the Department of Education, Mark Sedwill as Cabinet Secretary and Philip Rutnam from the Home Office; and the establishment of a new Downing Street headquarters at 70 Whitehall. Signalling the government’s radicalism, Public Health England was closed down and replaced by the National Institute of Health Protection. The proof of PHE’s incompetence was Duncan Selbie’s belated denial that his organisation was responsible for a ‘national testing strategy’.3 His unrealistic interpretation of the past reflected the general refusal of the civil service unions to agree that their 500,000 members should return to their offices even under safe conditions. Having defeated the teachers, the leaders of the civil service unions were his next foes. Some would criticise the new centralisation and dismantlement of old institutions as dangerous, but Covid exposed the necessity to rebuild the government machine. Modernising Britain after Brexit, Boris believed, depended on a revolution. Many agreed but also wondered whether Boris had the stuff of leadership. The last stages of Brexit were the proof. His decision to challenge Brussels’ interpretation of the UK’s Withdrawal Agreement, enshrining his opinion in new legislation, and extol the virtues of leaving the EU without a deal was the ultimate adoption of Otto von Bismarck’s brinkmanship or Dominic Cummings’ ‘swerve’ as his government’s strategy. Gambling the nation’s fate was playing for high stakes, but that was always the nature of the man.

Once Brexit was completed, the obvious solution to Boris’s woes was to replace Downing Street lightweights with experienced, wise operators and ditch the embarrassing Cabinet no-hopers. Introducing original intellect and astute operators into the government despite the risk of more disgruntled backbenchers was critical. That was a gamble he would need to take by the end of the year. The appointment in September of forty-one year old Simon Case as the new Cabinet Secretary was a risk, clearly targeted at Whitehall’s encrusted establishment. Choosing Case also defeated Cummings’ search for ‘weirdos’.

With the chance to reshape Britain for the rest of the century, Boris is too ambitious to forgo the opportunity to fulfil his dream and become an historic legend. He understands that the country needs leadership to escape from Covid’s extremes. In the concluding page of his Churchill biography, he praised his predecessor in Downing Street – ‘he alone, made the difference’. Being remembered for making a difference is the dream of all politicians. Unlike his competitors, Boris has the opportunity to improve fundamentally people’s lives. To succeed, he will need to step back from the brink, restore calm and re-convince the nation of his vision to build a prosperous, united society. As an intelligent patriot, Boris still retains the goodwill of most Britons. Their loyalty is his to squander. They know him as a loner and a lover. They still wait to see whether he is a leader.