Leading article

Before Boris Johnson became Prime Minister there was widespread expectation that his government would be chaotic. It was thought that he would be good at articulating the broad sweep of government policy, but that his administration would quickly sink into turmoil. In the event, the opposite has happened. Three weeks on, the government appears to be running with almost military precision. Preparations for no-deal Brexit seem to be well under control, to the alarm of Philip Hammond, who had thought the task impossible. Yet the Prime Minister himself seems to have gone underground. He is not on holiday — his government is working all hours. But he has not been as big a feature of it as many expected.

Comments by the former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers this week, claiming that Britain will come off poorly in negotiations for a trade deal with the US, should not be surprising. He has previously declared that Britain’s vote for Brexit was ‘the worst self-inflicted policy wound that a country has done since the second world war’ so he would not want to be proved wrong by Britain doing well out of leaving the EU. But the reaction to his intervention has emphasised a peculiarity in attitudes towards free trade, from both Brexiteers and Remainers. Many of those who are keenest to assert the importance of free trade with the EU tend to retreat in fright whenever the prospect of a trade deal with the US is raised.

In his first week as Prime Minister, Boris Johnson has shocked those who had assumed that he is a joker incapable of making any more progress than his predecessor. During his leadership campaign, he said that he would not settle for a modified version of the Brexit deal that Theresa May agreed and Parliament rejected three times. In office, he has been as good as his word and is refusing to start negotiations until the EU says it is willing to compromise. If it doesn’t, then we leave without a deal on 31 October. If many politicians are still in denial about this, the currency markets are not. A no-deal Brexit would put the UK economy in transition from being part of a European bloc into one governed by yet-to-be-signed free trade agreements, under World Trade Organisation rules.

It’s hard to think of a prime minister who has reached No. 10 with lower expectations. Boris Johnson has been dismissed as a philandering clown, a joker calamitously miscast as prime minister in a moment of national crisis. Obloquy has been hurled at him every time he has taken a new job — from mayor of London to foreign secretary. When he became editor of this magazine, his critics said putting The Spectator into the hands of such an oaf was like asking an ape to look after a Ming vase. At every stage, however, Boris’s critics have been confounded. His jobs change, but his style remains. His belief is that achievements speak for themselves, and voters understand that. He has been happy to be judged on his time as London mayor and on the Vote Leave campaign.

Twenty years ago, the Scottish parliament was reconvened after a lapse of almost three centuries. The logic for devolution was clear enough: that Scotland has discrete issues, and ones that were not always solved by London government. Devolution would allow ‘Scottish solutions for Scottish problems’. There was, in Westminster, a feeling that MPs could worry less about these problems. Public health in Glasgow, previously one of the biggest problems in the UK, would be someone else’s problem. Let the MSPs see if they could do any better. The news this week should shock people on both sides of the border. Scotland has the worst rate of deaths from drugs in Europe, with numbers up by a shocking 27 per cent since 2017.

In some alternative universe the Labour party, as under Tony Blair in the mid 1990s, is busily preparing for government, its confidence boosted by a massive lead in the polls over a shambolic Tory administration. Back in this one, however, Labour is crumbling even faster than the divided and unpopular Conservatives. Remarkably, while the Tories have seen a collapse in their share of the vote to just 22 per cent, according to one poll this week, Labour has sunk to just 20 per cent. Just how it succeeded in throwing away such a remarkable opportunity to seize power is going to trouble its remaining members for decades to come.

Crises in the Gulf and Conservative leadership elections come around with unnerving regularity. It is not unknown for both to coincide — that happened in 1990, when Margaret Thatcher was overthrown in the lead-up to the first Gulf War. On that occasion, drama on the domestic front did not smother Britain’s response to the international crisis — unlike now. It is bizarre to have a US president threatening to ‘obliterate’ Iran while our Foreign Secretary hardly bothers to respond, preferring to pose with fish and chips and Irn Bru on the campaign trail.

When Boris Johnson was appointed editor of this magazine two decades ago, an unkind soul said it was like ‘entrusting a Ming vase in the hands of an ape’. The remark encapsulated many people’s worst fears about the man who will almost certainly be Britain’s prime minister in four weeks’ time, if not before: that Boris is an irresponsible joker. Similar warnings were made when he was elected London mayor. His refusal to conform to type encourages a constant expectation of imminent disaster. What if Boris flops in No. 10? Even his supporters can’t be sure he won’t fail: his election as leader is a gamble from a party that believes its very survival is at stake.

This week’s European election was always going to be pointless, at least from a British perspective. It is possible that the elected candidates will never even take up their seats. In one important sense, however, the election campaign has been useful: as a reminder of where public opinion stands on Brexit. A few weeks ago, many believed that Change UK, the party founded by Labour and Conservative dissidents spoiling for a revocation of Article 50, would capture the public mood. Instead, another new political party would appear to have triumphed — a party set up with the sole purpose of expressing anger at the failure of Parliament to effect Britain’s departure from the EU on the date which had been set into law.

When a political party is in trouble, we see infighting, leak inquiries, resignations, mass loss of council seats, dismissals and botched attempts to depose the leader. But when a party implodes, something different happens: it loses the ability to defend or explain itself. An imploding party can and will lose any argument, no matter how strong its track record. The Tories entered this terminal stage under John Major after the disastrous local elections of 1995, which were followed by their landslide defeat of 1997. With the party now having had its worst set of election since 1995, it looks very much like they might be entering it again.