Francis Elliott

When the Conservative party looks in the mirror what does it see? Beyond the bruising, what face peers back from the glass? The problem for the party is that no two MPs can agree – and that just might be Boris Johnson’s best chance of survival. Contradictions shatter a unified surface that might once have offered the chance of self-reflection for the Conservative party. Some of the cracks are obvious, such as the one running through Downing Street over the proper size and limits of the state, for example, or that which separates No. 10 from many of its backbenches over Covid public health measures and liberty.

Boris Johnson is on the brink of raising taxes to fund a health and care spending package two decades after Tony Blair embarked on his own NHS tax rises. There are striking differences in their approaches though, when it comes to preparing the ground for this rare event in British politics.  It is not yet apparent what Boris Johnson’s primary objective for social care is Blair’s 2002 tax rise came at the end of a long, high-profile process that sought to put the long-term future of the health service at the centre of a national discussion. By contrast there has been little to no debate ahead of Boris Johnson’s health and care announcement, that is expected within weeks.

Like a tongue searching for an absent tooth, I keep wondering if I’m missing anything from my two decades as a lobby hack. Friends, of course, and perhaps the vast, grey field of sloping slate as seen from the Times’s parliamentary office. That empty and silent space, the roof of Westminster Hall, seemed austere and indifferent, a mental refuge from the babble beneath and within. The opposite aspect, towards the crumbling guts of the Palace of Westminster, elicits more complicated memories. I arrived in the press gallery aged 30 to take a job as Westminster correspondent for a clutch of provincial papers. On my first day my new colleagues took me to tea at 4 p.m. in the dining room. There was also a bar with its own barflies and a barman named Clive.