Date: 2024-08-16 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00017271 | |||||||||
Brexit / Boris Jouhnson | |||||||||
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Burgess COMMENTARY Peter Burgess | |||||||||
| Boris Johnson The Guardian view on Tory purges: a historic betrayal Editorial By forcing sensible, moderate MPs into exile Boris Johnson is extinguishing a valuable Conservative tradition in British politics Wed 4 Sep 2019 13.42 EDTLast modified on Thu 5 Sep 2019 05.13 EDT Shares 146 Comments 1,092 Boris Johnson ‘Mr Johnson says his preference is for Brexit on orderly terms but his preference hardly matters when he has mortgaged his office to people who see any accommodation with Brussels as treason.’ Photograph: James Veysey/Rex/Shutterstock The intensity of the current political crisis can dull the impact of events that would, in quieter times, be explosive. Until recently it was hard to imagine Ken Clarke’s political affiliation as anything other than Conservative. He has served in government under four Tory prime ministers. But Mr Clarke and 20 parliamentary colleagues have been driven into exile from Boris Johnson’s party. Their offence was supporting a cross-party bill to prevent a no-deal Brexit. The bill passed its second Commons reading on Wednesday by a majority of 29. Mr Johnson’s aggressive tactics, withdrawing the whip from dissenters, emboldened their rebellion. This is evidence not of the rebels shedding their Tory values but of the party abandoning its roots. Mr Johnson’s eagerness to shred the UK’s relations with its closest neighbours is one symptom of that change. His readiness to defy conventions that underpin democracy is another. Conservatives have harboured suspicion of the European project since the UK joined in 1973, but the party has mutated into something more extreme than was ever advocated by orthodox Tory Eurosceptics. Brexit is no longer a conservative programme for economic or constitutional reform. It is a faith-based revolution in the way the UK is governed. The prime minister himself may not see it in those terms. He has no constant belief, aside from confidence in his own entitlement to high office. Brexit happens to be the most powerful vehicle he could find at an opportune moment in pursuit of his ambition. But he is not the driver. Mr Johnson is a hostage to the same ideological sect that besieged, captured and destroyed Theresa May’s administration. The current Tory leader is unlike his predecessor in style and temperament, but he has made the same fundamental misjudgments: that support from his party’s radical English nationalist wing can be borrowed on a temporary basis; that the hardliners can be placated, co-opted or controlled. Mr Johnson says his preference is for Brexit on orderly terms but his preference hardly matters when he has mortgaged his office to people who see any accommodation with Brussels as treason. He signals capitulation to that ethos by referring to the rebels’ plan to avoid no deal as a “surrender bill”, an insidious device to present legitimate democratic opposition as collusion with an enemy. He has also decried pro-European MPs’ “collaboration” with Brussels. This belligerent idiom is certain to resonate with the far right, although Downing Street would never admit to cultivating that audience. When it suits him, Mr Johnson presents himself as a social and economic liberal in the “one nation” Tory tradition. Maybe he even believes it. But his Brexit stance has alienated the voters who would be attracted to such a candidate. He cannot appeal to remainers, and liberal leavers are a niche constituency. Electoral logic thus requires that Mr Johnson appeal to supporters of Nigel Farage. He needs to reassemble the voter coalition that delivered referendum victory for the 2016 leave campaign. Naturally, he defers to that campaign’s mastermind, Dominic Cummings, a restless revolutionary with no respect for or attachment to historic political institutions, including the Conservative party. Mr Johnson won the Tory leadership by posing as the candidate who could deliver Brexit and win an election. He did not say that his method involved purging the party of dissenters, despising its pluralist history, reinventing it as something anti-conservative and risking its destruction in the process. He has already engineered the loss of the Tories’ majority in the Commons and surrendered control of the legislative agenda to opposition MPs. His discomfort in parliament on Wednesday was palpable, although he tried to mask it with the usual repertoire of bluster. In one awkward peroration, the prime minister declared: “Britain needs sensible, moderate, progressive Conservative government.” Even by Mr Johnson’s standards it was a moment of exquisite hypocrisy, identifying precisely the Tory tradition that his agenda and methods seem certain to extinguish. Topics | |||||||||