by Atul Hatwal
Boris Johnson looks like he’s staying. Not as prime minister, nothing can prevent his imminent ejection from Number 10. But he’s going to stay as an MP and is planning for a comeback as Tory leader after the next election. How do we know? His final government reshuffle tells us.
Johnson has promoted a raft of lifelong backbenchers – the mad, the bad and dangerous to know. Peter Bone to Deputy Leader of the House, Andrea Jenkyns into the education team, Richard Drax to the Attorney General’s department, there are several more.
One interpretation has been that this was Boris Johnson rewarding his supporters with a taste of ministerial office before his leadership is over. There’s likely an element of this but Boris Johnson is not a man whose life story is one of loyalty and commitment to looking after his colleagues. If he does anything, for anyone, it’s because he wants something.
In this case, that thing is to create what he has historically lacked – a core of Johnsonites in the parliamentary party. People whose exclusive loyalty is to him. He’ll have seen the cultish commitment of so many in the Republican party to Trump and coveted it.
The drawn out fall of Boris Johnson has progressively turned most of the parliamentary Conservative party against him but there is one group that stands apart. Individuals who continued to defend Johnson to the end, who never called on him to go and were privately telling him to fight on. It’s not a group defined by ideology or geography or even past allegiances, but for whatever reason, however they arrived at their destination, they have been radicalised into becoming fervent backers of Boris Johnson.
The opportunity to forge this group into his personal guard is the opportunity that the soon to be ex-Prime minister is seizing. Ministerial office bestowed by Johnson, complete with severance packages when they’re inevitably sacked by the new leadership, is the glue to bind them together, after the fall.
Johnson said he planned to stay as an MP after leaving Number 10. Most people assumed this was a lie and that he’d be off around the world earning as much money as humanly possible. The reshuffle suggests otherwise. Picture the scene: an embattled Conservative party either squeaks to a narrow victory at the next election or slumps to a defeat. Either way, whoever wins the current leadership election will face huge difficulty.
