In Defence of Boris Johnson
17/11/25
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BORIS JOHNSON WAXWORK, IMAGE: MATHEW BROWNE
To some, Boris Johnson is a gaffe-prone, bumbling buffoon who should never have reached the pinnacle of British politics. But to others, including myself, he is a simply remarkable figure – a charismatic political operator, able to connect with the politically disengaged with an unbreakable spirit and unrivalled bounce-back ability; a One Nation Conservative whose appeal goes well beyond traditional political boundaries. His record of delivery as Mayor of London is widely hailed, and if it were not for Covid, I am utterly convinced that he would have capitalised on the high hopes of 2019 and become a decade-long serving and positively consequential prime minister. This article is a political defence of Johnson’s premiership, with my criticisms reserved mostly for his personal flaws.
It's the summer of 2019 – Westminster is in meltdown over Brexit, which has just claimed its second prime minister, Theresa May, who failed on three occasions to get her Brexit deal passed. The Conservative Party, having suffered its worst nationwide election result in history (the 2019 European Elections that were not supposed to take place), was looking for a new leader to turn its fortunes around and solve the Brexit conundrum. Johnson, who had quit the May government as Foreign Secretary a year before over the Chequers plan, was in a prime position to take over. He would likely have been prime minister three years earlier had it not been for Michael Gove’s decision to run against Johnson after promising to run his campaign. This time, Johnson saw off Gove in the MPs round and comfortably defeated his successor as Foreign Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, in the final round of Tory members to become prime minister.
His first mistake was made on the opening day of his government. Despite some good appointments, including Sajid Javid as Chancellor, the decision to appoint the political rogue Dominic Cummings as his chief of staff was a colossal mistake that would later come back to bite Johnson due to Cummings’ scant regard for the rules and political customs.
One of his first major decisions as prime minister was to prorogue Parliament for five weeks until a new Queen's Speech would be produced in October. Johnson notes in his memoirs that the current Parliament had sat for nearly an entire year, that it was the longest Parliament since the English Civil War, and that it was high time a new Parliamentary sitting was to be ordered. Jacob Rees-Mogg was entirely right that prorogation is “an entirely proper constitutional procedure” for a new government to get its ducks in a row and set out its legislative agenda. However, the courts, overstepping their power in my view, intervened and deemed it unlawful on September 20th after a case was brought before the UK Supreme Court by Gina Miller. Critics of prorogation, including Miller, argued that the decision was taken to stop Parliament from debating Brexit, but as Johnson rightfully contests in the opening chapter of Unleashed, Parliament had been debating Brexit for three years and was not in a position to deliver it.
The clock continued to tick down to October 31st, the day Johnson had promised to take Britain out of the EU, but all the time, the political straitjacket he was in became tighter, as his negotiating position was continually undermined by a predominantly pro-Remain parliament. Before prorogation was enacted, Johnson was forced to strip 21 MPs of the party whip for voting in favour of an amendment to the Benn Bill brought forward by Sir Oliver Letwin to allow the opposition to take control of the Parliamentary agenda the following day, to force a vote that would prevent a no-deal Brexit (on October 31st). Johnson states in his memoirs that he would never have left the European Union without a deal, but tried to use it as a final trump card to force the EU’s hand – a card he would no longer have. By losing 22 of his own MPs (including Dr Phillip Lee, who crossed the floor to the Liberal Democrats mid-debate), Johnson suddenly found himself without a majority.
THE BREXITEERS, IMAGE: SAMUEL REGAN-ASANTE
The following month, Letwin once again damaged the prime minister’s pledge to take Britain out of the EU by the end of October by bringing forward another amendment on ‘Super Saturday’ (Parliament’s first Saturday sitting since the Falklands War in 1982) when Johnson’s deal was supposed to be voted on. After this, Johnson was forced to write the so-called ‘surrender’ letter under the terms of the Benn Act, and the EU agreed to a third extension – this time to January 31st.
With frustrations growing and his authority draining away, Johnson tried for a third time to have Parliament agree to a general election, and this time it did. The result was the largest Conservative Party majority since Thatcher.
The campaign had one simple message: ‘Get Brexit Done’, which tapped into the public’s frustrations that Brexit had yet to be delivered three and a half years on from the vote that had the greatest mandate in UK political history (17.4 million votes). The manifesto itself was a positive, one-nation manifesto that pledged to increase the number of police officers by 20,000; increase spending on education and the NHS (including 50,000 more nurses and the building/redevelopment of 40 new hospitals), as well as much-needed infrastructure development. The optimism and hope of 2019 sadly didn’t last long. On the same day Britain left the EU, a new virus circulating around the globe was confirmed to have reached our shores – it was to be known as Covid-19.
Johnson’s government has been widely criticised for its response to the pandemic; I think that criticism is grossly unfair. This was uncharted territory for all parties involved, including the scientists advising the politicians.
Firstly, because the virus was a complete unknown, and at the start, most experts believed the coronavirus would be of a similar nature to SARS that broke out in the winter of 2002-03. Secondly, the situation developed incredibly quickly, and the scientific advice underestimated where the UK was on the curve compared to badly affected countries on the continent, such as Italy, by around two weeks. Government ministers were also warned that by locking down too early, a potentially more deadly second wave could follow in the winter, because fewer people would have natural immunity.
In no way am I stating that mistakes weren’t made, for example, I share Matt Hancock’s belief that we should have had a circuit breaker lockdown in October 2020 (like Wales did) when cases began to rise as winter (the traditional flu season) crept ever closer. But I think the criticism around school closures, for instance, is unfair. At the time, most people thought it was the right decision, including the experts who rightfully concluded that schools were a potential vector for transmission. And even if children were likely to be mostly unaffected by the virus, it became apparent within months of the outbreak of Covid that asymptomatic transmission was possible, and that children were the most likely to be asymptomatic, so in that instance, they could be passing on the virus without even knowing they were infected. I think the root cause of these criticisms intensifying was the scandals the government became implicated in – particularly Matt Hancock’s affair and Partygate, which we will come on to later.
A PROTEST PLACARD DEPICTING JOHNSON AS THE JOKER, IMAGE: JAMES VAN DE WOUWER
Whatever criticisms have been made of the government’s response to Covid, the vaccine rollout has received universal praise. Capitalising on the contribution of UK scientists to the global effort to develop a vaccine, the rollout itself was a combination of excellent organisation (in which the government played its part), determination to go further with delivery, and effective government procurement, making use of the newly found Brexit freedoms. The vaccine rollout gave Johnson’s government a bounce in the polls, which was seen in the Hartlepool by-election victory and the 2021 local elections success.
However, as 2021 drew to a close, Johnson’s personal flaws were exposed, and his downfall began. Partygate. Revelations of a Christmas party in Downing Street in 2020 were first broken by Pippa Crerar of The Daily Mirror on November 30th. Johnson, for the first time, would use the now infamous line that all rules were followed in response to the story. But a week later, ITV News exclusively revealed a leaked recording of a mock press conference where Downing Street Press Secretary Allegra Stratton was asked a question about a party, to which she nervously laughed and stated, “this fictional party was a business meeting… and it was not socially distanced”. More revelations, including the prime minister’s attendance at some of these events, were published in the weeks and months that followed. In April 2022, Johnson and Chancellor Rishi Sunak were given a fixed penalty notice by the Metropolitan Police for their attendance. But Partygate did not kill off Johnson; at home, his government stumbled through 2022.
But abroad, Russia had illegally invaded its neighbour Ukraine – bringing war to the continent for the first time in nearly eight decades. Johnson, becoming increasingly unpopular at home, found much support in Kyiv for his steadfast support for the war-torn country. Indeed, he was the first world leader to visit Ukraine following the invasion and led the global effort to increase support for Ukraine and sanctions for Russia during the early days of the conflict.
Returning home, Johnson’s government was beginning to unravel. Despite the personal anger many people held over Partygate, such as being unable to see loved ones before they died or attend their funerals in person, it was the continuous lies that ministers were being forced to spout on the morning media round, which were disproved by lunchtime, that did for Johnson in the end – that is no sustainable way to conduct government. This indeed is what happened with the third scandal, the one that broke that camel’s back: the Pincher affair. The line sent out by Number 10 and espoused by Will Quince on the morning of July 5th 2022, was quickly refuted by Permanent Secretary of the Foreign Office Sir Simon McDonald. This was enough for Sajid Javid and Rishi Sunak to resign within fifteen minutes of each other that evening – with the issue of integrity right at the heart of Javid’s resignation letter and Geoffrey Howe-esque speech in Parliament the following day. Quince would be among 62 members of the government who quit in just 48 hours, culminating in Johnson’s resignation.
Johnson could have been one of the long serving, consequential post-war prime ministers, able to connect with the politically disconnected (only Corbyn and Farage in my lifetime have had that skill), able to pull off a Houdini act to achieve the politically impossible, a clear mission that he had the determination and will to complete but through circumstance and personal flaws, it sadly did not happen. Is Johnson our Nixon? Possibly, but I don’t think history will be kinder in retrospect to Johnson as it has started to become to Nixon from revisionist historians.
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