Winning a majority in parliament gives Boris Johnson more freedom to do what he does best: let people down. There are now enough Conservative MPs that the prime minister can afford to disappoint dozens of them without suffering the indignity of a Commons defeat. And disappoint them he will, although not all at once and not immediately. Unreliability is Johnson’s business model, as is attested by everyone whose misplaced trust has been incinerated to fuel the engine of his ambition.
Betrayal is a feature, not a bug, in the Tory leader’s operating system – and no one can now dispute that the system works, at least for the acquisition of power. That power is a compensation to any Conservatives who would otherwise be appalled by Johnson’s character. Victory buys loyalty. Last year, Nicky Morgan said she could not serve in a government led by Johnson. He became leader; she served. She renounced her Commons seat before the election. Now, thanks to a quickie ennoblement to the House of Lords, she keeps her job as culture secretary. Thus is scruple overcome by patronage.
The voters who gave Johnson his majority will not be so easily wooed back if they start to feel neglected or mistreated. The prime minister cannot give everyone in Grimsby a peerage as compensation when the bounty of Brexit fails to materialise. Johnson has daubed blue streaks across the electoral map over places that were once deepest red, but his support there is reluctant and conditional. A forensic study of last week’s results by the centre-right thinktank Onward attributes a large portion of the swing to “contract voting” – not a shift in cultural allegiance but a transaction to procure a one-off outcome.
It was Onward that correctly identified “Workington man” as the crucial target audience for a Tory message on the eve of the campaign – white, male, over 45, non-university educated, pro-leave, living in the north and Midlands. By that definition, 77% of “Workington men” backed the Tories last week, as compared to 42% in 2015. Such a dramatic movement describes a collapse in the Labour vote share more than a surge in enthusiasm for the Tories.
Johnson didn’t win over many more hearts than Theresa May did in 2017, but he benefited from intensified frustration that Brexit was not getting done, plus hardening of sentiment against Jeremy Corbyn. The vital question for both of the main English parties is whether recoil from Corbyn is symptomatic of a longer-term realignment; whether Tory voting is an acquirable taste and the habit of backing Labour, once kicked, stays kicked. It certainly shows no signs of coming back in Scotland, although the transition to Scottish nationalism for Glaswegians was not impeded by the same deep-seated taboo that operates when Doncaster contemplates lending a vote to a Tory.
Much depends on whether Labour can rise to the challenge of winning its old heartlands back. The obvious and predictable mistake for the opposition to make would be relying on Conservatives to conform to their most wicked caricature, secretly hoping the government will inflict cruelties on deprived communities and thus drive chastened voters, filled with remorse for their ill-advised dalliance with Johnson, back into the warm red embrace of socialism.
Johnson knows he is not much trusted by his new, borrowed voters. He has a two-part strategy to convert them for good. First, get them out of the EU quickly. Second, spend money where they live. Brexit will be done, crumbling public services will be restored, local economies will be buoyed with new infrastructure.
The problem is that doing the first part of the plan makes it much harder to do the second. Johnson’s Brexit model requires a short transition followed by severe separation from continental markets. Even presuming a benign economic backdrop, tearing Britain away from Europe and installing trade barriers across the Channel (and in the Irish Sea) will cost jobs and shrink exchequer revenues before any of the mythological benefits of new free-trade deals come into play.
Moderate Tories who thought the cushion of a parliamentary majority might be used to soften Brexit have been swiftly disabused of the idea. Johnson plans to amend EU withdrawal legislation to prohibit any transition beyond December 2020. Apparently this is meant to reassure voters and show Brussels that Britain means business. In reality it proves that the Tories learned nothing from the article 50 negotiations or have forgotten that the ticking clock favours the bigger, better prepared side in trade talks. Without an extended transition, the UK will have to choose between quick and total capitulation to EU demands as the price for low-friction trade or being shut out of the single market.
Johnson can play these reckless games confident that Brexit will slide down the news agenda once legal separation is complete at the end of January. His election mandate is as much an instruction to Westminster to stop banging on about Brexit as a demand that the task itself be complete. Labour is currently feeling too jilted by leave voters to dare raising its already dampened pro-European voice.
One variable in this equation is the cohort of Tory MPs who have just been elected in those former Labour heartlands. They will be ultra-loyal to Johnson for now, owing their seats to his campaign. But over time, they will feel a tension between their constituents’ interests and a Brexit model conceived by the older breed of southern, pinstriped Conservative Eurosceptics. Workington Tories may be pro-Brexit, but that does not mean they are acolytes of the ideology that scorns state intervention as an affront to liberty and treats worker protections as shackles on the spirit of buccaneering enterprise.
Johnson is not wedded to that creed but he has built a career flattering audiences that are. His only core belief is entitlement to power, which gives him political agility but not empathy. He grasps the strategic value of adapting Conservatism to a new electoral base, but will feel no moral urgency about the task. If it comes down to a choice between serving the traditional Tory base that brought him this far and cultivating the new electoral terrain that opened up for him last week, which would he prefer? His supporters say no such dilemma exists; that “Boris” possesses the unique political gift of cakeism (having it and eating it); that Brexit will be done in a way that unites Workington and Wokingham under one Tory banner.
Is that possible? Can Johnson pull it off? The precedents are mixed. The electoral record warns against underestimating him. The record of everything between those victories warns against trusting him. Promises will be broken. The unknown quantities are how many, how soon and how long he will get away with it.
• Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist
