It’s Got to be Boris

I can see a lot of readers balking at that headline. Boris imposed three lockdowns on the British public, introduced vaccine passports and is a Net Zero fanatic. He’s unlikely to unify the Conservative Party, given that 57 ministers resigned from his last Government, making it impossible for him to carry on as Prime Minister, and if he does become the leader again some Tory MPs will probably set up a breakaway party, while others will simply defect to Labour and the Lib Dems. And hoping the electorate will forgive Boris for partygate and other sins and not simply wash their hands of the Clown Conservative Party at the next election is a massive gamble.

But my gut says that Rishi would be worse. During the last leadership contest he claimed to have been a lockdown sceptic all along, but that wasn’t very plausible. Not only did he support the lockdown policy – in public, anyway – but in his capacity as Chancellor he borrowed hundreds of billions of pounds so he could pay people not to work, which is the root of our current economic problems. And do we trust him on Brexit? The litmus test is whether he’d be prepared to scrap the Northern Ireland Protocol and deal with all the political fall-out from that. I think Boris would. I’m not so sure about Rishi.

It’s true that the Tory Party will look absurd if it makes Boris leader again six weeks after defenestrating him. But it’s going to look absurd whatever it does. Would it be any less ridiculous to appoint a third leader in as many years? At least Boris can claim to have a democratic mandate, given that the Conservatives won an 80-seat majority with him as leader in 2019. What democratic legitimacy can Rishi lay claim to? If he becomes our next Prime Minister I think the pressure to call an immediate General Election – not just from all the other political parties, but from the Civil Service, the BBC, Sky News, the EU, the Bank of England… the entire deep state – will be almost impossible to resist. And the longer Rishi puts it off, the more frit he’ll look. But a General Election in the next few months would almost certainly see Keir Starmer installed in Number 10 as our next Prime Minister.

Even supposing Rishi did rule out a General Election until November 2024 and the howls of protest began to die down, is it conceivable that a Conservative Party led by him could win? To my mind, that’s a bigger gamble than plumping for the devil we know. Love him or hate him, Boris is a proven election winner. Yes, he doesn’t have as many fans as he did three years ago, but maybe he could win enough of them back to scrape in with a reduced majority in a couple of years. I’m not saying I think that’s likely, only that it’s more likely than Rishi winning a majority.

That’s a persuasive argument, I think. Suppose you think Rishi would be preferable to Boris. Maybe so, but would Keir Starmer be preferable to Boris? On lockdowns, vaccine passports and Net Zero he’s even more of a zealot than BoJo, and with Rishi at the helm Labour’s victory at the next General Election is almost inevitable.

Finally, just think of how angry all the Boris-haters will be. As I’ve written about before, the reason Boris is so unpopular with the Establishment – the reason he brings certain members of the ruling class out in hives – is because he’s the embodiment of Merrie England. They detest his devil-may-care attitude, his disregard for conventional morality, the fact that he has three wives and god knows how many children. He’s Sid James and Falstaff and Benny Hill rolled into one. He’s a saucy seaside postcard come to life. Watching all the purse-lipped puritans rub their bony hands with glee after Boris’s demise turned my stomach and I’d like nothing more than to see Billy Bunter cock a snook at them as he barrels back into Downing Street. It would be like the restoration of Charles II, except the Interregnum will only have lasted six weeks.

I’m sure many people are unconvinced and Boris hasn’t even said he’s going to run yet. But I expect he will and if he does I’ll be holding my nose and backing him.