This article is taken from the October 2022 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

Boris Johnson was one of the most controversial Prime Ministers in British history, as well as one of the most remarkable. Loved by a slew of conservative-minded voters, including a huge cohort who had never voted Conservative before, Johnson assembled a coalition of support across the country unseen this side of the Second World War. 

They are going to have a very hard time

But beyond the admirers and the give-him-a-chancers there is a long list of people who hate him wholly and entirely and with an unremitting enmity. They are not to be found exclusively, nor even largely, amongst the ranks of the Left, for their animus is not triggered by traditional tribal difference. But who they are we will come to later. For the moment let us consider why they hate him.

Is it his supposed cavalier approach to governance and truth? For some maybe. But if carelessness is the cause of their antipathy why is Tony Blair not also an object of their contempt? After all, he was well-known for sofa government, for a casual approach to the Constitution and with only a passing acquaintance with veracity (remember Weapons of Mass Destruction?). Yet only the hard Left damn Blair as the devil.

Might it be that that the Fourth Estate takes exception to one of their own deserting them and their vocation for elected politics? But hostility to Johnson is not the preserve of the press and his plans to sell Channel 4 and his less servile attitude to the pretensions of the media class do not adequately explain why so many others amongst the intelligentsia, usually so assured, misplace their poise when presented with Boris. 

As for the Johnson government’s role in public spending and helping those least able to help themselves, certainly there are some Conservatives who fretted at the former PM’s ostensible indifference to budgetary discipline. But if free-spending non-Tories earnestly believe that Boris Johnson embodies the spirit of Thatcherite economics, they are going to have a very hard time when they get to know Elizabeth Truss and her oft-repeated belief in lower taxation and the smaller state.

They think he never really believed in Leave

Blame is also apportioned to him for the Covid lockdowns and party lock-ins. In early 2020 and thereafter, the Cabinet approved some of the most draconian restrictions ever endured by the British population in peacetime — and in wartime come to that. Yet there is surely no suggestion that the vast apparatus of the British state took a different, more relaxed view of what the rules should be, only to be overruled by Boris Johnson? Keir Starmer would have been even more iron-fisted and authoritarian had he sat in Johnson’s chair. 

As for the notorious lock-ins, Boris himself accepts they were handled very badly. But the anger they generated began only in December 2020. The deep aversion of the beau monde to Boris Johnson began long before lockdowns and lock-ins were ever on the horizon.

There is something else. At the heart of their hate (and it is hate) is their assessment of  Johnson’s attitude towards the European Union. The “Restablishment” drawn from swathes of the media, the arts and entertainment elite, the commanding heights of big business and the City, much of the Civil Service and academia, the Church and quite a few politicians, despise Johnson because he led Leave to victory. 

You may think that trite, tired and unoriginal but bear with me. Many in the Restablishment resent Leave voters for daring to choose a course different to the one they wanted. And they blame Johnson for championing the rebellion which they otherwise think would have been doomed to failure. 

Yet they hate him not because he played the part of Spartacus, capturing the public imagination, but because they think he never really believed in Leave in the first place. At least those poor naive fellows IDS, John Redwood, Steve Baker and the others — the haters rationalise — believed in their crackpot cause. Johnson, they consider, should have been on their Remainer side, but he betrayed them and used Leave as a vehicle for his own ambition. By their lights he is not so much Spartacus as Quisling. That is the capital crime for which they can never forgive him.

I think their conviction is misplaced. You do not win the sort of deal with European Union that Johnson secured unless you absolutely believe in it. And the Leave campaign was always the underdog. At the beginning of the Referendum battle few thought it would prevail. Johnson may have been unorthodox, even heretical, but he won a deal which the mavens said could not be done and he delivered a Brexit for which the people voted. 

Now he is gone, will the haters pack up their brickbats? I think that most unlikely. After nearly three years of usurpation, the Restablishment will try taking back control. It will want to see the sale of Channel 4 ditched or at least massively diluted. It will press for a relationship with the European Union that draws us into the tractor beam of the single market and its “harmonising” technocracy. 

Moreover, it will continue to demand the further interference of the state into the rights of individuals and communities, and the extension of the privileges of special interests under the guise of diversity. In short, it will work to ensure the Truss administration can do as little as possible to pursue its own agenda before such time as a new government, more congenial to the Restablishment’s interests, can be elected. 

Boris is gone, but the Restablishment remains

Conservatives who long for a quieter time after months of relentless bashing should beware. The state’s expansion and the power of these vested interests must be rolled back. Legislation that has embedded their interest, some of it sanctioned by Conservative governments, should be scrapped. As a minister, the constant cross references to the Public Sector Equality Duty and the Human Rights Act, laudable in many senses, seemed to me to be used by some to obstruct the rapid execution of the will of the elected executive. 

Today, only two years away from the next election, there is a growing intolerance, crudely classified as “woke”, in our society which shouts down conservative voices and views that do not pander to its prejudices. In the Restablishment “woke” finds willing accomplices.

Many fixate on our moments of least renown and blench at the name of Britain. They much prefer the bland, bureaucratic “UK”. They are impatient with our institutions and their careful and natural balance built up over the ages, and the language they favour is neutral or neutered where disapproved-of words are deleted. 

Boris is gone, but the Restablishment remains — and  its presumptions. The new government must be brave and face them down or else the ratchet will grind ineluctably forward and the majority, mandate and opportunity will be lost.