Boris is back! But that doesn’t mean Partygate PM is off the hook

You know Boris Johnson is back in the saddle when the one-liners come thick and fast. A little more than a month ago, it would have been impossible to imagine the UK prime minister, then hanging onto his job by his fingernails, yucking it up with Tory MPs over a lavish dinner in central London. 

But Johnson now feels secure enough to crack jokes about the attempts to oust him, reportedly telling Conservative lawmakers that he is “more popular in Kyiv than Kensington”. The quip was both self-mockery and a sharp reminder to MPs that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the world’s most admired public figure right now, has singled out his relationship with Johnson for praise. 

That the prime minister is able to wine and dine his colleagues, even while there is an ongoing investigation into a series of lockdown parties at Downing Street, says a lot about how Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has changed the debate in British politics.

For one thing, the shocking scenes in Mariupol and elsewhere have had the effect of shrinking the differences between parties and politicians in democratic nations — at least temporarily. Behaviour that looked outrageous a couple of months ago seems, in the scheme of things, to be hardly a fireable offence. Tory party members are asking whether now is really the time for a major in-party squabble about their leader.

The war in Ukraine may have cast Johnson’s Partygate troubles in a different light. But he now enters an even more difficult period with a lower reserve of public support and many promises to deliver on.

“Events dear boy, events,” another British prime minister, Harold MacMillan, reportedly answered when asked about the greatest challenge of the job. Johnson might answer exactly the same.

When Covid arrived, Johnson was still negotiating Britain’s post-Brexit trading relationship with Europe. But the pandemic shifted public attention entirely away from those contentious talks. The wave of Treasury spending made it impossible to isolate the costs of Britain leaving the EU. Johnson received much criticism, but as the government’s performance improved and restrictions were eased, he reaped the benefits.

The Ukraine war has similarly changed the political calculus. There is no longer an obvious successor to Johnson. Rishi Sunak’s popularity is fading. Though his star may well rise again, the chancellor’s spring budget statement pleased no one. And foreign secretary Liz Truss seems to have slipped in the eyes of rank and file Tories, too. She was mocked by Russian foreign secretary Sergei Lavrov and contradicted by UK defence secretary Ben Wallace. Longtime prisoner in Iran Nazanine Zaghari-Ratcliffe had little praise for Truss, even as the foreign secretary took credit for negotiating her release. 

Though the opposition Labour Party enjoyed a bounce in popularity from Johnson’s troubles, the polls now show the two parties to be very close. It underscores the adage that governments win or lose elections, not oppositions.

But while the war has distracted attention from Johnson’s immediate political woes, the problems that bedevilled him before Putin’s invasion are not going away. On the contrary, they are likely to intensify. 

James Johnson, a former Theresa May pollster who runs focus groups, believes that even if MPs are over the Partygate fiasco, the public isn’t likely to easily forget about it. There is plenty to remind it of its grievance, too. Tax hikes kick in next month, along with a major jump in energy prices, the highest inflation rate in 30 years and the biggest fall in living standards since the 1950s. The cost-of-living crisis has only begun to really bite, and it will affect poorer parts of the country hardest. 

That coincides with an unprecedented drop in public satisfaction with the all-important National Health Service. The main reasons are long waits for appointments, staffing shortages and a sense that there’s not enough spending on crucial health services. The government has already promised to tackle a backlog of more than 6-million NHS procedures.

The government will also wear the failures of the NHS. On Wednesday, health secretary Sajid Javid issued a House of Commons apology after a report into hundreds of cases of babies born dead or brain-damaged found shocking levels of negligence at an NHS trust for more than two decades.

Both Covid and the economic implications of the war in Ukraine have consequences for Johnson’s central governing project, which is to rebalance Britain’s economy, or “level up”.

The day after Johnson’s Park Plaza evening with MPs, he was grilled by the opposition on the cost-of-living crisis and his response to the Partygate scandal. Hours later, he appeared before a parliamentary liaison committee and had to defend himself again on a range of challenges, including charges that his government’s immigration policy is a mess. 

The war in Ukraine may have cast Johnson’s Partygate troubles in a different light. But he now enters an even more difficult period with a lower reserve of public support and many promises to deliver on. Landing the one-liners is bound to get harder once again.

More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com/opinion

— Bloomberg