Can Boris bounce back after his annus horribilis?

Harry Mount | 10th December 2020 | Comment, Magazine

Boris hasn't had the best time at the helm — Boris Johnson has looked panicked at the helm (Credit: David Sedlecky https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)

Since Boris Johnson won an 80-seat landslide at last year's general election, he has never quite looked in control. But he could yet recover, says Harry Mount

‘Campaign in poetry and govern in prose’ – as New York Governor Mario Cuomo famously put it.

A year ago, Boris Johnson was wrapping up his successful campaign in the lead-up to the election on December 12, 2019. He didn’t so much campaign in poetry as campaign with three words – Get Brexit Done.

The slogan was said to be the work of his former chief adviser, Dominic Cummings. It certainly fits with Cummings’s campaign-winning slogan in the 2016 Brexit referendum, another simple three-worder: Take Back Control.

Boris’s election campaign last year was, in fact, a bit lacklustre but that was intentional. Keep Boris on a short lead and let the slogan do the work – that was the idea. And, boy, how it worked, with a landslide and an 80-seat majority for the Tories.

It’s easy to forget what a shock that was. Even Tory loyalists would have been happy with a 20-seat majority. No one – except, some say, Cummings himself – predicted such a huge win.

And then came coronavirus. If governing in prose means dealing with the grinding, everyday realities of modern politics, then Covid-19 demanded the sort of relentlessly tough, gruelling leadership that hadn’t been required here since the Second World War.

Boris Johnson famously wanted to be ‘World King’ when he was five. That ambitious little boy would have relished being King of the World in a crisis and miraculously coming out on top.

That …

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