Boris Johnson never left election mode to make sense of his patchwork of policies
At the end of last year, the queue to be in was not for some new restaurant or bar, but for the petrol station. Across the country, cars were stacked up outside the pumps that were open – many had simply run dry.
The problem was not inflation, energy prices or a war in Ukraine but a shortage of HGV drivers. Boris Johnson was adamant we needed to hold our nerve and wait for higher wages, pushed up by demand, to attract the drivers needed to get the pumps filled up again – rather than capitulate and dole out more visas for cheap labour from Europe.
Eventually, short term visas were issued, the psychological panic of running out of petrol abated, and at least for a moment, the world righted itself.
Johnson had picked a moment to dig his heels in and try to force the free market to push stagnant wages up. He had finally remembered he was a Conservative leader.
Yesterday, in the midst of local elections, plans to ensure hospitality workers would be able to keep all the tips given to them by customers were shelved. Only days before, Johnson had announced plans to reignite “Right to Buy” in a bid to tie himself to some semblance of Tory roots.
Another flagship Conservative policy – the proposal to sell off Channel 4 – has been lambasted. According to Dorries’ If Channel 4 doesn’t cost the taxpayer a thing, if they’re so good at looking after their own financial needs, why would we need to keep it under state ownership? But for a long time conservative politics has followed the rule: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
This mish-mash of policies all bring to light Johnson’s attempt to define himself as a Conservative. What is that brand of Johnsonian politics underneath the charisma, theperformance?
The tips policy, a brainchild of Sajid Javid back in 2016, would actually enable the philosophical underpinnings of the Right to Buy 2.0: self-determination. Currently, businesses are slapping on a service charge – and keeping the benefit for themselves. This would give more power to individuals to earn money based on their own hard work. What could be more Conservative than the notion of pulling yourself up by the bootstraps? If Boris Johnson was so hell-for-leather in favour of enabling the market to decide what people are paid back in October 2021 when people were prevented from buying more than £30 of petrol at some pumps, why won’t he prioritise it now?
It was thrown on the backburner while the Prime Minister grabbed headlines with claims of turning “generation rent into generation buy”. Especially in London, with its battleground boroughs of Wandsworth and Barnet, the housing crisis is particularly acute. Promising cheaper home ownership is a vote-winning policy.
The Channel 4 scheme seeks to keep those new Conservative voters who came over with Brexit, by appealing to the culture wars. In rejecting what has been spun as the “woke culture” of Channel 4, they’re trying to cast themselves as defenders of “good old commonsense”.
Labour hasn’t just been given fertile ground to make headway against the Tories, they’ve been given a whole greenhouse of Partygate, a cost-of-living crisis and porn-watching MPs. But the more fruitful trees to shake are the house of cards policy-making happening in No10. Boris Johnson was made for elections, he was built to shake hands and make people laugh – the guy you’d like to go for a beer with, is the oft-cited description of the Prime Minister. But since taking up office in 2019 with a storming majority, Johnson has stayed firmly in election-mode and never actually started governing.