Come back, Boris? Routed Tories pine for a winning formula

LONDON — Fresh from another pasting at the ballot box, Britain’s Conservatives are searching for a comeback plan.

After being booted out of national office in July, a spate of local election defeats last week has left them licking their wounds — and wondering if the success of Nigel Farage’s populist Reform UK renders them irrelevant.

The results are a world away from when the seats were last fought in 2021 under Boris Johnson — the controversial Eurosceptic who helped the Tories bounce back from a Farage surge last time around, before blowing himself up in office.

Back then, Johnson was master of all he surveyed: an 80-seat Commons majority, a “vaccine bounce” from the fast deployment of Covid-19 jabs and a Labour opposition at that point failing to prove it was electable.

Four years on, that bubble has well and truly burst — and some Tories are now pining if not for Johnson himself, then at least for a rekindling of the flame he lit under the Tories.

“These results are sobering,” said one Tory MP, granted anonymity like others quoted in this article to speak candidly. “The coalition we built in 2019 was powerful because it tapped into a sense of national renewal and pride. That energy hasn’t disappeared, but we do need to reconnect with it.”

Blue sky thinking

Johnson made “leveling up” his government’s defining theme, a boosterish vision of national renewal that promised to spray investment, jobs and opportunities around the U.K., and not just in traditional Tory heartlands. 

That aspiration, alongside a clear pledge to “Get Brexit Done,” helped the party smash Labour in its former industrial strongholds.

Now, that’s all turned to dust.

Five years on, the Tories have just one MP in northeast England and only three northwest parliamentarians. At the general election last year, Labour reclaimed almost all the seats they lost and rebuilt much of the “Red Wall” Johnson prided himself on knocking down.

Since then, “leveling up” has vanished from the Tory agenda. In a sign of their downgraded ambitions, the Tories launched their local election campaign in Buckinghamshire, the epitome of Home Counties safety for the party.

“Leveling up is how we win the next election,” said former Tory MP Robert Goodwill, who retired from parliament last year. He believes his former Yorkshire seat could be regained from Labour by tapping into Johnsonian ideas about investment and renewal.

“Leveling up was probably the most conservative thing that the last government did,” argued a second backbench Tory MP. “Conservatives understand the fortunate have a responsibility to the less fortunate.”

Translating this rhetoric into reality is far harder. Reform UK came second in 60 northern English Labour seats last year, meaning the right-wing insurgents are seen as the beneficiaries of frustration with the government, not the Conservatives. 

“They realize that the red wall isn’t particularly fertile territory for them,” Tim Bale, a politics professor at Queen Mary, University of London, said of the current Conservative operation. He highlighted how the Tories “never really built up any infrastructure” in seats won for the first time in 2019 — and then didn’t grow their local membership.

It’s little wonder Reform have spied an opening.

“It’s all looking pretty grim,” a Conservative shadow minister said. “[The] trouble is, Reform correctly identify the problems, but fail to identify the solutions (or at least workable solutions).”

“Most thoughtful Conservatives recognize the battle is to reoccupy the post-Brexit ground,” the second backbench Tory MP quoted further above said. “That’s what we have to recapture … the spirit of 2019.” 

Damaged goods

Even if Johnson’s political vision has a hearing among beleaguered MPs, there is no looming desire to welcome the former PM himself back to the front line. 

Numerous MPs POLITICO spoke to said the current leader, Kemi Badenoch, is the right person to hold the fort (a view shared, ominously, by Farage).

Johnson’s reputation was tainted by his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, and he resigned from parliament in 2023 after a damning report into lockdown-breaking Downing Street gatherings during the pandemic. He now spends his time writing newspaper columns and campaigning for Ukraine. A political comeback doesn’t feel imminent.

“A lot of Conservatives have finally woken up to the fact that he’s as much a liability as he is an asset,” said Bale, citing Partygate’s unpopularity. “He doesn’t, at the moment, appear to many people to be the solution to the problem.”

Pollster Joe Twyman highlighted how Johnson divided Tory members even as his legacy “cast a shadow” over the party.

“The Conservatives have with Boris Johnson what I would describe as a ‘Life of Brian’ problem,” the Deltapoll co-founder said, referring to the famous Monty Python film.

“There is a proportion of its supporters, particularly its members, and also some of its MPs, who believe that Boris Johnson is the messiah, and there’s another group of, particularly MPs and, to a lesser extent, supporters and members who believe he’s not the messiah, he’s a very naughty boy.” 

Not everyone is sold on Johnson’s actual policy record, either. His premiership saw net migration surge from 254,000 in 2021 to 634,000 in 2022 — a move critics on the right are dubbing the “Boriswave.” Tory frontbencher Priti Patel’s recent attempts to defend her party’s approach to border control under Johnson didn’t go down well.

“The perception is that we didn’t control immigration,” Goodwill admitted. “The challenge is to ensure that we are training enough people to do the jobs that people need skills to do.” 

Conservative MP Martin Vickers, who supported Johnson’s leadership bid in 2019, defended the need for immigration, but recognized it remains a “massive issue” for voters. 

“We have to face the reality that we do need some immigrant labor to carry out many crucial jobs,” the backbench MP argued, claiming there were not enough skilled workers in the British workforce for the jobs needed.

Vickers also called for his party to “counter the simplistic nonsense” from Reform UK on the issue of deportations.

“If Boris Johnson himself were asked in an interview about that, I imagine he would be able to give an explanation, excuse [or] justification that would go down relatively well with his supporters,” said pollster Twyman on immigration.

But Twyman said that while it was the hot-button “chink in the armor” for Johnson, Rishi Sunak was the PM more remembered for failing to stop English Channel small boat crossings. 

It is unsurprising, then, that Badenoch insisted the party is under new leadership. 

“Whether it’s in the halls of Westminster or indeed, up and down the country in the Conservative clubs [and] bars, they don’t want the whispers of ‘Boris Johnson would have done a better job,’” said Twyman. 

Changing the climate 

Badenoch has already created clear blue water between herself and Johnson on one key policy area: cutting carbon emissions to net zero.

The ex-PM championed tackling climate change in office. Badenoch, by contrast, said it was “impossible” for the U.K. to reach net zero by 2050 without reducing living standards or reaching bankruptcy.

Twyman said the Tory leader appeared to be acknowledging that people’s support for net zero lessens when they are asked to make specific sacrifices, and trying to “subtly emphasize that the Conservatives will put people first before the environment, at least in the short term.”

Badenoch is “finessing our position” on net zero by making it “affordable and deliverable,” Vickers insisted. 

However, there was skepticism about whether Reform supporters would really be convinced by the Tory pitch, when Farage himself is offering strident criticism of the entire agenda.

“The key to winning back Reform voters is taking a stronger line and coming up with the right policies on immigration,” said John Flesher, the deputy director of the Conservative Environment Network. “The evidence that Reform voters are really hostile to climate and the environment just isn’t there.”

Flesher added: “I don’t think she’s necessarily rejecting everything from that era, but it’s inevitable, given where the party is, that we are going to start to look at things differently.” 

“The age in which we live demands a fittingly conservative response,” said the second Tory MP. “[Badenoch] needs to be more confident about setting out that vision.”