Tory divisions over vaccine passports and public dismay at rising fuel bills and NHS waiting lists are putting pressure on Boris Johnson’s time
Practically everyone has a view on Boris Johnson. Far fewer, whether friend or foe of his party, have much clue what binds Johnsonism together or even if this is a meaningful taxonomy at all. Whether a leader has an “ism” to their name does not always matter very much in the scheme of political success. Blair’s “traditional values in a modern setting” could just as easily be described the other way round, but the blend was the point. Among Tory progressives, the Cameron era is lauded by rose-tinted memories as a much clearer ideological prospectus than the pragmatic pick-and-mix it was. Angela Merkel’s near decade and a half in power in Germany was a mix of stolid instinct and sudden pivots.
And yet the quest to understand what Johnsonism means looms larger at the start of 2022 as the prime minister faces resistance to Covid-era restrictions in his ranks. The introduction of the vaccine passport limiting access to big events to the jabbed has infuriated traditional allies, leaving the PM’s loyalists crossing fingers that the calculation of modest restrictions pays off if the Omicron variant declines in the next few weeks and overloaded hospitals are finally relieved. If, as one of his oldest friends and backers put it to me, his present curse is that “Tories think he is doing unTory things they don’t understand”, he can change those things. Or alternatively, he can explain his narrative more persuasively to keep his internal coalition intact and avoid more uprisings of the kind that left him relying on Labour votes to get his latest Covid measures through the Commons before Christmas.
