Few tears are being shed at the departure of the Lord of Misrule from Downing Street. Though deep in the bowels of Bute House there is the faint sound of the gnashing of teeth. Boris Johnson was the best recruiting sergeant for independence since Margaret Thatcher.

Indeed, he’s a greater hate figure for Scots since Thatcher at least had relatively humble beginnings and had guts, which many Scots couldn’t help admiring – even Alex Salmond.

Boris Johnson’s personality summed up everything Scots loathe about the English public school elite: the effortless superiority, the plummy accent, the Woosterish bumbling. He is the Englishman the Scots can comfortably hate without being accused of anglophobia. And now he is gone, the job of demonising English politicians becomes that much more difficult.

It will be hard to foment class hatred against Sajid Javid, son of an immigrant bus driver. Difficult to paint Rishi Sunak or Nadhim Zahawi as racists in the way Nicola Sturgeon painted Boris Johnson.

He never was a racist and installed more BAME ministers in his first cabinet that all previous UK Cabinets combined. But that hardly matters any more. With Johnson, the myth will always be greater than the man.

Johnson was regarded as far right by the left, even though he came from the liberal interventionist tradition of the Tory Party and enlarged the state more than any politician since Clement Attlee. As this column has pointed out before, one of the reasons that Sir Keir Starmer has had difficulty putting together a coherent social democratic vision is that Boris Johnson has stolen most of it.

With taxes at their highest level since the 1950s, public spending higher than even Jeremy Corbyn envisaged and with the NHS set to consume 44 per cent of day-to-day public service spending by 2024, there’s not a lot for the Labour leader to offer.

Starmer’s promise last week of 30,000 jobs in gigafactories making EV batteries even sounds like typical Johnson. Starmer opposes climate protesters, like Stop Oil Now, and, like Boris Johnson, supports nuclear power. This doesn’t make Boris Johnson a left-wing socialist, of course, any more than it makes Starmer a Tory. Boris Johnson is a liberal version of Nigel Farage: a populist nationalist who sought to ride the tiger without succumbing to racism and demonisation of immigrants. One of the many paradoxes of the Johnson years is that immigration last year was as high, if not higher, than before Brexit.

He tried to manage a coalition of white nationalist Labour supporters, often misnamed “the left behinds” in the north of England, with mainstream Conservatives by waving the flag and “making Britain great again”, latterly by leading the war effort in Ukraine.

His domestic enemy Johnson characterised as “The Blob”: the liberal-left legions of teachers, academics, civil servants, and the media with their alleged preoccupation with pronouns and doctrines of white privilege.

Remainiacs

IN the salons of Brexit, Boris Johnson’s downfall is being cast as a pincer movement by disaffected Remainers in the Tory party and the “remainiac” civil service, ably assisted by Dominic Cummings.

There’s a sliver of truth in the conspiracy theory since Cummings undoubtedly helped orchestrate partygate and other internal crises, and many senior civil servants, like Lord McDonald who outed Johnson over Pincher, clearly loathed the PM. But the truth is that the Brexiters were as responsible for the assassination of BoJo as the remain establishment.

It was the resignation of Lord Frost, the Brexit Secretary, in December that led to the downfall of the politician who “got Brexit done”. Frost didn’t resign over parties in Number 10 but what he saw as failure to deliver the Brexit economic agenda. Johnson’s mania for increasing taxes and spending money was, Frost believed, replicating the European social model in Brexit Britain. The way to make Brexit work, he argued, was to slash taxes and turn the UK into a low-regulation entrepôt off the coast of Europe. It was a buccaneering vision of free-market Britain taking on the sclerotic bureaucrats of Brussels.

Like many Brexiters, Frost loathes the climate change agenda and wanted Johnson to abandon or curtail net-zero commitments. When the energy crisis broke, the right’s answer was to restore fracking, which Johnson had blocked, remove the climate change levies, and cut VAT. Johnson’s answer was to give every low-income household £650 to compensate them for rising costs – a move which Paul Johnson of the Institute for Fiscal Studies described as “remarkably redistributive”.

This was the last straw. Brexiters, led by the former Boris bagman Steve Baker MP, united with Continuity Remain to get Boris out of Downing Street. Now they have succeeded, they are beginning to realise that they don’t really know what to do next.

Tory trauma

Indeed, the entire Conservative Party is in trauma, having suffered a kind of psychological collapse or what I call Brexit Derangement Syndrome. Brexit clearly isn’t working, but leaving the EU is the one thing that cannot be blamed – since the Tory Government won in 2019 on a promise to deliver Brexit.

UK trade has fallen off a cliff and the pound has tanked. The Global Britain project has stalled. The EU is holding Britain’s feet to the fire in Northern Ireland. All the leadership candidates realise this but have no solution to it other than the new mantra of cutting taxes, reducing the size of the state, and cutting immigration.

They are all saying that economic policy needs to change to promote growth and enterprise. But as the Office for Budget Responsibility made clear last week, cutting taxes is the last thing the economy needs right now.

The independent forecasters warned of “unsustainable” debt rising to 320% of GDP in 50 years if action isn’t taken. The OBR called for a combination of spending cuts and tax increases to keep the debt sustainable. That is very much not having your cake and choking on it, and the Tory leadership contenders want none of it. They want increased spending on defence to help Ukraine, and more spending on health to cut waiting lists. They want to cut VAT, reverse the increase in business taxes, and restore the thresholds for higher tax in England. Only Rishi Sunak departs from this consensus, wanting instead to slash public services and end the “fairy tale” of high spending.

The next Conservative leader will be trying to deal with a cost-of-living crisis with a return to class-based policies, cushioning business and the better off. This will be combined with emergency cuts to spending in non-health and non-defence services. Welfare will be frozen again. The British economy will lapse into recession in 2023, which will be a disastrous curtain-raiser to election year, 2024.

Whoever has the misfortune to take over in Number 10 will be tempted to hold an early election before the crisis hits, but that is unlikely to save the Tory Party. Labour may have a weak leader and no real policy agenda, but that doesn’t matter. Oppositions don’t win elections; governments lose them. With Boris gone it will be “après moi, le déluge”.