We Brits of a certain age know better than to write off a scruffy, tousle-headed leader whose cunning schemes have gone awry. Yes, he might bundle his own father headfirst into a rhododendron bush, tempt the girl next door with sugary treats before making her violently ill and bring his sister’s love affair to an abrupt end — all before burning the paint off his own bedroom door in what he might have called “a ’speriment”.
But Richmal Crompton’s 11-year-old rapscallion, William Brown, immortalised in the Just William series, has entertained children and adults for almost a century; he usually escapes severe retribution, defeats his enemies (the Hubert Lane-ites) and lives to fight another day.
Unfortunately for anyone who believes that dishevelled charm will get you out of any scrape, it’s time to grow up. Covid-19 won’t be cured by “sixpennorth of Gooseberry Eyes”. No page turn will restore those lost to the families of nearly 150,000 people who have died with the disease. There is no comforting embrace available for millions forced to see their elderly relatives only from a distance. And all the while the men and women who were issuing the orders from Whitehall were partying.
Many who regarded Boris Johnson as unchallengeable are no longer so sure. But contemplation of his departure reveals a startling possibility unprecedented in any western democracy.
I don’t want to raise false hopes amongst the prime minister’s enemies. The children’s author Sue Townsend called Crompton’s creation a “wild child . . . her free spirit”, evoking the kind of affection that has led the electorate to give Johnson the benefit of the doubt time and again. Nor are most people unsympathetic to the burden of office. The transgressions last Christmas ought not be terminal by themselves. Last night’s booster push will look decisive to many; Johnson-haters shouldn’t celebrate too soon.
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But as young William found time and again, the path to punishment rarely lies in the commission of the original offence; it is usually the result of a forlorn attempt to disguise it. In the past two weeks, even Johnson’s Outlaws have become restive; the Violet Elizabeth Botts of the libertarian right no longer believe in their leader’s miraculous powers (William, it is said, could worm through any gap in a fence large enough to accommodate his head). They will thcweam and thcweam. Even the deference of close lieutenants will not survive, for example, defeat in the North Shropshire by-election.
He is already weaker. Crucially, the chances are that he will no longer choose the date of his departure. And if he goes, then what? Leaving aside those unlikely to succeed him because they’ve already had their shot (Jeremy Hunt) or because the country just wouldn’t wear it (Matt Hancock), the contenders, all with compelling back stories, are already making themselves plain. Liz Truss makes no secret of her desire to bring a populist tinge to the Tory blue. Rishi Sunak offers a persuasive case for the ascendancy of the technocratic, moderately Thatcherite establishment; while Sajid Javid, business-friendly and socially liberal, cruises the party’s centrist lane.
Most interesting of all is the man emerging as easily the Tories’ best communicator, Nadhim Zahawi, who oversaw the one unambiguous ministerial success of the past two years, the vaccine rollout. None of the four is too closely tied to No 10; Javid displayed his independence by resigning rather than be told what to do by Dominic Cummings. Sunak and Zahawi are rich enough to buy their own wallpaper, many times over.
And most strikingly, if this is indeed the Tories’ line-up to succeed Johnson if he leaves while they are in office, it will mark a unique event: a contest for leadership in a western democracy where the winner cannot be a white man. Does their sex or ethnicity make a difference? Yes. While these are not defining characteristics for any of these people, they do count.
Nobody is ever going to hear Truss banging the drum for radical feminism, yet she made it clear from day one that she would never be bullied into erasing women, Stonewall-style. Neither Johnson nor Starmer has yet dared to confront the trans-fantasists. The inaccuracy attributed to medical instruments such as oximeters has cost many minority lives. Previous health ministers must have known this but it took Javid to do something about it.
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I am sure that there are still people in the Tory party who think that Britain was a better place when William Brown could maraud around his home counties suburb in a Native American costume, face darkened with soot or burnt cork, without fear of being cancelled from public libraries. Should Nigel Farage return, I suspect that such folk will flock to his banner. But the prominence of these four shows that the Tories still understand the purpose of a political party: to gain power, pretty much by any means necessary. If that means burying old prejudices because the voters have moved on, then so be it.
Ironically, if I am right, there is a dispiriting corollary; for any of those antediluvian souls who think that another woman or a person of colour in No 10 would herald the end of the world as we know it, there is only one route back to the 1920s suburban world of William’s family. They need a party which, presented with a choice of four women, one of them from an ethnic minority, and a man, does what it has done again and again for over a century: choose the white man. One might even call it the Labour Party.