Whether intentionally or unintentionally, Boris Johnson certainly has a gift for grabbing a headline.
From his surprise trip to Ukraine to fresh revelations about his close relationship with the BBC chairman Richard Sharp, the former Prime Minister’s reputation as a one-man news machine has certainly been confirmed in spades over the past week.
Add in the revelation that he had earned a whopping £1 million in just one month, thanks to two speeches and a half a million pound advance for his memoirs, and there’s no doubting the “Boris is box office” effect.
But whereas Johnson has rarely been out of the public eye since his defenestration last year, Liz Truss has been conspicuous by her marked absence from the limelight.
That’s why reports that she is imminently set to dip her toe back into the waters of Westminster life have prompted a flurry of interest among Tory MPs.
Truss has certainly been wise to stay schtum until now. For the millions of homeowners whose mortgage rates are set to rocket in April, chewed up and spat out thanks to last autumn’s Trussonomics – with some facing £600 a month hikes that will dwarf even their energy bills – a little more silence on her part may be welcome.
Truss sounds determined to try and recast her doomed premiership in a more favourable light in the run-up to the Budget on 15 March. She is weighing up whether the best vehicle will be a speech, an interview or a newspaper article. It may, of course, be all three.
The shortest serving PM in British history is said to want to renew her case for “pro-growth” policies. And there are undoubtedly elements of that agenda that were worth listening to, not least streamlining planning to build more houses, more onshore wind power and more legal migration to counter our labour shortages.
Apparently Truss will acknowledge that she failed to secure the political support needed to deliver on her promises. Some of her supporters hope she will share their belief that her main argument was right but the breakneck rush of her policies was wrong.
Her detractors may see that as the right-wing version of the argument deployed by some on the Left after the no-compromise-with-the-electorate disasters of the 1983 and 2019 general elections. Just as some argued those prospectuses were not socialist enough, or at least not sold in the right way to voters, Trussonomics fans still yearn for a revival of their own.
Yet what may prove more significant is that Truss is not expected to make any apology for her time in office at all. Having already missed the chance in her farewell speech to make amends by expressing regret at her failed experiment, repeating that error in any “comeback” speech would be perhaps doubly misjudged.
She may be taking her lead from her predecessor. It’s a refusal to apologise that has so far characterised Johnson’s time since leaving office too. And again, that seems exactly the wrong approach for a disgraced former premier to take.
It’s arguable that if Johnson had made a genuine, early, heartfelt apology over “partygate” that he could have survived it. The same applies to the Owen Paterson row, the spark that lit the Tory campaign to unseat him. In November 2021, he reacted to criticism of his handling of the affair by reportedly telling friends: “I’m not bloody apologising!”
Even now, Johnson could repair some of the self-inflicted damage to his reputation by perhaps using his opening evidence to the Parliamentary inquiry into partygate to make a very public show of regret. A similar mea culpa at the start of the Covid inquiry would help too.
Unlike Truss, whose political legacy may end up being an answer to a pub quiz question, Johnson genuinely harbours hopes of a return to No 10. So it seems all the more important that he begins to get the public back on side.
For some of his allies, there’s no doubt that the gleam is not lost from his eye. In one of those curious sliding doors moments, there are some MPs who believe that Penny Mordaunt could be PM today but for Johnson’s decision to launch his own botched comeback bid last October. Close to the 100 votes needed to trigger an election among members, she lost out as backbenchers were burned by the ex-PM’s own hokey-cokey on the leadership.
With a total of seven living former Prime Ministers currently kicking around (and three still in the Commons), it’s no surprise some Rishi Sunak supporters worry about what Margaret Thatcher once called “back-seat driving”.
Each offers different role models. John Major has opted for the less-is-more approach, with sparse speeches deployed for maximum effect. Tony Blair has had real influence (not least in the pandemic) through his policy institute, Gordon Brown prefers a hands-on review to help out Keir Starmer. David Cameron is slowly rehabilitating himself through charity work after his Greensill debacle. Theresa May plugs away on her own priorities like modern slavery.
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What few of them anticipate is to actually walk through that big black door again. And once again, it’s Johnson who is the outlier, making plain he feels he won a personal mandate in the 2019 election landslide and that only he has the star quality to rescue his party from a landslide defeat.
There is no intrinsic reason why a former PM can’t return, of course. Harold Wilson managed it, as did Winston Churchill. In the Victorian age, Disraeli and Gladstone made a feature of their interchangeability.
But in the modern era, whether you’re a politician or a celebrity, the prerequisite of any return to the limelight is humility and contrition.
Truss wants a comeback for her ideas, Johnson wants one for himself. But just as she may have trashed for a generation the idea of unfunded tax cuts, he may have revived for a generation the Tories’ taint of sleaze and untrusworthiness. Refusing to apologise will do neither of them any good.
And as the old saying goes, as a dog returns to its vomit, so a fool returns to his folly. Conservative MPs seem in no mood to go back to the future and the public certainly don’t.
