What lessons can history offer the incoming Boris?

Following his decisive leadership victory - can history predict Boris Johnson’s likely prospects? What can we learn from the fate of those previous premiers chosen by their party rather than the people?

The simple (but rather boring) answer is no – politics is too inherently unpredictable, especially in the turbulent seas of Brexit Britain.  However, history can offer a few pointers to the future. Indeed, examining the fate of past Prime Ministers, who have shared Johnson’s experience of entering Number Ten without first winning an electoral mandate in the country, reveals some interesting patterns.

Since Britain became a de facto democracy, just over a century ago in 1918, as many as eleven Prime Ministers have trodden the same path. Interestingly, the first three chose to seek their own electoral mandate within six months of coming into office (Bonar Law in 1922, and Baldwin twice, in 1923 and 1935). In April 1955 it took Anthony Eden less than a fortnight. The first Premier to break the mould was Neville Chamberlain in 1937, probably not a happy precedent given his ignominious fall, without ever calling a General Election, in the dark days of 1940 (the wartime electoral truce meant his successor, Sir Winston Churchill, had no choice in the matter, but then he was backed by all parties).

It was Harold Macmillan who decisively broke the pattern of speedily seeking a democratic mandate when, in January 1957, he succeeded the ailing Anthony Eden in the aftermath of the ‘Suez Crisis’. With the polls looking bad, and the economy apparently faltering, Macmillan chose to bide his time. Crucially, when he finally held an election, in October 1959, he was returned with a landslide majority of 100 with 49.4 per cent of the poll. Macmillan’s triumph emboldened future incoming Premiers to play the long game, making full use of the levers of state power to engineer the most opportune time to hold a confirmatory poll.

Since Macmillan in 1959 no unelected Premier has ever enjoyed the same extraordinary success. Indeed, apart from John Major in 1992, none has managed to secure a Parliamentary majority by choosing to see out their predecessor’s Parliamentary term. Sir Alec Douglas-Home came close in 1964, but not close enough to stop Harold Wilson becoming the first Labour Premier for thirteen years. James Callaghan and Gordon Brown both chose to ignore calls to seek an early election, and a personal mandate, and both ended up losing to untried Conservative Party leaders (Margaret Thatcher in 1979 and David Cameron in 2010).  Most recently, of course, in 2017 Theresa May went back on her initial refusal to call a General Election in the hope of increasing the modest majority she had inherited from Cameron. The gamble backfired, the majority was squandered, and everything that has happened since has simply been the slow motion car crash made inevitable by her decision to carry on regardless.

So what does all this tell us about Boris Johnson’s likely fate? Like his old schoolmate David Cameron, Johnson seems by nature to be something of a gambler, but will this lead him to wager that he can be the first person successfully to follow in Macmillan’s wait-and-see footsteps? Or, alternatively, will he be the first since Eden in 1955 to insist that, as an unelected PM he has a democratic duty to seek a personal mandate? It’s hard to know, but one suspects that like May in 2016, he’s likely to be tempted to risk calling an early election to take advantage of the apparent disarray in Labour ranks. But this only makes sense if he can find some way to overcome the disarray in his own ranks. He appears to have two diametrically opposed options. Either he can run headlong for a ‘No Deal’ whilst coming to a temporary electoral understanding with Nigel Farage to try and break the Parliamentary log jam, or he can dash in the opposite direction by seeking a broad-based, cross-party compromise (offering an immediate post-deal General Election, and, who knows, perhaps a Scottish referendum, as the carrots to achieve a Parliamentary majority).

Or perhaps he isn’t a gambler at all, and, like so many before him, he will just wait for the clock to run down on his Premiership (unlike them he will at least have the excuse of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act, 2011 to justify his failure to seek a democratic mandate). But that’s not very Boris. Who knows, as in 2016, he may already have penned alternative Telegraph columns outlining the case for both of the radical punts available to him.

Jon Lawrence

University of Exeter

@JonHistorian
Author of Me, Me, Me? The Search for Community in Post-war England (June 2019) @ https://bit.ly/2UXL3jd

Johnson Image: (c) Andrew Parsons/i-images, licence Creative Commons