Boris Johnson May Be the Last Best Hope of the Tories

Political parties in the modern sense barely existed in Lord North’s day; there were only factions. And there isn’t much of a Conservative Party now, only factions. This isn’t only because the Conservatives are out of ideas and talent after 12 years in power, with cabinet offices held by the competent but inexperienced or the experienced and incompetent. In 1770,

Edmund Burke,

the brains of Rockingham’s proto-party, described a party as “a body of men united, for promoting by their joint endeavors the national interest, upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed.” In 2022 Conservative members of Parliament no longer agree on any principle beyond holding power.

Parliamentary Conservatives don’t split only into Brexiteers and Remainers. They also divide between free-market, small-government libertarians in the Thatcher tradition and an older lineage of interventionist, big-government paternalists. These twin divisions don’t align; they are crosshatched. The result is faction, backstabbing, instability and paralysis.

The party’s head, the parliamentary Conservatives, are working against the party’s body, its membership. The membership lives in the shires and the outer suburbs—Labour and the Liberal Democrats control the inner cities—but the MPs live and work in the Westminster Bubble. The membership is much older than the MPs, and they are also more likely to support Brexit and Thatcherism. They never asked Conservative MPs to get rid of Boris Johnson in July, and they still prefer Mr. Johnson to the MPs’ choice,

Rishi Sunak.

More than half of Conservative members of Parliament, however, voted against Brexit in the 2016 referendum. Many of them fear Mr. Johnson’s charisma, cleverness and unscrupulousness. They accepted him as prime minister in 2019 because the alternative was to lose a general election. He won them an 80-seat majority, the biggest since Thatcher in 1983.

Mr. Sunak’s supporters repaid Mr. Johnson by overthrowing him last summer after a whisper campaign in the media about Covid lockdown violations. The scandal resounded in the bubble. It baffled the party members, however, and angered first-time Conservative voters who, having trusted Mr. Johnson in 2019, once more found themselves overruled by the arrogant Tories from London.

The economic and experiential gap between the country and the city was a feature of 18th-century British politics and 19th-century French novels. In the U.S., it recurs in the Great Sorting, whereby blue-state big-city coasts sandwich a red-state small-town hinterland. In Britain, that gap is still “North and South,” as Mrs. Gaskell’s novel of 1854 had it. The Thatcher revolution widened the gap between London and the rest of Britain. In the North, Thatcher’s reforms replaced the rusty Victoriana of industry with a patchy service economy. In the South, the Big Bang deregulation of the City of London unleashed waves of prosperity.

The pro-Brexit vote topped 50% in the 2016 referendum because it was a coalition. A single principle united the followers of two perhaps irreconcilable futures: “Big Bang 2.0” and “Singapore-on-Thames” for the South, and welfare and protectionism for the losers of globalization up North. In 2019 Mr. Johnson promised to close the gap between them by “leveling up” disparities of wealth, opportunity and infrastructure. His victory created a new Conservative coalition, between affluent Southerners, who profit from access to London and global markets, and disenchanted Labour voters, who want protection from the global economy.

Only a charmer such as Mr. Johnson could float above the obvious contradictions. Still, despite the pandemic and economic headwinds, the Conservatives led Labour in the polls only a year ago, because Mr. Johnson’s policies honored his electoral promises to the North. Mr. Johnson’s overthrow broke the Conservative alignment of 2019. The Truss fiasco has blocked any chance of reversion to an earlier, Thatcherite alignment. The result is faction in Westminster, chaos in the markets and freefall in the polls.

“When bad men combine, the good must associate,” wrote Burke. Only Boris Johnson holds a “mandate,” as British politicians now say, from both the voters and the Conservative grass roots. Only Mr. Johnson can reunite the Conservatives’ parliamentary factions around the principles of his 2019 manifesto. He might still lose the next elections, but he might also save his party.

Mr. Green is a Journal contributor and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Foreign Policy Research Institute.