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Like Margaret Thatcher and Enoch Powell before him, the Tory leader plays Little Englander and Global Briton at the same time
In April 2013, Nigel Farage was on the rise, and Boris Johnson wanted to calm Conservative nerves. “He’s in our constituencies, wooing our audiences, nicking our votes,” he wrote in The Daily Telegraph. But panic, he said, was premature. “We Tories look at him – with his pint and cigar and sense of humour – and we instinctively recognise someone who is fundamentally indistinguishable from us,” Johnson wrote. The alarm was simply that “of a man confronted by his doppelganger” – “he’s a blooming Conservative, for heaven’s sake”.
Today, Johnson’s flirtations with Farage are often seen as the symptom of a newly feverish, out-of-character Conservative party. In this view, a party once prized – in its own eyes at least – for its pragmatism, patience and common sense now rushes forward, unrecognisably, with revolutionary zeal. “The Tory party has crossed their rubicon,” Matthew Parris mourned in The Times on 1 November, announcing that, after 50 years, he was backing the Lib Dems. “I’m still not sure whether I left the Conservative party, or whether it left me,” Rory Stewart had lamented the previous month. Continue reading...