Looking back on the 1990 ousting of Margaret Thatcher as Conservative prime minister, her chief whip Tim Renton concluded that Thatcher had lost power because she “had ceased having an open mind” about how to unify her party or to govern. “She only wanted to have her own friends around her and she had come to identify No 10 and the job of prime minister with herself,” wrote Renton. “Anyone who stood in her way … was to be dispensed with. They were not of the right faith.”
Boris Johnson is not in the same league as Thatcher as a successful prime minister and much else. She lasted 11 years in Downing Street and won three general elections. He has been prime minister for two and half and has won just once. She possessed ideological conviction in spades. His only serious interest is in himself.
Yet all the evidence from the so-called reboot of Johnson’s government in the wake of the lockdown party scandals is that this prime minister is now making many of the same mistakes that Thatcher did more than a generation ago. Like her, Johnson surrounds himself with flatterers. Like her, he has come to identify the Conservative government with himself rather than the party or the electorate. Like her, he ostracises those who are not true believers – which in this case means believers in him. There are, of course, some differences. Yet the outcome will be the same. » | Martin Kettle | Wednesday, February 9, 2022
