Does Boris really deserve a second chance?

The original fans of Boris Johnson feel a special kind of disappointment about his disastrous premiership. He’s the best campaigner of his generation, he governed London well, his superpower is to find and devolve to brilliant people who can implement a vision of liberal conservatism that he articulated over a 20-year career.

Judge him, we’d argue, by his achievements. That’s what we argued in 2019, anyway. If we judge him by his record in No. 10, it was one not just of disaster – but of doing the precise opposite of what he promised. As we argued in The Spectator, he was becoming the very prime minister that, as a journalist, he warned us about. That’s why, as I argue in today’s Sunday Telegraph, I cannot cheer him on this time.

Yes, lockdown hijacked his premiership. But events hijack every premiership: leaders are distinguished by how they respond. Johnson had an ability to take bets, get things right. He and Ben Wallace fought the Ministry of Defence establishment over arming Ukraine before anyone else; his vaccine taskforce format worked superbly and was a success admired the world over.

But against this, we must balance his drawbacks. He spoke about how he wanted low taxes but spent like a drunken Keynesian: the absurdly unaffordable Net Zero, defending HS2. I wrote a cover story attacking his plan to tax ordinary workers to protect the inheritance of the rich via care home subsidy. He refused to accept a choice between high spending and low taxes, leaving us with massive debt and high taxes.

His sheer disorganisation meant he was pushed around by others and shouted down by illiberal voices: hence the high spending and those lockdowns. A social and economic calamity, one from which the country will never properly recover. And yes, almost every country locked down – to an extent. But how many countries locked down longer or harder than Britain? And how many countries sustained more economic damage? That explains the mess we’re in: under a mountain of debt, suffering low growth with a workforce that never recovered to its former size. The moneyprinting used to finance lockdown left us with inflation, as Mervyn King explained this morning. Johnson took a "see no evil" approach during lockdown, refusing to commission a cost-benefit analysis. The benefits are hard to find but the costs confront us daily. Johnson has a lot of apologising to do. His vaccine procurement success was, in the end, squandered because he kept Britain locked down anyway.

So yes, he gets points for managing the vaccine programme: that’s his swashbuckling good side. But his failure to convert this success into earlier reopening – due to his inability to challenge the pro-lockdown voices around him – blunted this success. If he’s going to get out-argued by people with bad ideas, what’s the point of having good ideas?

The hassle of managing the coalitions involved in a parliamentary democracy proved too much for him. He had a (huge) personal mandate in City Hall – and acted as if he had one in No. 10. But that's not the way our system works. His hoarding of power in Downing Street might have worked had it been a cauldron of great ideas, but it wasn’t. The appalling banning of protest; the chilling censorship laws outlined in the Online Safety Bill; the highest tax burden in 72 years; they all formed a pattern of illiberal Conservatism. That became his trademark. What he did was the opposite of what he promised. His advisers peeled away, one by one, in recognition of this grim reality.

When he was all set to impose vaccine passports, The Spectator ran a page in the magazine listing all the times that Boris the Journalist warned against power-grabbing PMs who exaggerated threats to force us to carry identity cards. To me, that the 180th degree of the U-turn; this was the sign that the Boris revolution had failed, this was his equivalent of crushing of the Kronstadt Rebellion. Johnson the writer had campaigned harder than anyone else against Tony Blair’s appalling identity cards - saying he'd sooner eat one than produce one. And when Blair was back, again pushing vaccine IDs - an even more intrusive version of his original idea - he found Johnson as his useful idiot. And yes, I revere my predecessor as a writer and remain in awe of his hugely successful editorship. But did he expect The Spectator to cheer him on as he implemented the very things that – when he was editor – the magazine had campaigned against? We regularly held up his own words against him asking: what had he become? And why?

I wrote a Telegraph column saying that as a writer (again) he would be in a position to explain all of this. Did he, in No. 10, think his old ideas were naive, unviable or anachronistic? Has he joined the big-state fatalists who think the demographic and protectionist forces give us no other option than to have a massive government, 50 per cent bigger, even, than in the Blair years? Or did he not change his mind but rather found himself under-resourced to make the change? Or will he just enter denial, gloss over lockdown, and repeat his old refrain that there are good times just around the corner?

Here’s what I keep coming back to: what are the rational reasons to expect that Johnson V2 will be any better than Johnson V1? I have no animus toward him. I continue to like and admire him and think of his political career as historic: the Brexit vote; vanquishing Corbynism and more. His books alone would be enough of a legacy, set aside his ground-breaking political journalism. He is one of the most consequential writers and politicians of our times. But as prime minister, his flaws overpowered his benefits - and his attempt to apply a presidential model to parliamentary democracy undid him. A political disaster movie has been rewound, with the Tory finger again hovering over the ‘play’ button. It’s time to press eject instead. Boris’s friends and enemies know how this movie ends. Please, let’s not watch it again.