Where is the Boris agenda?

It's a common trap: a Prime Minister is asked whether he or she will fight the next election as leader. To which there are only two answers: to say 'yes,' or announce your resignation. But - here's the trap - saying 'yes' can be easily translated into Thatcher-style declaration that you want to "go on and on" - in Boris Johnson's case, the papers say he wants to last to the 2030s. Not a timescale he mentioned.

But he did talk about a "third term" and is blaming his by-election defeats on voters not thinking enough about the future. ‘If you look at the by-elections, people were absolutely fed up about hearing about things that I had had stuffed up,’ he said. ‘An endless churn of stuff. What they wanted to hear was: what is this guy doing? I want to talk about our plan to help people with the cost of living, what we’re doing for a stronger economy, our plan for a stronger economy.’

But this is the problem. When they ask ‘what is this guy doing?’ the answers are not encouraging. This the guy who signed a manifesto pledge not to raise taxes, then ordered his MPs to vote to abandon that pledge – with a National Insurance hike that hands government a further 2.5 per cent of salaries as of last April. What this guy is doing will be felt by every earner whose take-home pay has just been hit by his tax rises. In a very real way, Johnson’s government is part of the cost-of-living problem.

As Allister Heath argues in an unsparing assessment, the economic chickens of lockdown are coming home to roost. The recklessness with which the economy was shut down was always going to carry a price. Johnson had the chance to reopen early last year after the vaccine success, but let Whitty et al talk him out of it. How much thought did he give to the likely economic consequences of that delay? Where was his cost-benefit analysis? For various reasons, tax-and-spend Labour has been replaced by borrow-tax-print-and-spend Conservatism - and with predictable results.

Johnson asks us to look at his ‘plan for a stronger economy’. So let's do so. He plans the highest tax burden in 74 years: what chances does the economy have under the weight of a government that is now 55 per cent bigger than it was under Tony Blair? Look beyond partygate, look to the future, and what kind of economic future can we expect under Boris Johnson? What does his ‘plan for a stronger economy’ amount to? The worst growth of any G20 country apart from Russia. And (below) the worst in the G7.

This is the problem: not only that Johnson ‘stuffed up’ the past but the lack of any decent ideas for the future. I’m not one of those calling for him to go, as I don’t see right now anyone coming up with a better agenda. Politics is always a choice, a swap. It's not enough to say "Boris should go." You also need to be confident that Jeremy Hunt (or Liz Truss or whoever) would do a significantly better job. And, importantly, that the improvement would be worth the upheaval of a leadership putsch. Have a look at the below list and ask: who meets that test? Which of the below would be so much better as to make the spectacle of regicide worthwhile?

The problem is policy - not personality. The Tories have finally run out of other people's money. Some 5.3 million are being kept on out-of-work benefits, a hugely expensive waste of human talent and unforgivable in the middle of the worst worker shortage in modern history. A third of all UK households are now on means-tested benefits: how on earth did that happen? For as long as the Tories are committed to spending so much money - way more than Blair or Brown spent - they'll have no option but to keep rinsing the public to pay for a state that has grown out of all proportion to its usefulness.

Word is that a the next Boris relaunch will detail plan to "curb inflation", "help with the cost of living", "boost the economic security of families" and "invest in public services." Let's take these in turn. It's the Bank of England's job to control inflation - and the time to worry was before it decided to print money as fast Boris Johnson could borrow it.

Once the inflationary milk has been spilt, it's hard to get it back in the bottle; as Lionel Shriver notes in her column this week central banks do not look serious about doing so. Next, his pledge to "help with the cost of living". The most effective way he can do so is to reverse his April tax grab. And when it comes to "investing in public services" - well, that's Brown-speak for "spending." An excess of which, of course, is the original problem.

Until we can find a Tory leader willing to say break this cycle and say that spending is too high then - as The Spectator argues in the leader column of this week's magazine - nothing will change. So in a way, I’m more pessimistic than the Tories who think a change of leader would improve things. The problem lies much deeper.

If the PM genuinely thinks that he lost the by-elections because voters were not thinking of the future, then he ought to think again. His problem is that voters are looking to the future, they’re open to convincing solutions to their problems – but they don’t see any. Unless this changes, the Conservatives can expect a lot more such electoral defeats.