Britain: What the hell just happened? Interview with Robert Saunders on the Conservative collapse

Trigger warning explicit content

You can listen to the Lowdon on Apple (see below) Spotify, Android and every other podcast host

Trigger warning: strong language

Brits need a strong stomach to cope with the official inquiry into the handling of the Covid pandemic. It revealed that, at one point in 2020, Simon Case, the head of the UK civil service, said of Boris Johnson and his Downing Street team: "These people are so mad... they are just so madly self-defeating. I've never seen a bunch of people less well-equipped to run the country."

At another, Dominic Cummings, then Johnson’s Svengali, later his enemy, tried to sack the senior civil servant Helen MacNamara, because No 10 was “dodging stilettos from that cunt”.

Unsurprisingly, Macnamara said that Downing Street had a "macho" culture and that a "toxic" environment had affected decision-making. Before you sympathise, Macnamara the former head of ethics in Whitehall, no less, then admitted that there “was never a day when Covid-19 rules were fully followed in No 10,” and she led the way in breaking them by attending a karaoke party – a pandemic singalong.

Oh, and Johnson wanted to inject himself with covid on live TV to prove it wasn’t a threat.

I was going to write a mock-despairing sentence in the “it’s a bloody miracle they didn’t kill us all” manner. But this is no time for mockery. Hundreds of thousands lost relatives, partners and friends. Hundreds of thousands more are still suffering from long covid and mental illness.

How did the UK country which once prided itself on its pragmatism and efficiency end up being governed by such dangerous incompetents?

You cannot reasonably expect anyone to see a pandemic coming. But what about the populism that Brexit authorised? It is once again tearing the Tory party apart as the right lines up against Rishi Sunak, after he sacked Suella Braverman and brought back David Cameron. The Conservative party, an institution that governed the UK for most of its modern history, is a shambolic wreck. It has given us five prime ministers since 2016 and more chancellors and foreign secretaries than anyone can remember.

For the Lowdown I wanted to talk to Robert Saunders, one of Britain’s best contemporary historians​, about the crisis on the British right. You can listen to the podcast by clicking on the links above. Below is an edited transcript. I’ve added links and notes so you can check out the wider arguments we raised in our conversation.

I began with self-criticism. People like me, liberal, university educated, thought Johnson was such a self-evident charlatan no one could ever believe in him. And yet as Saunders says in his essay “Let Them Eat Cake’: Conservatism in the age of Boris Johnson”  in December 2019, Boris Johnson led his party to its most spectacular electoral success for a third of a century. Nearly 14 million people voted Conservative – the second highest number of votes ever polled by a British party – ending a decade of hung parliaments and precarious majorities. Johnson’s party had smashed through Labour’s “Red Wall”, broken the parliamentary resistance to his Brexit deal and rewritten the geography of British politics. Or so it then seemed.

Armed with an eighty-seat majority, a pliable cabinet and a parliamentary party purged of rebels and ‘big beasts’, Johnson was the most powerful Conservative leader since Margaret Thatcher; able to anticipate a decade or more in which to remake British politics in his image.

The Tory party’s collapse in a little over two years explains why its politicians stagger around in a state of such evident disorientation. But before we discussed that I wanted to talk about why conventional middle-class commentators underestimated Johnson.