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Boris Johnson is often represented as an anomaly in Conservative history: an 'unconservative' figure who has transformed his party into something new. Yet Johnsonism has clear roots in the Conservative tradition, and Johnson himself is as much a product as the architect of changes in the party. His flair for rhetorical ambiguity has enabled him to hold together a divergent electoral coalition, but the return of political economy to the mainstream of public policy may challenge that approach in future.
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 - bringing to an end 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. 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.
But had those voters come to praise the Conservative Party or to bury it? For its critics, the party that had stormed the polls in 2019 was not the Conservative Party at all. It had morphed into something new: an 'English nationalist party', a 'Vote Leave government', or a 'populist Johnsonian cult'.1 Its actions, thought one writer, were 'not simply un-conservative', but 'an explicit repudiation of everything that it means to be a Conservative'.2 A party that was once cautious of change had embraced a revolutionary transformation. A party that once prized scepticism now urged its supporters to 'believe in Brexit'. The party of the constitution had suspended Parliament, while the party of law and order was legislating to break its own legal commitments. The 'natural party of government' now excoriated 'the establishment', while the party of traditional moral values was led by a voluptuary, an adulterer and 'the most accomplished liar in public life'.3 Who now believed, with Sir Arthur Bryant, that 'the Conservative acts always with caution'? Or, like Anthony Quinton, that 'Conservatives...