A few salient points about Boris Johnson from Rob Ford's Swingometer blog.
With Boris Johnson’s shock resignation from Parliament
returning him to the headlines, the Conservatives once again have a 'Life of
Brian Problem'. A sizeable chunk of Conservative MPs and members believe Boris
Johnson is the Messiah. Another sizeable chunk see Johnson not as the Messiah,
but as a very naughty boy.¹ This argument has broken out multiple times since ITV’s
revelations of parties in Downing Street during lockdown began the long and
ugly process of Johnson’s decline and fall. Here we go again.
While Conservative politicians struggle to weigh the merits
and flaws of Johnson, the public do not. Johnson wasn’t a popular politician
when he led the Conservatives to victory in 2019, he certainly wasn’t popular
when forced from office last summer, and he isn’t popular now. There is no
great yearning for his triumphant return. His impact on perceptions of his party
has been entirely negative for close to two years. Electorally, he is an
albatross around the neck of his successors.
Johnson’s unpopularity is not new. Though he won a large
majority in December 2019, he was not personally popular before or during that
campaign. Johnson is usually contrasted positively with Theresa May, the
‘Maybot’ of 2017. Yet Johnson was less popular at every point of the 2019
general election campaign than Theresa May had been at the equivalent point in
the 2017 campaign (see figure 1). And it was May who did most of the work of
attracting Leave voters to the Conservatives’ banner, in particular achieving
large swings in the ‘red wall’ where in most cases she fell short. But in doing
so she set up Johnson’s subsequent victory.
