Johnson's unpopularity

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.