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Your starter for 10: Would the Tories be better off without Boris Johnson?
By: []
Date: 2021-12
Facing a rebellion over new COVID restrictions, a potential inquiry into undeclared donations from a Tory peer to pay for improvements to the prime minister’s Downing Street flat and revelations over lockdown-breaking Christmas quizzes and parties, the season of goodwill appears to have bypassed Number 10.
The Tories also face the embarrassment of losing the near 23,000 majority in Thursday’s North Shropshire by-election, a seat the party has held for all but two years since 1832.
But while it’s tempting to blame most – maybe even all – of the party’s current problems on Boris Johnson himself, simply ditching its current leader and replacing him with any of the current frontrunners won’t necessarily see an uptick in the party’s fortunes. Indeed, it might even make things worse.
Johnson, believe it or not, has never been a particularly popular prime minister – not overall anyway. In fact, as research for our recently published book, ‘The British General Election of 2019’, makes clear, his predecessor, Theresa May, was more popular with the electorate as a whole during the disastrous 2017 campaign than he was in the weeks leading up to the Tory triumph two and a half years later.
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What Johnson had over May, however, was that many of those voters who did like him, really, really liked him. That, and the fact that many of them were precisely the kind of voters that the Conservatives needed to earn them a comfortable majority – white, not particularly well educated, patriotic Leave supporters, prepared to give his government the benefit of the doubt when it came to ending austerity.
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