(Bloomberg Opinion) -- A dozen candidates are vying to replace Theresa May as leader of Britain’s Conservative Party. The only question is whether Boris Johnson, who says he would take the country out of the European Union without a deal, will emerge victorious, making him prime minister.
Tory MPs will whittle the field down to two candidates in the days after May steps down, before putting the pair to a vote by the party’s estimated 124,000 members in July.
It is a decision with monumental consequences for Brexit itself. May’s failure left her party and the country more polarized. The stakes are now higher. The social injustices she promised to tackle still fester. The country faces a political, and potentially economic, crisis more severe than any since World War II.
The choice will also test the limits of populist politics: All politicians over-promise, but Johnson is pushing the boundaries in promising the impossible to appease the implacable. Failure could drive more voters to the extremes, destroy the Conservatives and put Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party in power.
The fact that Johnson is the front-runner again shows how much has changed since he lost the last leadership battle in 2016. Then, his Brexit-campaign partner and ally Michael Gove publicly declared him unfit for office, forcing him to withdraw. Gove ran himself instead, though his treachery caught up with him. In the end, May ghosted into the job, never having had to campaign for it.
That was all before Donald Trump – an avid Brexit supporter and fan of Boris who visits the U.K. next week – became president of the U.S., swatting aside a host of conventional assumptions about behavior that would render a candidate unelectable.
It was before May, supposedly a safe pair of hands, failed to get her Brexit deal past her lawmakers and parliament. And it was before Nigel Farage proved that a party only four months old could win a national vote with a simple message that politics is broken and Britain should leave the EU without a deal.
Trump’s election, and the Republican Party’s subsequent deference to him, proved there are some politicians for whom the laws of propriety don’t apply. Farage’s feat, and the protracted Brexit debacle, pose an existential threat to one of the world’s oldest and most successful parties. Trump has already said he thinks Johnson would make a great prime minister; now he says he might meet both Johnson and Farage on his visit to Britain next week. That effectively places the full force of the U.S. Presidency on the side of a no-deal exit.
Only one Conservative politician can match Farage in charisma and popular appeal to Brexit-voters. If May was a wooden figure from a black-and-white film, Johnson is all Pixar. Even so, it’s hard to imagine a candidate with more negatives – from much-publicized infidelities, to blunders such as the one that left Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe in an Iranian jail. For all his considerable oratorical gifts, he isn’t a strong parliamentary performer.
These days, Johnson is a Marmite politician, an acquired taste. It’s a measure of the ire he sparks in some that he now faces a crowd-funded prosecution on charges of misconduct in office for his Brexit campaigning. Of course, holding politicians criminally liable for even grossly misleading campaign statements is fraught on many grounds; it may backfire and even play into Johnson’s hands.
“He’s not some great figure who transcends all party divides,” says politics professor Tim Bale, who has written a history of the Conservative Party from Thatcher to Cameron. “He’s polarizing, but then we get back to the Trump phenomenon; it’s possible to be a warrior and not a healer.”
There are efforts afoot to prevent his name being put to the party faithful, but they may be doomed after the recent European parliament vote. Most Tory MPs want to keep their jobs, and they need a candidate capable of winning elections. Boris has a track record, having twice won mayoral races in heavily Labour-leaning London.
If he makes the cut with MPs, winning the membership vote looks easy, given the support among Conservative members for a no-deal exit – but it might not be a slam dunk. He could still face a challenge from another Brexiter, such as Dominic Raab or Gove.
If he wins, Johnson could find he can do nothing with the prize he has long coveted. The EU is almost certain to refuse to renegotiate May’s withdrawal agreement. More likely, the price for another extension would be high, if it was on offer at all. Nor does there seem the remotest possibility that this parliament will accept a no-deal Brexit, as House of Commons Speaker John Bercow noted in the U.S. this week.
There is a Nixon-in-China argument that says only Johnson might be able to persuade Brexit hardliners to soften their stance. But to what end? Unless he conceded a second referendum, he would be left with an unpalatable choice: Reverse course on Brexit, or hold an election. The latter course would seem folly, though Johnson might be tempted to take a page from the playbooks of Trump and Farage and go to the electorate. His would be a simple message: Parliament is frustrating the will of the people. The option would play to his strength as a campaigner and his taste for the heroic endeavor. He may genuinely see himself as the one person who could deliver a Tory majority and Brexit. But it would be a high-risk gamble that could put Corbyn in Downing Street.
Crossing those bridges is something that is unlikely to be on his mind now; getting to them is. The prize has slipped through his fingers before. Like Winston Churchill, the adventurous wartime leader whose life he chronicled in a predictably controversial biography, Boris no doubt believes “history will be kind to me for I intend to write it.” First, though, he has to make it.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Edward Evans at eevans3@bloomberg.net
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Therese Raphael writes editorials on European politics and economics for Bloomberg Opinion. She was editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal Europe.
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