Boris Johnson was the most left-wing Tory PM

When Kemi Badenoch said at the launch of her Conservative leadership campaign that the party had “talked right but governed left”, many people were puzzled. What did she mean? Well, here is Graham Brady to explain. The chair of the 1922 Committee throughout the 14 years of Tory government, the conveyor of backbench Tory opinion to the five prime ministers of that period and the returning officer for the four leadership elections between them, has published his memoir, Kingmaker.

He was the keeper of the parliamentary Tory party’s inner secret — namely the number of MPs who wanted the prime minister out. Only he knew how close the number of no-confidence letters was to the trigger point that would require him to call a vote of Tory MPs. “I was the model of discretion,” he writes. “Until now…”

He reveals that he had only 10 such letters in his safe on 22 May, when Rishi Sunak called the early election, as against the 52 needed to trigger a confidence vote. This puts an end to the idea that Sunak called the election in order to pre-empt a leadership challenge.

But many of the most striking passages in the memoir are about Boris Johnson. He describes the Johnson government as “the most left-wing that this country has had in peacetime, with spending and taxation put on a steep upward trajectory and a Covid response that was authoritarian”. He elaborates in an interview with The Daily Telegraph to accompany the book’s publication: “The thing which always surprised me most was that Boris’s strongest supporters in the parliamentary party tended to be people who would identify themselves as being on the right, and I can only think that they were attracted to his cavalier elan rather than to the policies, because there’s no doubt that the Johnson government was governing to the left.”

This is a brilliant illumination of how the combination of Brexit and Boris confused people. Leaving the EU was a “right-wing” cause, therefore Johnson was seen as right wing. Yet his manifesto emphasised the public services, and he even occasionally argued for Brexit on grounds that ending free movement of labour would push up the wages of the lower paid.

The pandemic confused things further by forcing a big, if temporary, increase in public spending. Brady implies, although he does not say so, that the furlough and business support schemes were too generous, because the pressure for some state intervention could hardly have been resisted in a democracy. Coronavirus measures further divided Tories between liberals and authoritarians, with many “right-wingers” such as Brady finding themselves arguing against lockdowns and restrictions imposed by law. Indeed, the measures seem to have divided Johnson against himself, with Brady telling how he would one moment be ranting at the “effing scientists” and their “stupid two-metre rule” and the next demanding to know, when Brady complained about lockdowns, “How many people would you let die?”

The part of Brady’s book that has been serialised so far does not cover, however, the most important respect in which the Johnson government was “left-wing” — namely on immigration.

It seems astonishing, looking back, that Johnson used the Brexit freedom to set the UK’s own border policy to relax controls over who could come to the country from outside the EU. When people voted to “Take Back Control” in the EU referendum, most of them did so in the expectation that immigration would be reduced. Yet Johnson’s “Australian-style points-based system” achieved the opposite, even allowing for the special cases of Ukraine, Hong Kong and Afghanistan.

Equally surprising is that it took so long for anyone to notice. It wasn’t until revised figures for 2022 were published, near the end of the following year, that James Cleverly, by then home secretary, reacted in a panic and threw all the switches on the dashboard into reverse.

This “saying one thing while doing another” has further traumatised and confused the Tory party. It meant that it had no answer to Nigel Farage in the election, and has no prospect of winning back his voters in the foreseeable future. For all that Keir Starmer seems to have made a faltering start, governing with a large majority that is widely assumed to be fragile. But Boris Johnson’s failure on immigration is likely to haunt the Conservative Party for many years to come.