Why is Boris so Confident?

 The spectre of Partygate looms large over Boris Johnson; coupled with the cost of living crisis that his and Sunak’s disastrous policies have wrought upon the UK, current opinion polling is not looking good for him right now. Currently, opinion polling from major pollsters has Labour on a lead of between 6 and 11 percent (for comparison, Tony Blair won the 1997 election by a margin of 12.5%, so an 11% lead is indicative of a similarly scaled landslide). Even worse for the Prime Minister is polling on individual policy and leadership areas, with most pollsters showing Labour leads on every issue they poll, from the economy to healthcare to crime to integrity in office.

If that is the case, then why is Boris so confident?

Usually, when a government is in such a tailspin, its chaotic actions are matched by chaotic and often pessimistic media briefing, statements and leaks. However, while we are of course seeing plenty of chaotic actions, the approach of the government in terms of what they are saying has been confidence - confidence that the local elections will go well, confidence of winning the next general election, confidence even that the public will buy the line “The Prime Minister accepts that the police have found that he broke the law, which is why he paid the fine, however he does not accept that he broke the law.”

I am not the only one to notice this. Chris Curtis, the head of political polling at Opinium, tweeted “But it just seems so odd how confident the Tories feel, given how tough almost all polling questions are for them right now.” Curtis puts this down to the Tories having been on top for so long that they don’t really believe that the public would actually vote for Labour when the chips are down, since it has been nearly 20 years since they last did. However, there could be something more sinister at work.

Boris is confident of holding onto power for a considerable time. This is despite all signs pointing to a Labour victory at the next election. Furthermore, Boris has been known to take some leaves from the Trump playbook. All of these combined point to a single, inescapable conclusion.

Boris will attempt to hold onto power despite the outcome of the next election.

This could take many forms, though physically rigging the election is unlikely. The government has tried to weaken the electoral commission several times, but have never had the political capital to see it through, meaning that an attempt to rig the election would be difficult to pull off successfully. However, in the aftermath of an election there are things that can be done. For example, a change in which party has a majority in the House of Commons does not automatically lead to a change in Prime Minister. Only the Queen can appoint a new Prime Minister, and by convention she appoints a new Prime Minister when the current Prime Minister visits her to resign, and the outgoing Prime Minister will recommend a replacement who she then appoints. In other words, after Blair’s 1997 landslide, John Major had to visit the Queen the next morning to resign, then he asked her to send for Tony Blair. Indeed, the last time a Prime Minister was appointed by the monarch not on the recommendation of the outgoing Prime Minister was 1834, so it would be impossible for the Queen to deviate from this practice without causing substantial civil unrest.

All this to say, what if Boris just did not go to the Queen to resign and ask her to send for Keir Starmer in the aftermath of an election defeat? Indeed, this has not always been the norm in the immediate aftermath of an election defeat - in the 19th Century, Prime Ministers would sometimes stay on for days, weeks or even months in an attempt to win over opposition MPs to support their government rather than that of the majority party (unthinkable now for a Labour MP for example to give a vote of confidence to a Conservative PM over a PM from their own party, but this was much more plausible, and indeed happened, in the days of Tories and Whigs). More recently, when Labour lost the 2010 election to the Conservatives, Gordon Brown remained in post for five days while coalition talks occurred, in case agreement could be reached between Labour and the Liberal Democrats, keeping him in post (of course, the far worse outcome of the Lib Dems siding with the Tories happened instead, and Brown resigned, recommending the Queen to send for David Cameron, who with Lib Dem support could command a Commons majority). Of course, Boris staying on longer than the next day in the aftermath of Labour winning a Commons majority would be none of these outcomes, but he will use these types of cases to justify it - as a claim that he is not really acting against the outcome of the election.

Naturally, such a move would cause significant uproar, on a scale similar, or perhaps even worse than, the January 6th riots in the US. Whether the Queen intervened to appoint the winner of the election of her own volition or not, there would be sections of society that felt like democracy had been ignored (though of course the Boris supporters would be wrong in this case, since he would have lost the election). This risks civil unrest on a massive scale and possibly even civil war. But, if Boris plays it carefully enough to avoid that outcome, which he might, since he will have watched and learned from Trump, then there is the terrifying possibility that we might see the beginning of a form of dictatorship in the UK.