Conservative MPs are increasingly worried about Boris Johnson’s economic policy – or lack of it No one at the next election will remember Sajid Javid’s criticisms, but they could turn out to be very important indeed

One of Boris Johnson’s neglected qualities is that he doesn’t sweat the small stuff. As Mayor of London, he sharply limited his public appearances – his opponents on City Hall branded him a “part-time” mayor, but that didn’t matter very much to Londoners, who re-elected him in 2012.

Johnson realised, rightly, that what matters at election time is how you have handled the big issues. Have you turned up at the right moments, have you successfully drawn the right dividing lines in order to keep your voters on side? Most of the rows that make headlines will, in practice, have been forgotten by the time of the next election.

But unfortunately for Johnson, politics can’t be neatly split into those two categories – big events that move the voters, and small ones that can be safely ignored – ahead of time. For example, none of the dozens of interviews in which Labour politicians struggled to articulate the party’s Brexit position mattered at all, but taken together they mattered a great deal.

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Two events this week in the life of the government might have a similar afterlife. The first is the Commons statement made by Sajid Javid about his resignation from government, an event that will pass most people by and will make no practical difference to the outcome of the next election. Javid used the occasion to deliver a coded rebuke to Johnson’s style of running the government, and to return to an issue he is passionate about: cutting taxes and balancing the budget.

The second was the muddled response given by Gillian Keegan, a junior minister, to an independent report which found a direct link between cuts to government spending and falling life expectancy. The report’s conclusions are entirely unsurprising: if you cut a government programme, that will have at least some negative implications for at least some of the people using it.

Had the report come out in 2013, when Javid was beginning his slow ascent up the ministerial ladder, he would have had a clear answer: yes, the cuts had been painful for some people, but the reason for them was that the Labour government had “spent too much money”, forcing the Conservatives to make deep cuts in public spending. They even had a snappy little one-liner: “it’s hurting, but it’s working.”

In 2020, the party doesn’t have a clear line to take on the cuts anymore. The argument, such that I could make it out, seems to be that, actually, the cuts had no negative consequences, but Boris Johnson is right to reverse some of them in any case. The reason why Keegan and others sound stupid making that case is because the argument is stupid.

It speaks to a broader question that Conservative MPs are increasingly asking in private: what is their economic policy, anyway? In less than two weeks, Javid’s replacement as chancellor, Rishi Sunak, will deliver his first Budget, and we don’t know whether or not it will contain a commitment to reduce the size of government debt. That’s right: we don’t know if the British Government thinks that a balanced budget is a good thing, a bad thing or entirely irrelevant.

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The central cause of Tory unease is that most MPs do know what they think the answer is: a balanced budget is a good thing, taxes should be as low as possible, and cuts to public spending, while painful, may be a necessary way of keeping both those aims. What worries them is that they think that Boris Johnson may no longer share that view, if he ever held it at all.

It calls to mind the ideological battles in Margaret Thatcher’s Cabinet between the so-called “wets”, who thought that the economic consensus that had prevailed in the United Kingdom for the best part of three decades after the war ought to be defended not overturned; and the “dries”, the first Thatcherites who wanted to revolutionise how the economy worked.

But there is a big difference now. Thatcherism was based at its core on an emerging set of economic debates and questions about the shape of the British economy. Its high priests were high-powered academics and policy wonks. “Johnsonism” is an answer not to an economic problem but a political one: that supporting Brexit drove a coach and horses through the Conservatives’ pre-2016 coalition so they needed a new one. The hope is that the economic conditions will support higher levels of public spending while maintaining existing levels of tax.

It doesn’t matter that this position leaves the Government open to attack from former ministers or that it means current ministers sound incoherent on the telly. But it might matter if it turns out that the economic conditions won’t support the political positioning of Johnsonism. And that’s why, even though no one at the next election will remember Sajid Javid’s criticisms of Boris Johnson, they could turn out to be very important indeed.

Stephen Bush is political editor of ‘New Statesman’ magazine