Boris Johnson’s clear and present danger

With an eight point lead in the opinion polls, an 83-seat majority in the House of Commons and economic growth figures for the second quarter revised upwards from 4.8% to 5.5%, what does UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson have to fear?
Plenty. Although the opposition Labour party requires an enormous swing of more than 10% at the next general election to win outright — the party’s internal rifts were on display during its torrid conference week — the prime minister is not sitting pretty. Johnson could still lose his House of Commons majority if shortages in the shops and at the petrol pumps lead to a loss of confidence in his government’s competence.
“A nightmare for Christmas shoppers” is widely predicted. Inflation is back, domestic energy bills are soaring and fuel shortages have led to fist fights in petrol station forecourts, captured on social media sites. It’s hardly the ideal backdrop to the ruling Conservative party’s conference, which meets in Labour’s Manchester city stronghold this weekend. Johnson’s party faithful are already gloomy about recent tax rises to pay for pandemic spending.
Meanwhile the pound is falling against the dollar with no end in sight. The currency markets are not impressed by the UK’s resilience in the face of supply-chain bottlenecks. Even revised upwards, the economy is still 3.3% smaller than before the pandemic. Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey has warned that the recovery is weakening: “The hard yards,” he says, lie ahead. The prime minister’s critics complain of an “Autumn of Discontent” — a phrase freighted with memories of the strike-bound 1970s when the country was in the grip of stagflation and uncollected rubbish piled up in the streets. The doom-mongering is overblown but Johnson, to use his favorite current phrase, needs to “get a grip.”
He made it to the top by running against his party’s leadership. A talent for administration was never part of that winning formula. Johnson led the referendum campaign to leave the European Union in defiance of the then Tory prime minister, David Cameron. At one private event I heard him cooly calculate the odds that there was no personal downside to rebellion. He also brought down Cameron’s successor, Theresa May, by opposing her Brexit deal with Brussels.
Now two years after his sweeping victory over the unelectable far left Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, Johnson’s problem is that he can’t run against himself. With Brexit done and the pandemic in abeyance, the buck for everything stops with him. A talent for improvisation is all very well, but what is the prime minister’s strategy? As the economic clouds darken, the UK needs to move from a just-in-time economy to a resilient just-in-case one.
The prime minister’s instinct is to reshuffle his pack. When he was overwhelmed by administrative chaos in his first year as mayor of London, he simply fired his top executives and replaced them with competent ones. Last month the prime minister sacked his Cabinet’s worst performers after standing by them for too long. But this revamped team needs a clear direction of travel.

—Bloomberg