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LONDON — When it comes to matters of the heart (or trousers), Boris Johnson always seems to hedge his bets. And it’s a tendency that has some colleagues worried.
The U.K. prime minister spent almost 48 hours backing his beleaguered Health Secretary Matt Hancock, who hit the headlines on Friday after pictures of him kissing a ministry colleague — by his own admission a breach of social distancing rules — were published in the Sun newspaper.
Johnson ignored calls for Hancock, one of the most public faces of the U.K.’s pandemic response, to be sacked. Instead, he insisted through his spokesman that he considered the matter closed following Hancock’s apology. And when Hancock — under intense pressure from his own party colleagues — did eventually resign on Saturday evening, Johnson said he was “sorry” and left the door open for Hancock’s return to high office.
On matters of conduct, Johnson, often depicted as a ruthless politician, has in fact repeatedly demonstrated a fierce loyalty toward colleagues under fire. His Home Secretary Priti Patel kept her job even after a bullying inquiry concluded she had broken the ministerial code of conduct.
His critics see a flagrant disregard for the standards expected of those in public office. The prime minister has a “very dangerous blind spot†over issues of integrity and conduct, Labour’s Shadow Housing Secretary Lucy Powell told Sky News on Sunday.
But it’s not just the opposition party taking swipes at Downing Street’s handling of the saga. The scandal has again left Conservative Party colleagues questioning their leader’s judgment, and wondering at what point the electorate might run out of patience.
“My sense is that the prime minister will get a greater degree of latitude than others from the country. I think he will probably be forgiven by them for this,” one MP on the government payroll said.
It would not be the first time much of the public has taken that view. Johnson, whose own infidelities are well-documented, won a huge majority in 2019, and performed well in last month’s local elections, shrugging off a row over how exactly the refurbishment of his Downing Street flat was paid for.
But the same MP voiced fears about longer-term damage from the Hancock affair. “You can’t do this regularly. There will just be some random thing which nobody sees coming, and doesn’t look that important on its own, but because it’s just the latest of a series of these problems over a number of years, the thing will just completely fall over,” they added.
“It is that sort of silent aggregation of perception in the background which at some point will just do us in.”
Hypocrisy charge
In the case of Hancock, hypocrisy, rather than infidelity, was the most potent charge.
The former health secretary had been outspoken in his criticism of other public figures who breached COVID-19 guidelines, and made a series of impassioned pleas to the public to obey the rules.
Neil Ferguson, an epidemiologist at Imperial College London, stood down from the government’s scientific advisory group last May after it was revealed that his married girlfriend had been visiting him at home at the height of national lockdown.
At the time, Hancock claimed to have been left “speechless†by the reports, and said he would back the police if they wanted to take action.
It’s a double standard not lost on Hancock’s opponents. Alan Johnson, a former Labour health secretary, told Sky the Cabinet minister’s resignation was “justified comeback” for the way he treated Ferguson.
Despite snap polling suggesting the public wanted Hancock gone, some in Westminster were expecting Johnson to stand by him.
“I’m a bit fatalistic about it because he doesn’t allow people to fall on their swords for personal reasons, because obviously that gets into all manner of broader conversations about more senior people,” the colleague quoted above said.
But it became clear the prime minister was in trouble when the usually buzzing Conservative Party WhatsApp group, of which Johnson is a member, went quiet. Even ambitious MPs who regularly offer enthusiastic support to Johnson in the group piped down, the same colleague said.
“You know you’re in trouble when the WhatsApp does go silent,” the same person said. “It happened with Brexit when [Johnson’s predecessor Theresa] May got her deal [on Brexit, which the party ultimately rejected, along with her leadership]. You could tell there were potential problems,” he said.
Some in government even argue the prime minister is too nice, and willing to protect colleagues despite their indiscretions. One Cabinet minister said Johnson had avoided sacking Hancock out of “humanity.”
Hancock did eventually face pressure from close allies of Johnson to resign, according to the same Cabinet minister, suggesting the prime minister was at least aware of the risk to public perception and thought it better for the health secretary go, even if he was not willing to wield the knife himself.
A former minister said the incident had left them wondering again about Johnson’s personality flaws, described as “not wanting to see conflict, a slowness to take decisions about certain things.”
“There are certain colleagues who he has blind spots about, and there are certain colleagues, even though they are competent and should be in his government, they aren’t because he wants to repay friends and be liked,” the former minister added.
Steady replacement
Johnson meanwhile appears to have heeded calls for stability — and avoided a wider reshuffle of his top team — in appointing the experienced former Chancellor of the Exchequer Sajid Javid as Hancock’s replacement.
Javid resigned as chancellor after Johnson asked him to sack all of his advisers as the prime minister’s office sought to exert more control over the Treasury. Javid had also repeatedly clashed with Dominic Cummings, the prime minister’s former top adviser who has now become one of his most ardent critics.
Javid hinted Sunday that he could be more open to lifting pandemic-related restrictions, telling reporters he wanted to return to normal “as quickly as possible†— a message that will go down well with increasingly restless Conservative backbenchers.
A former adviser to Javid, Salma Shah, told the BBC Javid’s view on restrictions “could be defined as a lot more liberal” than Hancock, predicting a “nuanced shift” away from his predecessor’s stance.
