After Britain officially left the EU, the Brexit Party became ‘Reform,’ describing its mission as “reimagin[ing] how the state operates.” Its leading lights are now eyeing the possibility of welcoming into its ranks Boris Johnson—a career Tory politician who, as prime minister, spent three years operating the state.
Mr. Johnson was this month stripped of his parliamentary pass after MPs endorsed a report which said he lied about ‘Partygate.’ This has been followed by much discussion within the chattering class about where he will turn next. Some suggest he could become a member—perhaps even the leader—of Reform.
The party, which is understood to have sought first and foremost to take votes from the Tories, “stands ready to welcome him in an instant,” writes Trevor Kavanagh in The Sun: “Indeed, an offer is all but in the post.”
Reform leader Richard Tice has been coy about the idea in public, but he has very definitely not said “no.” He has made an effort to highlight that “we’ve got massive differences about net zero, about immigration.” (Mr. Johnson is for the first and has a very liberal view on the second; Reform stands in opposition on both fronts. The party also positions itself as being critical of the lockdown, implemented by none other than Boris Johnson.)
In the next breath, he said that “where we have the similarity is doing Brexit properly.”
In a separate though equally evasive interview, the Reform leader said:
We do all have … to protect the Brexit legacy because at the moment it’s being trashed by a useless existing government that doesn’t believe in it.
He failed to mention two rather fundamental points. First, Mr. Johnson’s support for Britain leaving the EU has always been known to be questionable, at best. Second, he was responsible for overseeing and signing off Britain’s official departure from the bloc and the deals which surrounded it—the very same deals that Reform officials enjoy tearing apart.
Mr. Tice went so far as to suggest that the former Tory leader “failed” to implement Brexit “properly” because of “the people around him.” It appears that the ‘Boris Myth,’ much like the ‘Thatcher Myth,’ is alive and well.
Former UKIP leader and current Reform President Nigel Farage has noted that “it’s the end of Boris Johnson in the Conservative Party … if he really wants to be in politics he is going to have to be part of some sort of centre-right realignment.”
He added that Mr. Johnson may opt for retirement from front-line politics, to give expensive speeches at lavish dinners in the most bourgeois regions of the world. Or there could be a return to writing; he has already landed himself a columnist role with The Daily Mail, choosing a fat-busting “wonder drug” as his first topic.
It appears, however, far more likely that Britons have yet to see the end of Mr. Johnson as, in the words of The Mail on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens, the figure is “too big a star to be written out of the soap opera.”
