Andrew Murrison: Boris Johnson could have resigned with his head held high – he didn’t
3 min read
On Tuesday 5 July I quit as a trade envoy, a minor post but one that was very important to me. Holding any position courtesy of the Prime Minister means buttoning your lip. I could no longer do so.
In the hours and days that followed a tsunami of government resignations made a visit by Pickfords inevitable.
It’s been a long burn. But for me the Archduke moment was Lord McDonald’s letter sent the previous day, Independence Day, to the parliamentary commissioner for standards. It flatly contradicted the Prime Minister’s account of the latest calamity – the Pincher affair. They couldn’t both be telling the truth. Having experienced Simon McDonald at the Foreign Office, it was plain to me who was.
Too often government’s response to the big issues of the day was to send out chaff
Boris and I were elected to Parliament at the same time – June 2001. He even kindly endorsed my first novel, Redemption. A Brexity one nation social liberal, I had no hesitation in backing his aborted leadership bid in 2016. By summer 2019, Boris was again asking colleagues for support. But he’d bottled it in 2016 and his record at the Foreign Office since had been mixed. I ended up backing him nevertheless. That was because he offered the only way out of a Brexit stalemate that was acting like a sheet anchor on our politics and our country. I do not regret that decision.
In the heady days immediately after the 2019 general election, I remember pumping Boris’ arm, gushing that his had every prospect of being a truly great premiership. He looked at me as if I was mad. It wasn’t long before I was starting to wonder myself.
It has never really been about partygate which, bad though it was, I saw as a symptom rather than the disease. The disease was the rolling chaos at No 10. Sure enough there were bright spots – the vaccine rollout was first rate after a bumpy start to the United Kingdom’s covid response, Rishi Sunak’s pandemic intervention saved the economy and newly nimble Britain took the, politically straightforward, decision to lead Europe in facing down Vladimir Putin.
But too often government’s response to the big issues of the day was to send out chaff when it should have been building a coherent, unifying narrative. Johnsonism as a political outlook never got off the ground.
Dispatching the Royal Navy to fix the Channel migrant crisis exemplified government by chaff. The government knew full well that it wouldn’t make any difference since the fundamentals hadn’t changed. But we were evidently prepared to risk the Navy’s reputation to grab an obliging headline. Jury’s out, but the Rwanda scheme is looking like a similar monument to short-term self-service.
And, yes, it is about those timeless virtues – honesty, decency, integrity. Standards in public life matter. The public has a sense that Parliament and its inhabitants should be the setters of standards, not backmarkers. I’ve been a registered medical practitioner since 1984, a commissioned officer in the regulars and reserves since 1980. In both I’m governed by accepted norms and codes of conduct that protect public and profession. Decent civil society depends on leaders upholding standards, not trashing them.
As late as February I was publicly supportive of Boris Johnson, even writing in The Guardian that its bien pensants could spit as many tacks as they liked, Johnson had got Brexit done. In my resignation letter six months later, reflecting on his achievements, I suggested that Boris could have left office with his head held high.
That option was no longer open to him by the time of his resignation speech outside No 10 on 7 July. I regret that very much.
Andrew Murrison is the Conservative MP for South West Wiltshire
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