{"id":31061,"date":"2022-04-24T06:02:06","date_gmt":"2022-04-24T06:02:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cjstudents.com\/index.php\/2022\/04\/24\/have-britains-tories-been-in-power-too-long\/"},"modified":"2022-04-24T06:02:06","modified_gmt":"2022-04-24T06:02:06","slug":"have-britains-tories-been-in-power-too-long","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cjstudents.com\/index.php\/2022\/04\/24\/have-britains-tories-been-in-power-too-long\/","title":{"rendered":"Have Britain\u2019s Tories Been in Power Too Long?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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After winning a fourth consecutive general election in 1992, the U.K. Conservative Party chairman told then Prime Minister John Major that they had \u201cstretched the elastic\u201d as far as it would go. Soon after, it snapped.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The Tories had been in power for 13 years at that point and had become arrogant and complacent. Major\u2019s government became mired in sleaze and lost its sense of purpose. In 1997, Labour\u2019s Tony Blair became prime minister.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Boris Johnson\u2019s appetite for power seems to increase with every scandal, but after a fourth successive Tory triumph in 2019, the signs suggest that the elastic may once again be stretched quite far.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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This week, Johnson\u2019s Tory MPs decided neither to back him nor sack him over whether he misled Parliament over the \u201cpartygate\u201d scandal. That leaves him in a no man\u2019s land between being tolerated and rejected by the party he once commanded as an election-winner. Being fined by the police for breaking his own lockdown regulations made Johnson the first British leader to be found to have broken criminal law in office and the first to be investigated for contempt of the House of Commons.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Yet the prime minister\u2019s talent for delaying may still save his skin. Only fellow Tory MPs can remove him from office, and it helps that his strongest rival, Chancellor Rishi Sunak, has fallen from grace. But personal survival hardly amounts to a coherent government program, and that gap is becoming more widely noted, even among backbenchers once loath\u00a0to risk a change at the helm.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Perhaps sensing that, Johnson rallied his troops earlier this week asking them if they would prefer him \u2014\u00a0or Labour. But the more pressing question is whether they are starting to favor another Conservative. If this administration gives off a whiff of decay, then the parliamentary party exudes the stench of corruption. An alarming number of Tory MPs have fallen foul of the law in a dizzying variety of ways. The signs of unearned entitlement and drift are all there. Has the party been in power too long?\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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This is how seemingly impregnable governments \u2014\u00a0and Johnson has a 75-person strong Commons majority \u2014\u00a0collapse. It\u2019s not by dint of external pressure, but largely from within.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In the early 1960s, after 13 years of Tory rule, revelations of ministerial high jinks added to the sense that Britain had lost an empire and hadn\u2019t found a role. At the tail-end of an even longer period of supremacy in the \u201890s, Conservative politicians made front-page news for petty speculation and sex scandals. The Cold War had been won, but reform of the welfare state was clearly beyond an exhausted Tory government. \u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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After the last general election in 2019, Johnson \u201cgot Brexit done,\u201d as he promised. But what is this government\u2019s purpose now, 12 years after the Conservatives returned to power? Johnson\u2019s allies say he has been reborn as a Churchillian war leader. A \u201cmere\u201d police fine \u2014\u00a0though it may only be the first of many \u2014\u00a0is outweighed, they claim, by his stirring defiance of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. \u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy\u00a0has garlanded Johnson with praise,\u00a0but it is the British armed forces that deserve the real plaudits. While the politicians were talking about peace with Putin over the last six years, British (and American) soldiers prepared for war and passed on new weaponry and tactics to the Ukrainians.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Doing the right thing by Ukraine also doesn\u2019t fill the domestic policy vacuum. Voters, while supportive of the attempt to see off an international bully, are anxious about their domestic circumstances. And Britain has changed leaders in wartime for centuries \u2014\u00a0that\u2019s how Winston Churchill, who is Johnson\u2019s hero and declared role model, got the job.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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At home, the government\u2019s priorities are hard to discern. A few weeks back, it was set on solving the energy crunch,\u00a0although the prime minister was too terrified of losing the support of a few rural MPs to give planning permission for cheap and rapidly built onshore wind farms. \u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Then 10 Downing Street claimed that leveling up the differences between the post-industrial north of England and the affluent southeast was the real deal. But there is no money to fund the policy. This week, the media were briefed that No. 10 places \u201cBrexit opportunities\u201d at the heart of the government. Is that code for a tariff war with the European Union over Northern Ireland while a real war rages in eastern Europe?\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Unsurprisingly, voters are duly unimpressed. A poll in the London Times this week reveals that the Labour party is ahead in every policy area, including the economy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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A by-election in the northern seat of Wakefield has been triggered after the previous incumbent Tory MP Imran Khan was found guilty of sexually assaulting a minor after plying him with alcohol. After Khan\u2019s conviction, a veteran Conservative MP and former justice minister, Crispin Blunt, tweeted that his conviction \u201cwas nothing short of an international scandal.\u201d\u00a0He later apologized.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The grisly scandals keep multiplying. Another Tory MP, David Warburton, has just been suspended over multiple allegations of sexual assault. He told the Sunday Telegraph \u201che has enormous piles of defence.\u201d Andrew Bridgen, a Conservative MP given to lurid conspiracy theories, was last week found to have lied under oath in court in a multimillion-pound family dispute. He was accused of\u00a0pressuring\u00a0a police inspector to investigate his brother over false allegations of fraud.\u00a0(Bridgen called the ruling \u201cdisappointing.\u201d)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The party of law and order has lost its moral compass. The government has lost its way. Even though few leaders can bounce back from setbacks as defiantly as Boris Johnson, many on his own side are starting to wonder why he allows so many in the first place.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Martin Ivens was editor of the Sunday Times from 2013 to 2020 and was formerly its chief political commentator. He is a director of the Times Newspapers board.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com\/opinion<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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