Boris Johnson: John Major’s Evil Twin

The comparison might, at first, seem odd. Johnson and Major embody completely different conceptions of what the Conservative Party is or should be.

Majorism in some ways presaged Cameronism: liberal on economics; in favour of the UK’s membership of the Single Market; wary, unhappy resignation regarding the EU political project; interested in public sector reform through the introduction of market dynamics; and trying to strike a more conciliatory posture towards the party’s socio-economic ‘opponents’, in contrast to Thatcher and the Tory Right.

Johnsonism, at least in its aspirations, seems to be the opposite: nationalist; confrontational, not conciliatory; more interested in state intervention, or at least not philosophically opposed to it; not particularly interested in public sector reform; signalling a more rightist position on social and cultural values; and hostility to the Single Market and the EU political project. Johnson’s trashing of the political constitution is anathema to Major, who looked to Stanley Baldwin as the paradigm of constitutionalist, pragmatic, conciliatory non-statist conservatism.

This is why Johnson is Major’s ‘evil’ twin — his conservative politics are the inverse of Major’s. But why ‘twin’? I think Johnson and the Conservatives find themselves in the position Major and the party were in from the…