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19 September 2025 - 10:00am
A “Tory row” reportedly erupted during a reception coinciding with Donald Trump’s state visit this week. Such disputes among politicians can be healthy. Modern media, by making private disagreements increasingly public, has done little to strengthen democracy.
But as that horse has bolted, one does have to wonder in what universe Boris Johnson is living. According to a witness quoted by the Daily Telegraph, the man who presided over the “Boriswave” of mass immigration actually thinks he did the opposite. The paper reports that “Boris robustly defended his government’s record [and] argued that Brexit gives us powers to reduce immigration if we wish, and said he did reduce it. He also said we shouldn’t bash the contribution migrants make to Britain.”
What? It’s such a baffling claim that it’s difficult to know what to make of it. Johnson and Priti Patel, then Home Secretary, presided over a huge increase in net immigration. The long-awaited points-based immigration system does give the UK powers to reduce immigration in theory, but in practice the Johnson government made it extremely generous.
More bafflingly, the former prime minister has in the past admitted to this, however grudgingly, telling the Sun that this country needed “hands to do the work” in order to avoid, of all things, upward pressure on wages. So where does this nonsense come from? There is not a single definition of immigration by which Johnson could claim to have reduced it.
These comments have obvious implications for the dreams of the dwindling band of restorationists who are still waiting for the great man to return and save the Conservative Party. Yet it also speaks to a deeper problem: the Tories’ apparently congenital inability to confront honestly the reasons they failed in office.
Instead, both the Left and Right of the party initially retreated into their preferred fairy tales. The Right’s is that everything would have been fine if not for some shadowy Blob conspiracy; the Left’s is that everything would have been fine if David Cameron hadn’t “lurched to the Right” and offered a referendum on the EU.
Neither is prepared to confront their real problem, which is that the Right never made a sustained effort to effect meaningful change on any policy area except Brexit (with the fleeting exception of Liz Truss), while the Left got what it wanted on tax, immigration, public spending, and nearly everything else except Brexit.
The scale of the failure of the 2010-24 era of Conservative government demands deep self-criticism. But nobody seems minded to do it; even Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s bête noire, has eyes only for the motes in everyone else’s.
Kemi Badenoch’s paralysed leadership is another symptom of the same problem. By setting out no detailed diagnosis of the party’s problems, she effectively offered herself in last year’s leadership contest as an opportunity to hit the snooze button on the intellectual and ideological battles the Tories need desperately to have — and which Robert Jenrick, like him or not, would have precipitated. Both during the campaign and now, almost a year in, she can maintain unity only by sticking to banal recitations of the party’s professed values.
Let Johnson defend his record (for surely nobody else will). But, more importantly, disregard the cheap digs from Reform UK and let the Tories have it out. Lord knows it’s better than the alternative: if the public wanted a government that prioritised the outward appearance of unity over everything else, they would have re-elected Rishi Sunak.
