LONDON — For an ordinary politician, heading into midterm
elections on an unsavory plume of scandal over cellphone contacts with
billionaires and a suspiciously funded apartment makeover might seem like the
recipe for a thumping. But Prime Minister
Boris Johnson of Britain is not an
ordinary politician.
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As voters in the country go to the polls Thursday for regional
and local elections that have been swollen by races postponed from last year because
of the pandemic, Johnson’s Conservative Party stands to make gains against a
Labour Party that has struggled to make the ethical accusations against him
stick.
Far from humbling a wayward prime minister, the elections could
extend a realignment in British politics that began in 2019 when the
Conservative Party won a landslide general election victory. That would put the
Labour leader, Keir Starmer, on the back foot and ratify Johnson’s status as a
kind of political unicorn.
“No politician in the democratic West can escape the
consequences of political gravity forever, but Boris Johnson has shown a
greater capacity to do it than most,” said Tony Travers, a professor of
politics at the London School of Economics. “People see his behavior as
evidence of his authenticity.”
Yet there is peril as well as promise for Johnson in the
elections, which will decide thousands of seats, including that of London’s
mayor, and which the British press has perhaps inevitably nicknamed “Super
Thursday.”
In
Scotland, the Scottish National Party could win a clear
majority in Scotland’s Parliament that the nationalists would brandish as a
powerful mandate to demand another referendum on independence from the United
Kingdom after an earlier one was defeated in 2014.
In the English elections, the big prize is Hartlepool, a
struggling northern port city and Labour bastion where a new poll suggests that
the Conservatives could win a bellwether seat in a parliamentary by-election.
The Tories could make further inroads in other Labour cities and towns in the
industrial Midlands and North, where they picked off dozens of seats in 2019,
running on Johnson’s promise to “Get Brexit Done.”
The prime minister did get Brexit done, as of January. Yet while
the split with the European Union brought predicted chaos in shipments of
British seafood and higher customs fees on European goods, its effects have
been eclipsed by the pandemic — a twist that ended up working to the government’s
benefit.
Although the pandemic began as a negative story for Johnson,
with a dilatory response to the first wave of infections that left Britain with
the highest death toll in Europe, it turned around with the nation’s rapid
rollout of vaccines.
As new cases, hospitalizations and deaths have plunged, voters
have rediscovered their affection for Johnson. His poll numbers rebounded from
their lows last fall and show little damage from the charges and countercharges
about his conduct, even though those have riveted London’s political circles.
More important, Johnson’s message of “leveling up” the
economically blighted Midlands and North with the more prosperous south still
seems to resonate with people, including many who traditionally voted for
Labour. And the government’s free-spending response to the pandemic has pulled
the Conservative Party even further from its roots as the party of fiscal
austerity.
“The party of Margaret Thatcher is becoming the party of a big
state and higher taxes, which can quite easily become the party of economic
nationalism and ‘Buy British,’” said Travers, the London School of Economics
professor.
For Starmer, the Labour leader, this shape shifting has been
confounding. A disciplined former prosecutor who lacks Johnson’s raffish
manner, he has found it difficult to attack the government on its pandemic
response, particularly the vaccine rollout, which is the largest peacetime mobilization
in British history.
Instead, Starmer has grilled Johnson in Parliament weekly about
who picked up the initial bill for the upgrade of his apartment and why he was
texting the billionaire James Dyson about the tax status of his employees, when
the two were discussing a plan for Dyson’s company to manufacture ventilators.
But there is little evidence that voters are particularly
surprised or concerned that Johnson does not play by the rules. As political
commentators have taken to saying this week, the prime minister’s behavior is “priced
in.”
The same is not true of Scottish independence. Analysts say
Johnson’s government is not prepared for the wall of pressure it will face if
the Scottish National Party wins a majority. The last time the party achieved
that, in 2011, Britain’s then-prime minister, David Cameron, yielded to demands
for a referendum. In 2014, Scots voted against leaving Britain by 55 percent to
44 percent.
Polls now put the split at roughly 50-50, after a stretch in
which the pro-independence vote was solidly above 50 percent. Analysts
attribute the slight softening of support to both the vaccine rollout, which
showed the merits of staying in the union, as well as an ugly political dispute
within Scottish nationalist ranks.
Johnson holds a trump card of sorts. To be legally binding, an
independence referendum would almost certainly have to gain the assent of the
British government, so the prime minister can simply say no and hope the
problem goes away. But that strategy can work for only so long before becoming
untenable.
“I don’t see any way in the world that Boris Johnson turns
around the day after the election and says, ‘OK, you can have a referendum,’”
said Nicola McEwen, a professor of politics at the University of Edinburgh.
And yet the calls could only grow. “If they manage to peel off a
single-party majority,” she said, “it does put pressure on the
UK to answer the
question, ‘If a democratic vote isn’t a mandate for independence, then what is?’”
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