Boris Johnson’s comeback hopes are less than he thinks

It’s tempting to see Boris Johnson’s sudden resignation from the British Parliament on Friday night as just another twist in a serpentine career, a tactical retreat rather than a political epitaph.

After all, the language in his 1,035-word statement was provocative and insulted, laced with memories of the thunderous election victory he had won for the Conservative Party less than four years ago and pregnant with the possibility that he could do it again in the future.

As he has done on so many other occasions, Mr Johnson seemed to channel his political hero, Winston Churchill, the wartime British leader who was swept from power in 1945, only to return triumphantly to Downing Street six years later.

But this time political analysts were skeptical of a Churchillian restoration for Mr Johnson. With little support other than a bunch of hard Brexiteers in parliament, and a British public that has grown weary of the Boris soap opera, they said there was almost no plausible path back to power for him.

“There isn’t nearly as much support for Boris Johnson in the country as there is for, say, Donald Trump in the United States,” said Tim Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary, University of London. “The number of voters who will support him no matter what is much, much smaller.”

In addition, Mr Bale said, the British parliamentary system makes any Trump-style revival much more difficult. The current Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, and the Conservative Party leadership, among others, have a say in whether Johnson can run for another seat in the House of Commons.

“At the end of the day,” Bale said, “no politician is bigger than his party, and the vast majority of Tory MPs would like to see Boris Johnson back,” short for MPs.

That doesn’t mean he and other pundits write off Mr. Johnson’s chances altogether.

Mr Johnson, 58, has endured so many defeats and setbacks that it would be reckless to assume he has no future. The outlines of a comeback plan were clear in his statement from the scorched earth.

He was scathing about Mr. Sunak, an ally-turned-rival whose resignation as Chancellor of the Treasury last summer set in motion Mr. Johnson’s downfall. Mr Sunak, he said, had abandoned the Johnson administration’s ambitious goals, not least a comprehensive free trade agreement with the United States.

“When I left office last year, the government was only a handful of points behind in the polls. That gap has now widened enormously,” Mr Johnson said. “Only a few years after achieving the largest majority in nearly half a century, that majority is now clearly at risk.”

“Our party urgently needs to regain its sense of momentum and its belief in what this country can do,” he concluded.

With the opposition Labor Party holding a steady double-digit lead over the Conservatives in the polls, Sunak faces an uphill battle in the next election, due by January 2025.

While he has won credit for keeping the ship of state stable – not least the damage done to the British economy by the tax cut policies of Liz Truss, whose 44-day term as prime minister preceded his own – Mr. Sunak haunted by persistent inflation and the specter of a recession. After nearly 14 years in power, the Tories often seem to be an idealess party.

It is not at all clear that the party would remain with Mr Sunak as leader if defeated in the next general election. Mr Johnson’s strategy, Mr Bale said, would likely be to try to win another seat in parliament either before or shortly after that election – and then convince his vanquished party to turn to him as a savior.

The problem with this plan, analysts said, is that British voters really seem to have had enough of Mr Johnson’s rule-breaking ways. While he retains the affection of some mainstream Tories, the wider electorate has turned against him since a series of scandals — including parties breaking lockdown during the height of the coronavirus pandemic and his defense of a rapacious Tory lawmaker — forced him out of office .

According to a recent poll by market research firm Savanta, only 5 per cent of Labor or Liberal Democrat voters would support Mr Johnson’s return to Downing Street. Those numbers are particularly damaging to him as Mr Johnson built his party’s 2019 victory by attracting disenchanted Labor voters from the British Midlands and industrial north.

In the short term, Mr Johnson faced the prospect of losing his own seat following the release of a damning report from a House of Commons committee into whether he had lied to his colleagues about attending social gatherings during the pandemic.

The committee, which handed over a confidential copy of its findings to Mr Johnson last week, plans to make the report public on Monday. Among the expected recommendations is Mr Johnson’s suspension from parliament for at least 10 days, which could have led to by-elections in his constituency of Uxbridge and South Ruislip. That election will now be held without Mr. Johnson.

He could still try to run for a seat in a friendlier constituency, such as that of Nadine Dorries, a loyalist who announced just hours before Mr Johnson’s resignation on Friday that she would not run in the next election. There is also an open seat in Henley, which he represented once before.

But Mr Sunak and the Conservative leadership would have to approve Mr Johnson’s candidacy. Analysts said it was hard to see them do that given the headache he has caused the government.

For weeks, Mr. Johnson has been a blackberry under the saddle. He argued with the Cabinet Office over demands that he hand over his diaries and WhatsApp text messages to the official Covid-19 inquiry, pre-emptively offering to hand over the material in unedited form even as the government resisted . The drama diverted attention from Mr Sunak’s agenda and seemed calculated to embarrass the prime minister.

Given all this, Mr Johnson’s departure on Friday night could be seen as a way for him to shape the narrative ahead of the Parliament’s Privileges Committee report. He lashed out at the panel, saying it had produced “not a shred of evidence that I had knowingly or recklessly misled the House of Commons”.

“Their aim from the start was to find me guilty, regardless of the facts,” Mr Johnson wrote. “This is the definition of a kangaroo track.”

In his bitterness and sense of resentment, Mr. Johnson’s response drew parallels to that of former President Donald J. Trump, a politician to whom he is often compared, and who is now facing the fallout from his own scandals. It had not escaped the notice of political commentators in London that Mr Johnson’s departure from parliament came less than 24 hours after federal prosecutors in Washington charged Mr Trump with obstruction of justice in his handling of classified documents.

But the parallel, analysts say, has its limits. While Mr. Trump’s legal troubles are arguably far greater than Mr. Johnson’s, he remains the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. Despite all the headlines at his disposal, Mr. Johnson has no comparable political backing.

“Boris Johnson and Donald Trump both have a psychological need to suck up all the oxygen in the room,” said Jonathan Powell, who was Prime Minister Tony Blair’s chief of staff. “The problem for Boris Johnson is that he doesn’t get the same resonance as Trump with voters.”