Boris might be a winner, but he will not be the saviour of Toryism

Boris likes alliteration. The Boris Bus, Boris Bikes Etc. Now there’s a new one – the Boris Basket. A place some Tories are yearning to put all their eggs.

As I’ve written before, Boris is a tricky customer for the Labour Party. He could beat us (he might not, too, as others have argued). He will certainly be a popular man who has proved he can overshadow his Party’s nasty brand. At the height of the cuts – even at the height of the omnishambles budget – he remains and remained an incredibly popular figure. I don’t get it. I don’t like it. But I would be a fool to deny it.

So Tories see a winner – one who has proved he can beat Labour on what we think of as our turf – and they want to get a piece of that. I can understand that urge. But it would be a huge and disastrous long term mistake for the Tories to make to adopt Boris as their figurehead. To do so would be to accept the unelectabilty of the Tory brand once and for all. It’s would be the ultimate triumph of tactics over strategy.

A highly popular leader might save a lacklustre party for a while, but the Party has to have something to it beyond that leader. After 14 years of heartache and times Labour thought it would never be re-elected we found ourselves our own Boris in Blair. Like him, hate him or – like me – feel fairly neutral – Blair was the man with the charisma that the public fell for. They may disagree with it now. Most refuse to remember that they did once feel this way. But they did.

Under Blair Labour did a lot of the hard work necessary to change. We didn’t lose our values – though for all of us there were times when we questioned that. The Iraq war being the most obvious example, but some of the unobservant – even obsequious – attitudes towards the an untrammelled private sector is something we have paid for in our unbalanced economy and the difficulty we now have in proving we have learned about too free markets. Markets without moral guidelines. Markets without a state that knows when to let go but also knows when to step in.

But ultimately Labour did the hard yards. We did change. We have become a party that is comfortable in a skin more modern than Old Labour and more in touch with our ultimate aims and values and how to deliver them than New Labour. We are a party that sees to compromise with the electorate without compromising our core. It’s bloody hard. We get it wrong a lot. But both new, old and the mainstream rest of us in Labour have worked hard to get here, and the Party is better because of the work of all of us.

The Tories thought electing Cameron as leader would be enough to do that work. They thoguht that a smooth leader was modernity enough. That and some – admittedly excellent – social policies such as equal marriage. Sadly they lacked the hunger for change of the Labour Party. Less than half of Tory MPs voted for this flagship policy of change. They have never grown beyond the nasty party. Never learned their electoral lessons. Even when they couldn’t even win their best chance in 2010.They never changed in the way even their own were suggesting they had to.

If the Tories decide that Boris is the answer they will once again refuse to answer the deeper questions about their Party. The reason the electorate might trust them with the economy but not necessarily with their votes.

A leader who could be elected despite being a Tory is no long term plan for converting voters. Boris might win a few anti-politics votes for a while (though less I suspect as a Party leader) but he will do little to solve the problems the Tories have in the vast swathes of the country in which they are simply an option the voter can’t and won’t stomach.

“Let’s elect another white, posh, Etonian – they’re under-represented in politics as opposed to real life” is something you don’t hear much. It certainly nothing that any Tory strategist worth their salt should ever say. In fact – in a week where the Tories have lost a working class, northern woman from their front bench, the fact that we are now looking at Boris as the next leader is political insanity.

The cult of Boris may be the best hope for the Tories in the short term. But in the long term it will be the insanity that may be the final nail in the Tory coffin.

I despair for what the Tory revival might do. But as a gradualist, I know that ultimately the point is not just to change the government but change the political culture. The longer the Tories put off a true reckoning with reality, the less electable they become. Ultimately that inability to look at themselves in the mirror will be their downfall.