As Britons anticipate leaving lockdown July 19, the Conservative Party stands at a crossroads. How does it keep faith with the British people? Of the United Kingdom’s independence from the European Union, Brexiteers can paraphrase Sir Winston Churchill: Freed from the centralizing forces of Brussels, the UK is at “the end of the beginning” of reclaiming its freedoms. Yet in striving to satisfy the spirit of Brexit — “maximal liberty and minimal government” — the UK is far indeed from “the beginning of the end.”

Before further advances can be made on the Brexit route, a stumbling block must be addressed. For he who was instrumental in making Brexit a reality — both at the 2016 EU Referendum and Brexit’s rocky road through Parliament three years later — is also the author of the current crisis of “independence” in Britain. Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Or, as BoJo may presume, independence for me but not for thee.

Witness the Prime Minister’s stewardship of his fellow Tories. For close to a century, backbench Tory MPs have gathered as a “1922 Committee” (named after a ginger group of Conservative members elected in 1922). There, the parliamentary party organize themselves at Westminster and keep watch over their leadership. The current chairman, Sir Graham Brady, emerged victorious in last week’s recent election of officers, but barely. His own Conservative Government conspired against him.

Though Tories with ministerial roles are kept at arms’ length from the ’22 due to considerations of “conflict of interest” — constituting a “payroll vote,” in parliamentary parlance — it was known that Prime Minister Johnson wanted Sir Graham ousted from his oversight position. The 1922 Chairman had the effrontery to question the benefits of lockdown, its terms, and its financial burdens to the country.

At the beginning of the year, Sir Graham voiced his dismay at “pointness restrictions” and “nonsensical interventions” that, he feared, were “infantilizing people.” All part of an MP’s responsibility to Crown and Country. BoJo was not amused. Instead, Heather Wheeler, MP was rumored to be the Prime Minister’s choice to assume the chairman’s role. Such “favoritism” is clearly contrary to the 1922’s spirit. The Committee serves as the focal point for internal parliamentary debate.

When 15% of Conservative MPs submit written requests for a leadership review, the ensuing balloting is undertaken under its aegis. Chairmen may support the party leader; but such support is never a condition of holding the position. To be sure, all along the Brexit path, Mr. Johnson’s contribution has been contentious. His Telegraph dispatches from Brussels were instrumental in informing Britons about the EU’s penchant for further centralization and aggrandisement of its powers.

Once he asserted his credentials, it turned out that Brexiteers were willing to trust him, in his own words, to “Get Brexit Done.” Yet now many advocates of independence, seeing with what ease the Johnson Ministry imposes lockdown after lockdown, and breaks its pledge to restore civil liberties “unimpaired,” are muttering “mea culpas” in remorse. Such self-flagellation is futile. Hindsight only obscures the fact that at the time, BoJo seemed the man for the job.

“There are cases in which a man would be ashamed not to have been imposed on,” Edmund Burke once confessed. “There is a confidence necessary to human intercourse, and without which men are often more injured by their own suspicions than they would be by the perfidy of others.”

With independence achieved, Brexiteers aghast at Boris’s current doings can condone having been “imposed on,” then. Now, though, it is a different story. There is no further need to feel obliged to Boris. Tory MPs must ask themselves, is their allegiance to “conservative principles” or to the “Conservative Government”? If the principles lead them to privilege individual responsibility, entrepreneurial freedom, and a limited state, then they stand in stark contrast to putative Conservatives in power.

Cynicism suggests that parliamentary careers hang in the balance. Although the Conservatives enjoyed great electoral success in May, even winning Hartlepool, a seat held by the Labor Party since the seat’s creation in 1974, that flooding tide is beginning to ebb. Labor defied the odds two weeks ago, to hold the seat of Batley and Spen, a ridingTories assumed was theirs. Meanwhile, the left-leaning Liberal Democratic Party won last month the “safe” Conservative seat of Chesham and Amersham.

The Tories are tied to a wildly expensive white elephant called high-speed rail. Critics call the project economically pointless, while environmentalists and locals lament the loss of woodlands. Mixed with recriminations of construction industry cronyism, HS2 presents a fatal combination.

Thus the Conservative crossroads. As lockdowns are set to wind down in England, will Tory MPs see to it that the Government remains true to the Brexit message of independence? Or, as is feared, with further lockdowns looming with the approach of winter, will the Conservative Party betray its vow to defend the liberties of the British people, who made their decision for independence so unambiguously five years ago?

________

BrexitDiarist@gmail.com