How bad has Boris Johnson’s start as prime minister really been?

It’s been a tough week back in parliament, but if Boris Johnson is looking for some comfort, he should look at his prime ministerial predecessors, writes Sean O'Grady

Just how long does the prime minister have? (PA)

Despite a shaky start and an uncertain future, Boris Johnson has to last only until mid-November to avoid being the shortest-serving British premier in history. Having lost more important votes more rapidly and immediately than any of his 76 predecessors and with no options left to break out of the trap his opponents have created for him, Johnson seems destined to rank amongst both the least effective and shortest of premierships.

Yet there is competition, quite apart from George Canning, who, after 119 days in office in 1827, succumbed to pneumonia. His last words were “Spain and Portugal”. In the past hundred years, the closest parallel to the current crisis and Johnson’s dilemmas is probably Stanley Baldwin. Although now remembered as a towering figure who, with Ramsay MacDonald, dominated the politics of the inter-war era, Baldwin too had a terrible start to his premiership. He inherited the premiership in May 1923 after the departure of his Conservative colleague, prime minister Andrew Bonar Law, due to ill health. Baldwin then had to decide upon a Brexit-style great trade issue.

The question, which bedevilled British politics and divided the Tory party bitterly for decades, was whether the UK should be a fully free-trading nation, tariff-free and open to the world; or whether it should operate a policy of “Imperial preference”, in which tariffs and the barriers to trade would be imposed on imports to the UK (including on foodstuffs and grains), but with lower or no duties levied on produce from the British Empire. Thus – hence the contemporary echo – there would be a bigger import tax on, say, dairy produce, meat or wheat imported from continental Europe than on equivalent produce from Canada, New Zealand or Australia.

Though Baldwin believed in the policy, he felt that he had to obtain a mandate from the people to introduce it, and therefore called a general election – scheduled for late in the year, 6 December 1923. Baldwin’s gamble failed, and he lost the overall majority the Tories had gained at the November 1922 election.

Baldwin did head the largest party, by some margin, in the Commons, but it was a hung parliament, and he felt he had no choice but to resign and make way for one of the opposition parties. That could have either been MacDonald’s Labour Party, which came second, or HH Asquith’s Liberals, who’d finished third. Asquith passed on the opportunity, and thus Britain’s first Labour government was formed by a man many regarded as little more than a Bolshevik Marxist extremist, the Jeremy Corbyn of his time.

MacDonald’s government didn’t manage to achieve much, in the circumstances, but the historic symbolism of a working-class cabinet was obviously powerful. After a few months, the Labour government fell, oddly enough with a scandal about Russian interference in British politics hanging over it (based on a probable forgery).

Nor were the Baldwin and MacDonald episodes entirely isolated. So rocky was Sir Alec Douglas-Home’s support in his own party in 1963 that when the Queen asked him if he could form a government – the usual formal courtesy – he was forced to reply: “I’ll try.” He did remarkably well in the year he had in power.

Short-lived governments plagued by having little or no majority in parliament but simultaneously trying to tackle monumental issues are more common than is often believed. We have to look back only as far as John Major’s troubled administration in the mid-1990s (again wrecked by rows about European integration) to see that. Other examples would be the Callaghan government of 1976-79 (though it lost relatively few votes and the cabinet stuck together even under severe economic pressures); and the short premiership of Anthony Eden 1955-57, infamously destroyed by the Suez crisis, an episode in which the realities of diminished British power and status proved a body blow to the political class. The parallels hardly need labouring.

And so Boris Johnson is not quite alone as he trudges up and down the famous stairs in 10 Downing Street, past the portraits of so many past premiers, famous and obscure, successes and failures. He might derive some comfort, if not inspiration, from their troubles. Governing ain’t easy.