Boris Johnson’s reign could make nothing more than a pub quiz question

So that’s it; save for accidents, Boris Johnson will be the UK’s 77th prime minister.

He won 66.3% of the vote; it was a strong performance and Team Johnson will be pleased with it.

There might be a twinge of disappointment that they were just shy of beating David Cameron’s winning margin (68%), but it will be just a twinge.

Johnson supporters will say that this is a mandate for his Brexit vision. In one sense, it clearly is.

As we already knew, the clear majority of Conservative Party members are comfortable with the idea of no deal.

We will hear about this mandate in the coming days and weeks (a mandate Theresa May lacked), indeed, it took mere seconds before Twitter was flooded with tweets like that from Conservative commentator Tim Montgomery: “A huge mandate for Boris Johnson, I hope every Tory MP was taking note.”

Yeah… good luck with that.

In a weird way, the Tory Party will shortly be embracing exactly the sort of internecine, party versus MPs approach to politics for which they have repeatedly attacked Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour for the last four years.

In some ways, they have little choice: Mr Johnson has no mandate from the public and a relatively slender one from Conservative MPs – don’t forget that 49% of Tories in the Commons voted for someone else.

The substantial mandate which Mr Johnson has, personally and politically, is from his members. His supporters will claim MPs must bend to that mandate, one which expressly pledged some enthusiasm for no deal.

But as we’ve learnt from the Corbyn experience, MPs don’t really conceive of themselves as delegates, to be instructed by their local party management. Most believe that the stakes surrounding no deal are so high that they will not care.

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This mandate will also not make a jot of difference to the parliamentary situation on the opposition benches, either.

The mandate Mr Johnson has received is from 66% of 0.3% of the electorate. The political legitimacy it confers is nugatory. This is a government with a working majority of two and if they lose the Brecon by-election, it’ll be one.

Sometimes listening to Conservatives during this election I have been reminded that they never seem to have properly internalised the fact that they lost their majority in 2017.

This government’s hold on power is shakier than any for decades. Mr Johnson’s will be even shaker. Its legitimacy, having lost that majority and now swapping even the prime minister who won them a minority, is wafer thin (no prime minister has given way to another minority prime minister in our modern history).

If Mr Johnson’s aim was merely to survive, as Jim Callaghan’s government’s was in the late 1970s, the outlook in the short to medium term might be rosier.

But his aim is not merely to survive but to resolve Brexit, indeed not merely to resolve Brexit but potentially force a no deal Brexit, something for which there is little support in parliament.

The fact that we now have definite proof that there is such support in the ranks of Tory members will be immaterial in the chamber of the House of Commons. A wise prime minister would recognise that.

I wonder how wise Mr Johnson will prove to be. Given just how attached to no deal he has proven to be, politically boxing himself into a yet tinier box than he was already in, an election (and one soon) must be inevitable.

The shortest serving prime minister was George Canning, who managed 119 days. If Mr Johnson falls before 19th November then he will replace Mr Canning as a mid-level pub quiz question.

Normally, save for death, there would almost be no question that this would happen. Extraordinarily, that prospect is not only conceivable, it is not even unlikely.

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(c) Sky News 2019: Boris Johnson’s reign could make nothing more than a pub quiz question