The Tories are in danger of learning the wrong lessons from Boris’s fall

When the Prime Minister heard that a delegation of Cabinet rebels were waiting in No 10, he insisted on seeing them one by one. Just as they had the same message for him – that the game was up – he had the same words for them. “I won 14 million votes,” he’d say. “They were won by me, not by the Conservative Party. I have a mandate and a duty to finish the job.” In other words: Tory MPs had no power, no right to take away what the public had given. It was a fundamental misunderstanding which, ultimately, destroyed his premiership.

Boris Johnson failed because he tried to impose a presidential model on a parliamentary democracy. He’s not a creature of Westminster and never built a tribe around him. His job, he thought, was to win and govern: theirs to follow orders and spread the word. It’s quite true no one else would have won the 80-seat majority and vanquished Corbynism. Probably no one else would have delivered Brexit. He was the perfect revolutionary, upending convention and breaking logjam. In Dominic Cummings, he had a ruthless and effective chief of staff.

But like many revolutionary leaders, he struggled to govern after the battle was won. The command-and-control model which Cummings helped him to build – with No 10 giving orders to a supine Cabinet – was alien to the Westminster system. Everything, then, depended on the quality of decisions coming out of No 10: no checks, no balances. No one to demand (for example) a proper assessment on whether lockdown would cause more harm than good. When Cummings left, this quasi-dictatorial system had no dictator. Chaos ensued.

Big policies were rushed through but not thought through: the Rwanda deportations and the lockdown last December only narrowly averted by a Cabinet revolt. “I’ve seen it close up: we have long been depriving voters of their right to competent government,” said one ex-Cabinet member. I’ve spoken to several loyalist ministers who willed Johnson to succeed, right up to the end. But the Chris Pincher debacle – “like the Catholic Church moving a bad priest from place to place”, as one minister puts it – disgusted them. Especially when No 10’s denials were, as they suspected, false.

More scandal is still expected. Johnson wants to tax steel imports in defiance of World Trade Organisation rules, for example, something his Cabinet colleagues believed had been done to win the votes of three red wall MPs in the last confidence vote. They’re appalled not just at the backroom deals and law-breaking (and what that says about Britain’s global reputation) but at what would follow. Under WTO rules, Britain would be vulnerable to retaliatory measures. Was this the point of Brexit? To be more protectionist than ever before?

It was Nadhim Zahawi, the Chancellor, who told Johnson in private that Westminster is like a herd – and that herd was now running against him. “He wanted a fan club but needed a team,” says one Cabinet member. “He was Meghan to our House of Windsor: he came in trying to act the celebrity and didn’t realise it’s all about service.”

The Conservatives, as a party, share the blame for this mess. They like power and tend to follow anyone who brings it – so they voted to raise National Insurance, in defiance of their manifesto pledges. They should have rebelled. Too many of them went along with lockdown, and to this day ask too few questions about its damage. As Johnson’s big-state Conservatism jacked taxes to a 72-year high, backbenchers pressured ministers for more spending still. The policy-based dinner clubs popular in the 1980s – the Bow Group, No Turning Back group – have no real equivalent now. Backbenchers are more likely to form lobbying groups for more pork-barrel spending.

Michael Gove taunted his fellow ministers for all this in his final Cabinet meeting: they were guilty, he said, of “fiscal Nimbyism”. They wanted spending cuts for lower taxes, but not in their own department. And this is the issue now. You can bet that almost every leadership candidate will advocate lower taxes, but how to finance this? Liz Truss and Nadhim Zahawi may both propose borrowing the cash: a fairly easy answer. Suella Braverman might offer more solid examples: rethinking HS2, for example, or cutting the green taxes associated with the net zero agenda.

There are important things to discuss in this leadership debate. Are the culture wars real – and worth fighting? Why on earth are 5 million people on out-of-work benefits during a worker shortage crisis? What does NHS reform look like, and would anyone vote for it? Where is this care home protection plan that Johnson promised? And if it doesn’t exist, might it be time to break the news to the public? Are the Tories ever going to cut state spending? If not, then why even pretend to be a low-tax party?

Now that Johnson has resigned, the Tories can finally stop moaning and move on to discussing what is broken – and how to fix it. But will we see candidates able to talk plainly about the mess they’re in? Or will it be the usual Tory circular firing squad, where the winner is whichever random soul happens to be left standing? “It’s very easy to see this all going very wrong,” admits one of the rebels. Labour has long argued that it’s not just Boris: that the Tories, as a party, have run out of ideas. Will this be the leadership race that proves it?

Johnson had planned a big speech on Monday, where he was going to lift income tax thresholds and abandon the planned corporation tax rise – the kind of measures that Rishi Sunak was dead against, saying they could only be financed by borrowing. “We were 24 hours away from bringing in a Conservative government,” one of Johnson’s last surviving allies tells me. Although just how conservative it is to make unfunded tax cuts is, of course, another question.

The best way to apologise for chaos is to bring something resembling order – which is why this leadership contest needs to be over as quickly as possible. Once the final two candidates are identified, party members should be given a few weeks – not all summer – to pick a winner. The kind of chaos that a leadership race imposes is justified only if the party is pretty sure it has a significant number of better ideas. Now is the time to hear them.