Que signifie être le leader d’un gouvernement conservateur ‘one nation’ ? Le cas de Boris Johnson

Abstract

On 13 December 2019, in Downing Street, Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced the formation of what he called a “new One Nation Conservative Government, a people’s government”. A few months earlier, a dozen Conservatives had formed a One Nation Caucus1 in a bid to block candidates who backed no-deal Brexit in the leadership contest due to start upon Theresa May’s resignation as Prime Minister. Johnson was supposedly one such candidate and therefore not considered a One Nation Conservative by his colleagues who continued by issuing a manifesto that took aim at him. That there should be different factions within the Conservative Party is not surprising. However, what is One Nation Conservatism if two opposed factions can both claim the label as their own? The aim of this paper is to examine and compare the recent appeals to One Nation Conservatism, with a focus on the Conservative Party since David Cameron, in order to try and establish where to position the new Conservative PM in the long One Nation tradition. The approach will be a historical one with, in the first part, a presentation of One Nation Conservatism from its birth onwards that will enable us, in the second part, to assess whether it is possible to position Johnson in this intellectual tradition. The second part will examine Johnson’s One Nation Conservatism in relation to his two direct predecessors’. The third part will consider the more loaded charge that One Nation “in a way has just become a code term for trying to make the party electable and to keep the party electable” to quote Lord Biffen, himself a leading One Nation Conservative. If this is so, then is it possible to argue that Boris Johnson is merely an opportunist One Nation Conservative?