The threat to Johnson’s ‘national revival’ will come from within his own party | Will Hutton

The deal the prime minister struck with his party’s right will come back to haunt him when the economy slumps The brutal political reality is that, today, the playmaker in British politics is indisputably the Tory party. It has always had crucial advantages: it is as much an open tribe based on class, social status and culture as a political party. It has the slavish support of a partisan rightwing press. Its ideas may be in the electoral minority, but a divided opposition and a first-past-the-post system confer election victory after victory. It has an appetite for power shared globally only with the Chinese Communist party. Now, led by Boris Johnson, it is once again master of all it surveys. Its weakness is that with no fixed set of beliefs it regularly becomes transfixed by an ill-judged ideology – first Thatcherism and now Europhobia . The combination has led to its transformation, over the past 40 years, from a pro-European party to an anti-European one – both the precondition and ultimate cause of