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.