Boris may surpass Churchill in his return from the wilderness

The political comeback is a contradictory concept: it’s an essential topic for columnists and political correspondents, and yet one for which their audience  have little sympathy. Offering party leaders a second or even third chance at glory seems today to be an old fashioned idea, and one that finds very little favour among voters. This is a departure from previous decades, when tolerance of defeat and failure, and therefore support for having another go, was far greater.

Take Winston Churchill, rejected as prime minister the first chance the public were given a say on the matter in 1945, but who stayed on as Leader of the Opposition and became prime minister for a second time six years later. Or Clem Attlee, his wartime coalition partner and successor at Number 10, who led his party to not one but two defeats in 1951 and 1955. Harold Wilson fought five general elections as Labour leader, including two after he had been kicked out of office in 1970. His Tory rival for more than a decade, Ted Heath, lost the 1966 election then went on to fight three more.

Since then, only two Labour leaders – and no Tory ones – have been allowed by their party to fight on after losing a general election. Neil Kinnock remained Labour leader even after losing the 1987 general election by a landslide, and Jeremy Corbyn persuaded his party and much of the country that Labour’s 2017 defeat had, in fact, been some form of victory. Neither example reveals Labour as a party that puts electoral victory above all else, and perhaps it is these examples that have ruined the way for their successors. There was certainly no public appetite for Gordon Brown or Ed Miliband to stay on after their defeats in 2010 and 2015 respectively. And no one genuinely believes that if Keir Starmer fails to win office in 2024, he will be given a second chance.

Perhaps all of this is yet another example of society’s impatience, its succumbing to the self-indulgence of instant gratification, where voters have no patience for those who can’t quite cut it on the night; their short attention spans in the age of Amazon and Instagram demand change and success at a far quicker pace than our parties’ internal processes can deliver. Politics now resembles a live audition on The X-Factor: one false step and the audience kicks you out.

None of this is conducive to healthy political outcomes, not least because we tend to dispose of political talent too early. Would Britain have been better off had we dispensed with Churchill’s or Wilson’s talents after one election loss? Alec Douglas-Home, having served as prime minister, had enough humility and commitment to public service to serve as foreign secretary in the cabinet of his successor as Tory leader, Ted Heath. In more recent times, former party leader William Hague returned to his front bench, also as foreign secretary. Few can reasonably claim that politics was not improved by the participation of both men.

Of course, losing elections is one thing; the Conservative parlour game of musical chairs, in which prime ministers are sacked, appointed and sacked again without the general public being consulted, is quite another. Nevertheless, given that there are now three ex-prime ministers on the Commons benches – there were none in the parliament to which I was first elected in 2001 – it seems odd that the general view seems to be that they must sit in silence, with no prospect of any sort of return.

It's doubtful that Liz Truss is seriously planning another pitch for her party’s leadership, yet the criticism she has triggered by merely putting her head above the parapet for the first time since her defenestration last autumn says more about the default setting of hysteria in our political debate than it says about her. Truss justifying what she did in office? No former leader has ever dared to do that!

And then there’s Boris Johnson. There’s always Boris Johnson. And it occurs to me that much of the confected anger against Truss isn’t about her at all; its target is actually Johnson, about whose return to Downing Street before the next election there is always speculation. Grown men and women lie awake at night, sobbing into their EU flag-printed duvets, petrified of the scenario in which Johnson replaces Rishi Sunak and leads his party into the next general election.

It is an unlikely scenario, of course, but post-the Brexit wars, no possibility, however bizarre, can be ruled out. The modern fashion for dispensing  with the services of political leaders too soon has not served Britain well. We may find out before too long whether the public is of a mind to reconsider that trend.