Boris’s premiership is entering a dangerous new phase

The announcement of a tax increase for both workers and employers to fund more spending on health and social care is Boris Johnson’s biggest gamble since he won the 2019 general election. He is betting that, under the cover of Covid, he can get away with breaking his manifesto commitment not to raise personal taxes.

Voters can be unforgiving of politicians who break their promises. Johnson is aware of this danger. Earlier in the crisis, when the Treasury pushed to drop the pensions triple lock — which ensures that the state pension goes up by inflation, earnings or 2.5 per cent, whichever is highest — because the Covid crisis was making it unaffordable, Johnson resisted on the grounds it was a manifesto commitment. (The triple lock was suspended for a year on Tuesday as the Tories attempted to show that all the burden was not falling on the working-age population.)

Why has Johnson taken this huge risk? Firstly, there is the sheer size of the NHS waiting list — 5.45 million and counting. It is going to cost a lot of money to deal with the backlog that has built up during the pandemic. Unless the government cut heavily elsewhere, which would be difficult for Johnson given the brio with which he insisted there would be no return to austerity, there’s little option other than to raise taxes. As one cabinet minister reluctantly puts it, if the Tories go into the next election with an NHS waiting list of ten million or so, that is an even greater risk to their re-election chances than breaking their commitment not to raise people’s taxes.

Secondly, Johnson’s manifesto — and his words on first entering Downing Street — had committed him to fixing social care and ensuring that no one had to sell their home to pay for it.