Don’t bank on a better Boris

In the past century, only four British prime ministers have returned to 10 Downing Street after being ejected from office. As Boris Johnson attempts such a second coming only weeks after being ousted by his own MPs, the historical record suggests that if he returns from the political grave the resurrection won’t produce a miracle.

The first returnee from the ranks of the political undead was the Tory statesman Stanley Baldwin, a stolid and unflappable Worcestershire iron master. Indeed Baldwin got not only a second coming but a third too. Like Boris Johnson with Theresa May, Baldwin was primarily responsible for ousting a sitting Prime Minister when he denounced David Lloyd George as a destructive ‘dynamic force’ at the historic meeting in October 1922 that saw the birth of the 1922 Committee of Tory MPs.

Lloyd George was succeeded by the Tory leader Andrew Bonar Law, but Law was a dying man and when terminal throat cancer was diagnosed in May 1923 Baldwin became Prime Minister.