British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is likely to remember his India visit for all the wrong reasons. It produced little by way of any tangible outcome in India. Back in London, he lost control of his wavering band of MPs.
Just about all that was tangible was announced on the eve of the visit; a slew of investments and business deals between companies from the two countries worth about a billion pounds, with the creation of an announced 11,000 jobs. That then was a message to his constituents back home that he was delivering.
Added up the announced deals are significant, but they are not huge. Just Vijay Mallya and Nirav Modi each walked away with that level of money. Indian investments have in any case continued to rise steadily over recent years without a blessing from a prime ministerial visit. Indian companies operating in the UK now have an annual turnover in excess of 50 billion pounds.
The announcements were bunched up for the suggestion not just that Boris Johnson is delivering but that the Brexit he campaigned for is delivering. The big Indian trade deal has been a promise since the early days of campaigning for Brexit. Johnson’s visit was intended substantially to speed up that delivery.
To that extent, the visit succeeded if all goes to plan as declared. Johnson said he was confident that a free trade agreement can be in place by Diwali this year, not Christmas as targeted earlier. But huge areas of differences remain.
Officials from the two countries have listed 26 areas where they need to find agreement in order to sign a free trade deal. Of these, agreement has been reached so far on four, and these are relatively simple matters in goods and services.
These significantly do not include Scotch whisky, the most saleable British commodity in India that Boris Johnson has been particularly keen on. A great deal will have to be negotiated to get whisky on the table. No Indian government will want to be seen opening the gateways to flood the Indian market with Scotch without showing substantial gains in exchange. The end of the year will bring the 2024 general elections within sight in both countries.
Back home
Boris Johnson insisted when asked in Delhi that he expects to remain prime minister come Diwali when he foresees an FTA being signed. Not many in London share his muscular optimism. The entire band of Conservative MPs turned their backs on him just as he left for India.
Johnson has ordered the ruling Conservative Party whips to stall a parliamentary debate calling for referring Partygate to a privileges committee to determine whether Johnson wilfully misled Parliament in denying that he attended parties at Downing Street while ordering the rest of the nation into a strict lockdown. He has already been fined for one such breach, investigation into more is proceeding.
Conservative MPs refused to buckle. Johnson spent his arrival hours in Ahmedabad dealing with this crisis and eventually giving in to the demand for a parliamentary inquiry. The relative check in which he had kept party MPs vanished overnight.
Boris Johnson has returned to deal with a mess that grows bigger by the day instead of disappearing as he’d like it to. He now faces further police fines, and not many believe he can go on apologising for one breach after another.
Gray area
Following the police investigations, he will have to face up to a full report due to be submitted by civil servant Sue Gray who had declared a failure in leadership over the parties in her preliminary report. The full report is certain to be scathing in a far fuller way.
And now it transpires while Johnson was in India that a parliamentary inquiry will follow the publication of the Sue Gray report. And that will mean a public cross-examination of a closeness he has not had to face before. His usual one-liners won’t get him out of that cross-examination in a hurry.
Finally and not least, the voters will have a say as early as May 5 in elections to the local councils. Should that result in a sweep against the Conservatives, the MPs will read the writing on the wall that will say quite unambiguously that they might be next to go. No MP will put loyalty to Johnson above his or her own survival.
Johnson has managed to get a lot wrong throughout his term as prime minister. His prediction that he will still be PM in October may well turn out wrong too.
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