Boris Johnson was the most left-wing Tory prime minister ever – and that’s a problem for his successors

The best of Voices delivered to your inbox every week - from controversial columns to expert analysis Sign up for our free weekly Voices newsletter for expert opinion and columns Sign up to our free weekly Voices newsletter SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy policy When Kemi Badenoch said at the launch of her Conservative leadership campaign that the party had “talked right but governed left”, many people were puzzled. He elaborates in an interview with The Daily Telegraph to accompany the book’s publication: “The thing which always surprised me most was that Boris’s strongest supporters in the parliamentary party tended to be people who would identify themselves as being on the right, and I can only think that they were attracted to his cavalier elan rather than to the policies, because there’s no doubt that the Johnson government was governing to the left.” This is a brilliant illumination of how the combination of Brexit and Boris confused people. Indeed, the measures seem to have divided Johnson against himself, with Brady telling how he would one moment be ranting at the “effing scientists” and their “stupid two-metre rule” and the next demanding to know, when Brady complained about lockdowns, “How many people would you let die?” The part of Brady’s book that has been serialised so far does not cover, however, the most important respect in which the Johnson government was “left-wing” – namely on immigration. Yet Johnson’s “Australian-style points-based system” achieved the opposite, even allowing for the special cases of Ukraine, Hong Kong and Afghanistan.