Introduction

In recent years, political messaging in the UK has taken a worrying manipulative turn, spreading ‘fake news’, manufacturing threats and claiming to break ‘politically correct’ taboos. Within this ‘post-truth’ political climate, trust in political institutions, the judiciary, experts and journalists has dramatically declined, while intolerance and violence have grown (Forkert et al, 2020). Such developments raise questions about the state of liberal democracy in the UK. In their book How Democracies Die, Levitsky and Ziblatt (2018, pp 5–7) investigate the takeover of states not by violent rebellions but by ‘would-be authoritarian’ and autocratic leaders ‘at the ballot box’, who, in the course of democratic elections, ‘subvert the very process that brought them to power’ (Levitsky and Ziblatt, 2018, p 3). Elsewhere, we have argued that ‘Britain in a time of Brexit is an arena of populist politics’ (Guderjan and Wilding, 2020). Although various authors (Taggart, 2004, p 276; Decker, 2006, p 18; Leach, 2015, p 200; Judis, 2016; Freeden, 2017, p 9) have conceived of populist movements as short-lived and as struggling once in office, populists in power do not necessarily ‘selfdestruct’ but ‘seek to establish a new populist constitution’ (Muller, 2016, p 52). So what happens if populists in government foster distrust in the state and political institutions?

The case of the UK government and especially the former prime minister, Boris Johnson, is especially illustrative of the fortunes of populists in government. Based on polling data, in April 2020 Boris Johnson's approval rates were at a high. In May 2021, when we started writing this chapter, views of his performance as prime minister were balanced (48 per cent approved and 47 per cent disapproved). By the end of 2021, however, less than a quarter of respondents thought of him as doing well, while over 70 per cent rated him badly (YouGov, 2022). Aside from an initial success story about vaccination rates during the COVID-19 pandemic, the government's track record was characterised by failures, scandals, misinformation and Uturns in policy direction.

In this chapter, we will therefore examine how populist politics have played out since Boris Johnson's coming to power. We want to explain the initial appeal of his administration and gain a better understanding of the nature of populism in the UK.