Backsliding, Populism and Hypermasculine Masculine Leadership: Prime minister Boris Johnson’s UK Conservative government

This paper contributes to the rapidly expanding scholarship on gender and right-wing populism which has, until recently, focused mainly on populism’s implications for gender equality, e.g. around reproductive rights and gender based violence, as well as on feminist responses to right-wing populist movements. Some political leaders’ hypermasculine leadership styles have important, but as yet under-theorised, links to contemporary populist politics (Eksi and Wood, 2019). Therefore the relationship between right-wing populism and hyper-masculine political leadership styles, and how hypermasculine leadership impacts on policy choices more broadly, needs more analysis (Loffler, Stark and Luyt, 2020; Starck and Luyt, 1019). Understanding hypermasculine leadership as ‘an exaggerated set of cultural norms and behaviours, usually associated with males, as a strategy for creating not just legitimacy but also a scenario of power itself’ that is not monolithic but contextually specific (Wood, 2016, p330), this paper explores UK Prime-minister Boris Johnson’s white English elite hypermasculinity (Waylen 2021). Amid accusations that the English Conservative party is succumbing to right-wing populism, there have also been claims that Johnson’s government is presiding over democratic backsliding and de-democratization not usually seen in consolidated democracies (Gauke 2019; Bale 2021; Whitehead 2020). The paper determines how far Boris Johnson’s particular form of performative upper-class hypermasculinity has influenced policy responses and communication strategies in four areas that are key to his government’s success, and also seen as evidence of its right-wing populist tendencies: namely ‘getting Brexit done’; its Covid-19 response; its ‘levelling up’ agenda and its foray into ‘culture wars’.