What makes the Bullingdon Club so infamous
is the members’ habit of smashing up the restaurants in which they hold their ‘events’
and then paying up on the spot for the damage caused. The act of paying for the
damage, in their eyes, somehow makes it all right to go around damaging other people’s
property as and when the urge takes them. In the process, it draws a clear line
between the wealthy who can afford to destroy first and pay later and the rest
who can only stand back and watch as years of work and investment is destroyed
in front of their eyes. And it reduces everything to its monetary value. But,
when the club leaves the premises, the owner is not out of pocket, and that, apparently, makes it OK.
It’s an attitude which has direct
parallels in the case of the Downing Street refurbishment undertaken by a
member of that infamous club. In this case, it’s not so much physical property
which has been damaged (although we can’t, yet, discount the possibility that
the nearly-new furniture removed from the flat has been skipped) as the rules,
conventions and laws under which things are supposed to happen. But, at the end
of the day, the PM has repaid the costs out of his own pocket (allegedly – it’s
still not clear how the money found its way into his pocket in the first
place), and that, apparently, makes it OK. It is, in his eyes, the end result
which matters, not the process of getting there. I’m sure that he’d be equally
forgiving of a bank robber who, when caught, repaid all the money. At that
point, the bank has lost nothing, so why make a fuss?
There is another parallel as well – when they
smashed up those restaurants, the money for reparations may well have come from
their own pockets at the time, but it was almost invariably put into those
pockets by someone else, usually the parents. And the expectation that that he
can and should be absolved of all blame by using someone else’s money to pay
for the consequences of his actions is another aspect of the Downing Street
saga. But what is there, in his background and life experience, which would
lead him to think otherwise? This is a man who has gone through his entire life
without ever having had to face up to the consequences of his own actions, a
man who has repeatedly found that lying brings rewards, not punishments
(literally in the case of many of his made-up and paid-for articles over the
years), a man who has always got away with ignoring the rules which apply to
others, a man who has demonstrated to his own satisfaction that the world takes
him at his own estimation of himself.
It isn’t just him, though. A whole
generation of politicians, and not all of them in the Conservative Party, have
outsourced any sense of morality and judgement to the people who make the
rules. They don’t need a moral compass, just a rule book, and if the rule book
doesn’t explicitly ban something then it’s permitted. Johnson has, admittedly,
taken that a step further in arguing, effectively, that as long as the outcome
meets the letter of the rules, then following the rules to get there is an unnecessary
hindrance on his freedom of action. But the people who put him there and defend
him daily, the members of his party, are equally culpable. Their moral compasses
seem to be incapable of telling them whether something is right or wrong,
merely whether the public care or not. If a sufficient proportion of the public
don’t care (as measured by opinion polls and elections) whether their leaders
are honest or not, if they don’t care about the integrity of their leaders,
then honesty and integrity don’t matter.
Perhaps the palpable anger of the PM
yesterday at the temerity of anyone daring to question what he does will mark a
turning point. Even some of his most loyal supporters in the media seem to be
turning against him. It would be nice to be able to say that they’ve all
discovered a sense of morality and outrage, but I can’t help but feel that it
has more to do with deciding that he looks like a loser after all. It’s not as
if any aspect of his character was ever unclear in advance.
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