Maybe we need a 'bad chaps' theory of government

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In a plot twist so obvious and predictable that even Nadine Dorries would have avoided writing it, it has emerged that former PM Boris Johnson appears to have been using the public funds allocated to his office, alongside his contacts made whilst in office, to enrich himself. Yawn. Labour’s Margaret Hodge declared that the reports suggest that “Boris Johnson is prepared to break the ethical standards of behaviour” (yawn again) and appeared to have acted “with complete impunity” (double yawn). From a man who has gone through life ignoring all rules and doing as he pleased to satisfy his own needs and desires, none of this is a shock or even a mild surprise. None of which stopped the Lib Dems’ Cabinet Office spokesperson Sarah Olney from declaring that “These allegations are extremely shocking”. Anyone genuinely shocked by these allegations would probably also be surprised to discover that the Pope is a Catholic. Even the Lib Dems can’t be that naïve.

The Guardian’s report also states that: “Revelations from the Boris Files will place pressure on Johnson to explain how some of his recent contacts with foreign governments on behalf of commercial interest fall within the rules”. No they won’t. This is a man completely impervious to pressure or criticism, and who adheres to the Mary Poppins maxim of never explaining anything. In this case, the ‘rules’ he has broken appear to be both unwritten and unenforceable. All the revelations really prove is that the ‘good chap’ theory of government only works when those involved are ‘good chaps’. But there is no mechanism for ensuring that they are – or for dealing with those who aren’t. And we already knew that.

Not criminal enough. Yet.

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With the elimination of Priti Patel from the Tory leadership race, the party has lost what, on the face of it, appeared to be one of their best chances of continuing the run of selecting only the naughtiest of candidates for the top post. Being sacked for conducting her own foreign policy and being found to have bullied civil servants (even if let off by her then boss) are the sort of misdeeds which ought to have elevated her to the top of the list given her party’s recent predilection for rogues and rule-breakers. She might have been pretty nasty in her period as Home Secretary and rather too fond of Farage, but amongst the Tory Party membership those were supposed to be assets.

Whilst May’s naughty doings – or at least the ones she owned up to – were limited to running through a farmer’s wheatfield, her successor set the bar high for those who would follow. And Johnson, of course, did indeed set a really high bar. Being sacked for lying – twice – being involved in a (failed) plot to beat up a journalist, making up stories for newspapers, to say nothing of being fined for breaches of his own Covid regulations: it was a tough act to follow. Whilst his successor, Liz Truss, had what has subsequently been revealed to be a somewhat tenuous grip on reality, to say nothing of a weird obsession with cheese, she really couldn’t compete. That was probably one of the factors in the brevity of her tenure in the role. Sunak did rather better, being fined for both breaching the Covid regulations and the seat belt law, even if his household benefitting from non-dom tax rules didn’t amount to a crime in the eyes of the law (I wonder who made, or failed to change, the law?).

Given Jenrick’s past record in relation to the Covid regulations (even if he somehow escaped a prosecution or fine) and granting what some might think was dodgy planning consent to a Tory donor, he is justifiably leading the field after the first round of voting. It’s not exactly on the Johnsonian scale, and may owe more to the so-far apparently clean character of the competition. But if any of the other four are serious about wanting the job, they need to either come clean about any past misdeeds, or get out there and start committing some. They can hardly expect the diminishing Tory membership to vote for someone who might turn out to be a fine upstanding citizen after all. Any expectation that they can win on that basis is showing a colossal misunderstanding of the values of the party they seek to lead.

Could we get that lucky?

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It’s long struck me as being a curious aspect of the world of football that a manager who leads one team to trophy after trophy turns out to be an utter failure when he transfers to another team, and that a manager who has a hopeless record with one team goes on to have a huge run of success with another. It’s almost as if what matters is whether the team is functioning well or not rather than the attributes of the manager. If the team is dysfunctional, it doesn’t matter how good the manager is, the team will continue to fail.

None of that only applies in football, of course; and that latter point about appointing a new manager not making any difference to an utterly dysfunctional team is one which the English Conservative and Unionist Party has already tested to destruction. Although that hasn’t deterred them from seizing the current contest as an opportunity to add further proof to the theorem.

There is another strange parallel between the two worlds as well. No matter how badly a manager does with one team before being sacked, there will always be some fans who believe either that he should be brought back to try again, or else that, despite all the evidence, he is the obvious candidate for any management job which comes along. And that brings us to Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. Having wrecked what rather likes to call itself “the world’s most successful party”, he is still being suggested and promoted for other jobs, where he would be free to wreck other organisations. Last week, we were told that he was being lined up to wreck the Daily Telegraph. Don’t get me wrong here – wrecking the Torygraph would be almost as big a favour to the UK as wrecking the Tory Party – it’s just that I somehow doubt that that is quite what his backers have in mind. Although, given his demonstrated propensity to swing between giving Johnson his total support and then pulling the rug from under him, perhaps Zahawi is really planning to sack him a day or two after taking control.

Ten months ago, it was reported that Johnson was going to become a presenter on GB News, although he has yet to make his debut performance. I don’t know whether he’s been paid for that ten months, but it’s at least possible that GB News would prefer to pay him for not turning up and wrecking their channel. It would almost be a sign of intelligence amongst channel bosses. And taking the money without doing very much for it isn’t exactly new. Johnson was, apparently, paid an advance of £88,000 for a book on Shakespeare for publication in 2016. The publishers are still waiting. Fortunately, he’s found a different publisher for his memoirs, who have apparently stumped up £510,000 for the privilege of publishing the tome, if it’s ever finished. That last may turn out to be another triumph of hope over experience.

Throughout it all, his long-term fans and sycophants still hold on to dreams about him returning to once again take the reins of a party in crisis, forgetting his role in creating that existential crisis in the first place. Perhaps their dreams will come true in the next or next but one leadership election (they can surely fit at least two more in before the next election) – but could we really get that lucky?

Dealing with the lying liars

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Last week saw the publication of manifestos by most of the parties. On the basis of scanning them, it is clear that amongst his first acts, in the unlikely event of his being re-elected, Rishi Sunak is clandestinely planning to reintroduce workhouses, award Vladimir Putin a peerage, and start a war with France. His manifesto doesn’t say any of that, of course – but neither does it explicitly rule any of it out. Given that the Tory attack on Labour is now largely reduced to accusing them of planning a variety of tax rises on the basis that the Labour manifesto doesn’t explicitly rule them out, why shouldn’t the same approach be applied to their own manifesto? And why stop at taxes?

Objectively for those who take the trouble to assess the different party statements, it’s a pretty stupid and pathetic approach to electioneering, and it smacks of desperation. But the lesson that they have learnt from Sunak’s predecessor but one is that making stuff up and repeating it even louder when challenged can work. The hope is that enough people remember the lie and forget the detailed rebuttal to swing their votes in the desired direction, particularly if they really want to believe the lie. (Although why keep these aims secret? Who, among the target audience for the Tories, doesn’t secretly like the idea of a decent war against France? Even if that audience would probably prefer to take on Germany. Again.)

There are, as the saying doesn’t quite go, lies, damned lies and political manifestos. The idea that ‘politicians always lie’ is commonplace, and in the sense that what governments deliver isn’t quite what their manifestos said they were going to deliver, it has the ring of truth. And whilst that is sometimes down to lying, it’s more often a case of exaggeration and wishful thinking – and circumstances can and do change. But recent years – the Johnson/Trump era stands out as marking the transition – have changed the nature of political lying. It’s no longer ‘just’ a case of exaggerated promises, it’s now direct, repeated and deliberate falsification of objectively provable facts. The ‘alternative facts’ are actively promoted by partisan print media and grossly inflated by the echo chambers of social media. The BBC have a reasonably good fact-checking service, but in their caution they struggle to be as blunt in their assessment of lies as they could be – and even after demonstrating the untruth of any given statement, they seem quite happy to invite the liars back to repeat the same lies again the following day.

There was an attempt in the Senedd recently, led by Plaid, to criminalise lying by politicians. It was somewhat droll, to say the least, to see it supported by the Tories, given that they have been the main culprits in recent years. It probably underlines the fact, though, that they don’t really believe that the law can successfully be applied to what they have been doing. I suspect that their assessment of the probability of such a law being effectively used against a Johnson or a Sunak is accurate, implying that they want the kudos from being seen to oppose political lying but without any danger that it would actually restrict them from doing so. They would hardly have supported it if it really meant that they would no longer be able to refer to ‘blanket’ 20mph speed limits, for example. It’s a problem to which there is no simple solution. In an ideal world, the miscreants would be rewarded with ‘nul points’ when the votes are counted. Sunak might be doing his best to move his party towards such a scenario, but he won’t be around for long afterwards (his promise to serve a full five year term on the opposition benches should be treated as just another example of the genre) and finding a successor who won’t simply double down on the same approach is looking like an impossible task. It looks like a problem with which we’re stuck.

With one bound...

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‘Dick Barton – Special Agent’ was a hit radio series which ran from 1946 until early 1951, which means that the final episode was broadcast before I was even born. That’s one of the very few things that I have in common with Boris Johnson. My knowledge of the catchphrase which grew up around it is not, therefore, based on any direct memory, merely the way in which an older generation used it from time to time. Whatever difficult situation the hero was in at the end of one episode, he managed to suddenly escape at the beginning of the next – hence, “with one bound, he was free”. I don’t know whether Johnson is familiar with the catchphrase, but it sounds like the approach to difficult situations on which he has always been able to rely.

There was a story in the Sunday Times this week (£paywall, but summarised here in the Guardian) about ‘allies’ of Johnson (i.e. people who he hasn’t yet betrayed, and who labour under the delusion that he won’t do so in future either) having been engaged in discussions with Farage to mount a cunning plan, under which Johnson would woo Farage to rejoin the Tories and mount a reverse take-over of the party. There are more than a few minor obstacles to overcome first:

1.    Farage has to stand for election – and win a seat

2.    Johnson has to persuade one of the few remaining Tory MPs after the election, in a very safe seat, to give up a £90,000 a year job and disappear into obscurity so that he can stand instead

3.    The central Tory Party have to accept a disgraced former PM and serial liar as a suitable person to represent the party, and the local association have to select him as their candidate for the by-election, despite everyone knowing that he will inevitably bring the party into further disrepute and that he is standing with the express intention of undermining and usurping whoever happens to be the leader at the time

4.    The electorate have to elect said disgraced former PM and compulsive liar as their MP

5.    Once he gets into the House of Commons, he has to somehow persuade a Labour-dominated chamber to set aside his 90-day suspension for misleading parliament, the implementation of which he avoided by resigning before he could be sacked. If he fails, he will presumably be immediately suspended from parliament giving the electors a chance to demand a recall by-election. In that case, steps 3 and 4 above need to be repeated.

6.    He then needs to persuade Farage to swap parties and join the Tories, despite Farage’s visceral opposition to many of Johnson’s policies on issues such as net zero

It’s quite a list. Even the scriptwriters for Dick Barton might have at least cavilled at the scale of the single bound which was necessary to extricate the hero from that predicament. The real killer for the cunning plan, though, comes after all of that, because one of the two men would then need to agree to play second fiddle to the other. And that is beyond the limits of anything which might be remotely credible. Yet it seems that there really are people in the Tory Party who seriously believe that this is their party’s way forward after the forthcoming trouncing. Dick Barton was, of course, the product of fantasy. It’s a fact which seems strangely relevant here.

That Venezuelan trip

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A couple of weeks ago, it emerged that Boris Johnson had undertaken what was described as a ‘private’ trip to see the president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro. The extent to which this was genuinely an ‘unofficial’ trip seemed to me at the time to be doubtful, given the reports that the Foreign Office had ‘supported and briefed’ the disgraced former PM before the visit, even if it was really true that the Foreign Secretary knew nothing about it until Johnson was already en route to Caracas. It still seems unlikely to me that he would have been briefed and supported without the knowledge of Cameron, and it does seem as if the Foreign Office are less than forthcoming over what advice and support they did or did not give.

Doubts about the idea that Johnson would have paid for the trip himself were entirely well-founded, since it turns out that it was being paid for by the boss of a hedge fund. Classic Boris Johnson. Better yet, it turns out that he was actually being paid by the hedge fund to undertake the trip. Again, classic Boris Johnson. And that it was part of a job which he’s taken on without going through the normal vetting process for former ministers. Classic Boris Johnson squared.

It's easy to understand why the president of Venezuela, the hedgie, and Johnson would like to normalise relations between Venezuela and the West – in the first case because poor relationships are damaging to his country, in the second because poor relationships reduce the opportunities to make money, and in the third because he was being paid to attend the meeting, and he can’t resist the pull of being thought important. It remains a lot less clear why any of those involved thought that a meeting with a disgraced former PM, with no influence over anything, would help to achieve any of those aims except those of Johnson himself. If nobody had given Maduro the impression that Johnson still had some influence, why on earth would he have agreed to meet him?

The Labour Party seem to be concentrating their fire on Johnson’s apparent breach of the rules, but that’s just Johnson being Johnson. He’s never believed that any rules apply to him, so of course he breaks them. And given that he has form on precisely this particular rule, it’s reasonable to conclude that the breach was entirely conscious and deliberate. So what? Another breach of the rules is just business as usual for the man. The bigger question is about what the Foreign Office were up to. Did they really brief and support Johnson for the visit, and do so without informing the Foreign Secretary? Did they really believe that Johnson was a suitable person to carry out a potentially delicate diplomatic task? And put their resources to work in support of a hedge fund’s profit aspirations? Did they really lead Maduro to believe that Johnson was acting in at least a semi-official capacity in order to facilitate the meeting? It seems unlikely that the meeting would have taken place otherwise. Helping to organise and prepare for a meeting whose main aim is to further the accumulation of private profit for a hedge fund that happens to employ an ex-PM seems to me a much bigger scandal than Johnson merely breaking a few rules. Again.

Officially unofficial

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The reports over the weekend that Boris Johnson has been engaging in some ‘unofficial’ diplomacy by meeting the president of Venezuela raise a number of questions. The first, but probably least important, is who paid for the private jet to take him there and back? His spokesperson said that the travel was privately funded and that neither government contributed to the cost. That might be true (although we know from other recent news that the UK government is not averse to funnelling funds through third parties to disguise the source). The one thing of which we can be certain is that Johnson didn’t pay himself. He is a man who has achieved the minor financial miracle of earning ludicrous sums of money for doing very little, getting other people to pay for everything he wants, and still being perpetually broke.

A more significant question is how the meeting came to be arranged. I don’t know whether Johnson and Maduro had ever met before, but they don’t exactly look like the sort of bosom buddies who would pick up the phone and agree to meet for a conversation which ‘sources close to the former PM’ (according to the Sunday Times) described as “one-way traffic”, with Johnson laying down the law to Maduro. So who initiated the meeting between a busy head of state and a disgraced former PM with no role in foreign policy who just happened to be on holiday a mere 1,000km away? Was it Johnson: “Nicolás, old chum. Boris here. I happen to be staying in the Dominican Republic just up the road from you, and I have a private jet at my disposal for the day. Why don’t I nip down to give you a little lecture about democracy and your role in the world?”. And if that sounds unlikely, consider the alternative: “Boris, mi amigo. A little pájaro tells me that you are staying just an hour and a half away from here by plane. Why don’t you blag a private jet from one of your rich friends for the day and nip down to give me a little lecture on democracia?”. I don’t buy either.

And then we’re told that Lord Cameron of Chipping Bollocks didn’t know anything about it until Johnson texted him en route: “Dave, old boy. Boris here. Just flying down to Caracas to give that Maduro chappie an earful about his responsibilities to democracy and the world. Thought that the Foreign Secretary might want to know about it. Toodle-pip!” None of it adds up – it’s far more likely that there was some discussion at a diplomatic level to set up the meeting, implying that both governments are keen for a restoration of some sort of normality in relations. If Maduro really thought that Johnson had absolutely no status with the UK government, why on earth would he ever have agreed to meet him? He can’t have been expecting a friendly fireside chat. In short, this ‘unofficial’ visit looks about as unofficial as a tax demand from HMRC. And if Cameron really didn’t know about it sooner, then someone in his department has been freelancing big time.

But, if it was an official 'unofficial' visit, that brings us to the biggest question of all. Who, in his or her right mind, thought that it would be a good idea to entrust a disgraced former PM, who is also a compulsive liar with a predisposition to saying the first thing that comes into his head, with acting as the conduit for sensitive discussions with a foreign government? The chances of him accurately relaying the UK government’s position to Maduro, and then accurately relaying Maduro’s response to the UK government are not exactly high. He's much more likely to deliver an insult or three in the belief that it’s just banter and good humour. And whether Cameron knew about the visit in advance or not, is it credible that the current PM would not have known that his predecessor but one was being deployed on an ‘unofficial’ diplomatic mission of a certain delicacy? Jobs for failed ex-PMs is becoming a Sunak speciality. Next up? Theresa May as head of an initiative to welcome new citizens? Liz Truss as next head of the Office for Budget Responsibility? If he’s given up on all hope of turning things around, Sunak can at least spend the next few months having a laugh.

Chaos and normality

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According to the last person but one to become a disgraced former PM of the UK, what the world really needs is another four years of a Trump presidency in America. For context, and to help establish the degree of credibility which his words should be accorded, it’s worth noting that he almost certainly also believes that the UK needs another decade or two under his own leadership, although he didn’t actually say that on this occasion.

His logic, to the extent that the word can ever be applied to any of Johnson’s utterances, is that he simply doesn’t believe that Trump will do what he says he will do. In itself, given Trump’s somewhat loose relationship with truth, that’s not a wholly unreasonable assumption; and given Johnson’s own passing acquaintance with the truth, it’s easy enough to see how he might believe that saying one thing to get elected and then doing the opposite is an entirely normal political process. The problem, though, is that he is assuming that, in departing from what he says on the campaign trail, Trump will back down rather than double down. Nothing, so it is said, is impossible, although the idea of a truthful statement emerging from the mouth of either Trump or Johnson might come pretty close to that.

Johnson’s faith in the idea that Trump will agree a trade deal with the UK which favours anyone except the USA at the same time as launching a trade war with the EU may be touching, but it is surely the stuff of fantasy. The only thing that we can prophesy with any degree of confidence about a second Trump presidency is four years of chaos. And given his reluctance to leave office last time, coupled with his disregard for the law and determination to take virtually absolute power to himself, there’s no certainty that it would only last four years either. Still, I suppose ‘chaos’ is what Johnson would regard as normality.

Coincidence and probability

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Lots of people struggle to understand the way probability works, and the fact that some ‘coincidences’ are relatively easy to predict. The classic example is the birthday problem which shows that in any group of 23 people, there is a 50% probability that 2 of them will share a birthday, and as the number in the group increases, so the probability also increases, until it becomes close to a certainty in a group of around 50. With there being 365 days in a year, it’s a result which just ‘feels’ wrong to most of us.

Other ‘coincidences’ are rather harder to predict. Millions of people update or replace their smart phones every week, and most of the time, it’s a process which is smooth and painless; but for a tiny minority something goes wrong and data is lost. That can also happen even if the phone isn't being replaced, although finger problems rather than technological ones are a likelier cause. I don’t know what the probability of that happening to any one individual is, but it’s going to be a very small number. It would be an amazing coincidence if three people who worked closely together all managed to lose all the data from precisely the same time period, and it's not an outcome which many people well-versed in probability theory would predict. It would be even more astounding if those same messages were then found to have mysteriously disappeared from the phones of those who had received them as well.

Still, being vanishingly unlikely isn’t the same as having a probability of zero, and sometimes highly unlikely events can happen. One doesn’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to wonder, though, whether there might not be a simpler and more probable explanation, perhaps relating to questions such as honesty and truthfulness.

Market forces are failing to date

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It is axiomatic for Conservatives that ‘the markets’ can and will solve problems – it’s just a question of matching buyers and sellers. It’s an axiom which is coming under some pressure in relation to the Rwanda scheme. Those who own the aeroplanes are concerned about reputational damage if they become involved and the Home Office has so far failed to locate any planes which can be made available. It’s not because there aren’t any, it’s rather that the ‘sellers’ of aeroplane services aren’t willing to provide those services to the ‘buyers’, for reasons which (in the Holy Grail of capitalist economics) are a distortion of the market because they have nothing to do with money. For the purists, money is the only driver in economics.

Perhaps capitalist economics will reassert itself if the buyer is prepared to offer such a high price that the sellers will ‘take the money and run’. Turning reputational damage into filthy lucre would hardly be a first. It may even be something that a certain Conservative peer might be able to assist with. She has no planes of course, but a lack of capacity to produce useable PPE proved not to be a bar either. And Chris Grayling managed to contract ferry companies with no ships, so there’s plenty of precedent. If the pile of filthy lucre is high enough, capitalism decrees that someone should eventually respond. But if the market does indeed fail, fall back plans seem to consist of hiring a plane in unbranded livery and hoping no-one will find out who owns it (probability: close to zero) or using RAF planes rather than commercial ones.

The Rwanda scheme isn’t the first occasion on which a government has rushed into a plan with a lack of detailed planning and preparation, and it won’t be the last. But it’s certainly shaping up to be one of the worst debacles in recent times. But then, the initial announcement was never intended to be taken seriously; it was always a Johnson-style plan to divert attention in the short term from his own behaviour. Sunak could have scrapped it within days of taking office (Johnson really wouldn’t have cared, although he might have huffed and puffed a bit just for show); how and why Sunak decided to double down on a half-baked plan which was never going to work is something which is likely to become an essay question for future students of the decline and fall of the Conservative Party.

Running the numbers

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In an attempt to estimate how many technically advanced civilizations there are in the galaxy, astronomer Frank Drake came up with the eponymous Drake Equation in 1961. It was intended to identify the factors which might be involved in determining an answer, and its shortness and elegance betrays the complexity and difficulty involved in assigning values to the assorted variables. For the mathematically-minded, it also shows how a galaxy with an apparently enormous number of stars can contain either a very low or a very high number of civilizations – and of particular relevance here, it’s an illustration of how the compound multiplication of low probabilities can rapidly reduce a large probability into a small one.

Some Tories have their own version of the equation (although they may not have realised that fact themselves as yet) – we might call it the Boris Johnson Comeback Equation. It sets out how their revered ex-leader might turn out to be their revered future leader. It all depends on the assumptions we make about the numbers. To pull off this feat, a number of things need to happen, each of which has a finite and non-zero probability:

a)   He needs to be accepted again as a suitable candidate by his party, some of whom may have become a little wiser with the passage of time

b)   He needs to find a Tory in a safe seat who is willing to step aside in his favour (and ‘safe’ doesn’t have the meaning that it used to have in the years B.J. (Before Johnson)

c)    He then needs to win the subsequent by-election, during which much of the attention will be on his past lies and failings

d)   He needs to persuade his fellow MPs in the House of Commons to back him as leader (despite the fact that it was they who deposed him in the first place), or at least put him in second place so that the vote goes to the party membership

e)   He needs to win the backing of those party members.

Even if the probability of all five individual factors is 90%, multiplying them together using the formula:

Probability = abcde

gives as a probability of only 60% for success; and 90% seems ‘generous’ for at least some of those factors. For those in the Tory Party who have repeatedly shown themselves to be mathematically challenged (including, of course, the man himself), none of this is a problem. And, or so the theory goes, once back in post he can elevate Nigel Farage to the Lords, appoint him as deputy PM and Home Secretary, and call an election during which his famous campaigning skills will see him sweep to victory over Labour.

Thos famous campaigning skills include, of course, hiding in a fridge to avoid reporters and refusing to be interviewed by anyone who might ask him difficult questions. Whilst it’s true that the Tories did win a general election under his leadership, ascribing the victory entirely to the leader is a leap which ignores the fact that the leader of the opposition was widely portrayed as unelectable, and that the issue of the day was Brexit, in the time before a more realistic assessment of the ‘benefits’ set in. There’s always a debate between two views of history – the one sees the movement of social and political forces, whilst the other concentrates on ‘Great Men’. Whilst Johnson clearly subscribes to the latter view, the idea that he is one of them is a bit of a stretch, to say the least. The suggestion that an election in which Johnson were the leader of the Tories would or could do other than concentrate on his many proven failings and lies is a strange one, particularly given the extent to which so many are disillusioned with Brexit and closely associate it with Johnson and Farage. Has the Tory Party become so utterly deranged that it would follow such a path? Opinions may differ, but the fact that it can’t be entirely ruled out tells us a lot about how far down the path to insanity they have travelled.

Catching the PM by surprise

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When the pandemic struck, it seems to have come as a complete surprise to Boris Johnson that the hopelessly underfunded NHS and Social Care systems had not sorted out what he called the “decades-old problem of delayed discharges”, meaning that something like 30% of hospital beds were occupied by people who didn’t need to be in a hospital at all. He’s probably going to be even more surprised, not to say angry, when he finds out who had been in charge for the previous decade, and who had been cutting budgets for the whole of that period. On second thoughts, probably not. Everything that happened before 2019, in his mind, was the fault of a different government and party. It’s only in the world that the rest of us live in where there’s any connection between the two.

Nature's Way

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Yesterday’s session of the Covid inquiry heard suggestions that Boris Johnson saw the virus as “nature’s way of dealing with old people”. For once he may have been, albeit only slightly, unfairly quoted. What he actually said was that his party believed that to be the case; as for himself, he merely said that he wasn’t entirely sure that he disagreed. It’s an important distinction, and it’s one that does make a difference. Whilst the rats seem to be quite happy to desert a sinking ship those who were closest to him seem quite happy to heap the blame on one man, the issue which should worry us more is that the phrase reflects the thinking of the government party as a whole. And it really isn’t that surprising.

Covid has been just one example of a mindset which thinks that the only important people in society are ‘working people’, and especially ‘hard-working people’ (and it’s worth noting in passing that on this point, as on so many others, the difference between the Tories and Labour is striking mostly for its absence). It is a philosophical viewpoint which, as often commented on this blog, places the needs of ‘the economy’ above those of ordinary people, and sees most of us as nothing more than resources to be exploited in the interests of that ‘economy’. But the ‘economy’ isn’t some amorphous undefined general good; from their perspective, ‘the economy’ is all about companies and businesses, not people. Enriching those who own and run those companies is the main purpose of economic activity; others simply sell their labour. And if people have no labour to sell – the old and the vulnerable – then they are disposable. Johnson may, on behalf of his party, have put it in starker terms – more honest terms, even, an unusual word to use in relation to Johnson – than his colleagues, but it would be a mistake to let the others off the hook just because of his rare burst of honesty. ‘Eat out to help the virus spread’ was simply one example of that philosophy in action – the interests of the businesses concerned were seen by the then Chancellor as trumping the interests of those who would die as a result. Sunak may not have put things in such forthright language as Johnson, but he’s every bit as guilty, and we shouldn’t allow anger with Johnson’s insouciance to cloud that fact.

Another thing we learned yesterday is that the PM’s then communications chief, Lee Cain – a man whose principal claim to fame is having dressed as a chicken to pursue David Cameron around the country during the 2010 election – believed that Covid was the wrong crisis for this particular PM (i.e. Johnson). ‘Wrong sort of crisis’ might make it sound as though he’s competing with Thérèse Coffey for that job at Network Rail, but while it has a certain air of truth, it leaves one very big question unanswered – exactly what sort of crisis would have been the right one to have someone like Johnson in charge?

What could possibly go wrong?

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The deliberately misnamed television channel, GB ‘News’, has found itself in some difficulties recently. It  was forced to sack or suspend presenters over misogyny, and has been criticised for a lack of the balance expected of any proper news outlet, although the latter seems a tad unfair given that, despite its name, it makes no pretence of broadcasting news, merely opinion. With those difficulties as background, I struggle to imagine the internal discussions which led to some bright spark suggesting that the way forward was to hire the worst misogynist and most compulsive liar that they could find, let alone that such suggestion was then acted upon. Announcing the decision the day after it was revealed that the Covid inquiry will this week be presented with a veritable feast of misogyny and foul language in messages exchanged between Johnson and Cummings is surely just having a laugh.

Johnson has regularly managed to display his misogyny, racism and disregard for the truth in columns written for various newspapers over the years, but everything we’ve seen there has been through various stages of editing and proof-reading before it appeared. Now they’re going to give him a live television show, circumventing all that checking and editing. What could possibly go wrong? As far as I’m aware, no bookmakers are currently offering odds on how long it will be before he gets sacked from this job, but it surely can’t be long. Will it all be over by Christmas? Or will he manage to drag it out until he has laid waste to GB News in the way he managed to do for the Conservative Party?

Will Sunak call an election for next month?

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Not because he thinks he’s got any chance of winning it, obviously. That ship sailed and sank a long time ago, and is now lying in pieces at the bottom of the ocean somewhere. The attraction of a snap election lies elsewhere, in the slow-moving but ever more incriminating Covid-19 inquiry. The long-awaited appearance of Sunak and Johnson before the judge leading the inquiry was delayed once because of the party conference season, but it will take another significant factor to delay it a second time, and in the absence of such an event, both men are currently slated to appear during November. In the meantime, the inquiry has had a chance to see and consider some highly incriminating emails, which reveal, amongst other things, that the UK’s top civil servant thought that the government looked like a tragic joke, and that Sunak’s ‘eat out to help out’ scheme was launched with no consultation with the scientists and experts, whose opinion was that it would only help to spread the disease. It’s hard to see how either man can face the judge and KCs without having what remains of their reputations shredded, very publicly. Calling a snap election would be like pushing the pause button. Again.

It's probable that Johnson believes that he can bluster and obfuscate his way through any difficult questions, just as he used to do at PM’s Questions in the House of Commons, blaming Labour, the Civil Service, the media – anyone but himself. He is, quite possibly, stupid enough to think that a judge whose sole task is to get to the truth can be treated like a Speaker whose main task is to referee a bun fight, and that eminent KCs asking precise and difficult questions can be batted away by calling them names as though they were opposition politicians. Maybe Sunak even thinks the same way – his approach to PMQs certainly seems to mirror that of his former boss, albeit minus the snobbish classical references, and without the confidence born of complete and utter shamelessness. But what about the people around them giving them advice? Do they really have so few functioning neurons between them that they cannot see the train crash which awaits their bosses in just a few short weeks?

Calling an election wouldn’t prevent the train from crashing, of course; it would merely delay it – and by not much more than a few weeks at that. And a shredded reputation is still a shredded reputation. But holding an election before it gets shredded might just save a few more seats than waiting until after the shredder has finished its work. There must surely be someone advising him who can see what’s about to happen. Or is it time to order additional stocks of popcorn?

Maintaining the human stock?

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Population size is one of the hardest questions for politicians to tackle. But using the simple and obvious truth that it is impossible to make unlimited use of limited resources, the relationship between an ever-increasing human population and the impact of humanity of the planet is inescapable. Malthus may have been wrong with his specific prediction two centuries ago that rising population would necessarily lead to famine, but he had a point with the underlying principle.

Just a few days ago, Jake (or ‘Sirjake’ as we should probably now call him) was telling us that the UK needed more babies, and he had done his bit by producing six. It was now time, he said, for younger people to take over and produce more children. We should perhaps be grateful for small mercies – it’s hard to think of much that the world needs less than a few more Rees-Moggs. He probably thinks Boris Johnson has also done his bit by producing eight children (other numbers are, apparently, available). Given his support for the two-child cap on Child Benefit, he presumably wants to limit large families to the wealthiest in society, rather than encourage just anyone to have more children, echoing the concerns of the late Keith Joseph about the breeding proclivities of social classes four and five, which, as a later acolyte put it in even blunter terms, threatens the quality of the ‘human stock’. Quite apart from the racist and exceptionalist undertones, I can’t help thinking that they haven’t really thought this through. Coupled with their aversion to immigration, a population growth imbalance between the poor and the rich means that either the children of the rich have to do the jobs which the poorest are usually expected to do (Sixtus Rees-Mogg and Wilf Johnson flipping burgers or sweeping the roads together for the rest of their lives makes an unlikely picture) or see such jobs go undone. But then, people living very comfortable lives and measuring everything in terms only of its cash value have never been able to understand the real worth of the myriad of tasks performed by ‘the little people’ which are necessary to sustain their comfort.

What we do know is that the wealthiest countries in the world sustain their life style by using more than their fair share of the planet’s resources – and we find the same imbalance within the populations of those countries as well. Whilst there are arguments to be had about the methodology and assumptions used to arrive at the detail of such conclusions, there is no real argument about the basic message: if everyone lived the lifestyle of the richest, the earth’s resources would be depleted instead of sustained for the use of future generations. For those of us who can see that obvious truth, it is clear that continued population growth – particularly amongst the ‘most entitled’ demographic groups – depends on maintaining and increasing inequality and inequity (and that is, of course, core to the political philosophy of the Sirjakes of this world). From their perspective, human aspiration in the many is to be resisted at all costs; people should know their place, and stay there. Comfort and wealth for the few, drudgery and poverty for the many, is the golden thread of their political philosophy – it underpins their attitude to refugees, wages, cost of living pressures, public services and much more. They get away with it by persuading the slightly less poor that the even poorer are the problem, and the extent of their success in doing that was underlined by this article in the Guardian on Tuesday. It should be shocking to realise how many believe that the poorer should not be allowed any luxuries, hobbies, or leisure, as though poverty is entirely their own fault and sufficient to deny them any sort of life outside of their existence as workers. But it actually merely underlines how easy it is for those who control the levers to manipulate opinion and turn us against each other.

Perhaps we really are doomed

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One of the less endearing traits of politics, in Wales as much as in England, is the habit some politicians have of campaigning against their own party’s policies in order to get elected. In Wales, it’s commonplace when the Labour government wants to make changes to the NHS to see Labour candidates and elected members purporting to ‘lead’ the opposition to their own government’s proposals; more locally, Labour councillors are more than happy to ‘lead’ campaigns against school proposals put forward by their own authority. For some strange reason, it seems to work – voters really are bamboozled into thinking that members of the ruling party can indeed be relied upon to stop their own party’s proposals.

We saw a variation on that yesterday in the by-election in Boris Johnson’s old seat, which the Tories largely succeeded in turning into a one-issue campaign against the extended Low Emission Zone (ULEZ). They presented it as though it was all the fault of that evil mayor, Sadiq Khan; but as Richard Murphy has pointed out today, that simply isn’t true. The original idea of the zone was born under the mayoralty of a certain B. Johnson, and the extension of the zone to include areas such as Uxbridge was imposed on Khan by the Tory Transport Minister, Grant Shapps (other names for the same person are available), with the very specific aim of raising cash for Transport for London, as a condition of a grant. So when the Tories attack the ‘anti-car’ policies designed to raise money from motorists, they’re actually attacking their own policy. And it seems to have worked.

It's probably no surprise that the likes of Jake, Frosty and Deadwood have leapt onto the bandwagon and demanded that the Tories abandon all net-zero policies because they are unpopular. I’m pretty certain that uncontrolled climate change will be unpopular too, but unfortunately the inexorable changes being caused by human activity are stubbornly refusing to submit themselves to the UK’s electoral cycle. Within the Tory Party itself, they’re pushing at an open door – short term profit will always be seen as the priority. The more worrying aspect is that the increasingly probable next government is also frightened by the prospect of electoral damage as a result of supporting net-zero policies. Starmer has already back-tracked significantly on the issue, as on so many others. What we need is leadership; politicians prepared to spell out the consequences of not acting. What we’re getting is politicians who are willing to say whatever makes them popular today, and hang the consequences. We really do seem to be doomed.

The inescapable shadow haunting the Tories

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It was probably predictable that the Tory campaign in Boris Johnson’s former constituency would seek to distance itself as much as possible from the former MP, although it was rather less predictable that they would also seek to distance themselves from the current PM and the entire Conservative Party itself. But desperate times call for desperate measures, and that is exactly what they have done, producing a leaflet which manages to avoid all mention of both the former MP and the party of which he (and presumably the new candidate?) is a member. I can’t really say that I blame them for giving it a try – last roll of the dice and all that. And honesty isn’t exactly what they are best known for anyway.

But the other thing that struck me was that the leaflet refers to the candidate instead as the ‘Stop ULEZ candidate’ and the election itself as the ‘Stop ULEZ by-election’, in an overt attempt to turn the by-election into a referendum on the expansion of the ULEZ scheme in London. Now my memory isn’t what it used to be, and I could be wrong on this, but I’m sure that I remember the Tories telling the SNP that they could not claim that the next Scottish election was a referendum on a new vote on independence. I could have sworn that there were words along the lines of ‘it’s not for one party to determine what an election is about’. Perhaps that was a different Conservative Party – there seem to be so many of them co-existing under the same label these days that it's hard to keep track. Or maybe it’s just another example of their standard modus operandi – honesty and consistency, like dignity, are grossly overrated commodites. That Johnson-shaped shadow is not as easy to shake off as they might wish - his approach to the truth has become deeply ingrained in his party.

"Make it so"

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It is a cornerstone of the English constitution that Parliament has absolute sovereignty over all things, and was granted that sovereignty by the monarch acting in the name of god. The unshakeable belief in the truth of that proposition can lead feeble-minded MPs into a mindset where parliament merely has to declare something to be so for it to become so. As an example of that, the last-but-one Prime Minister has come up with what he clearly thinks is a wizard wheeze to unblock the route to deporting people to Rwanda. He’s suggested that parliament should simply deem Rwanda to be a safe place, and that the judges will then be obliged to agree. The relevant legislation already contains a list of countries deemed to be safe, and adding Rwanda to the list will suffice, in his view, to over-rule those judges who keep insisting that the government should abide by the law requiring the UK to ensure the safety of any deported asylum-seeker.

If he’d given it a moment’s thought (admittedly, not one of his known strengths), he’d have realised that that will never satisfy the judges. All the countries on the list currently have had some sort of assessment before reaching the conclusion that they are safe, and it’s at least probable that judges would expect to see evidence of a similar process (rather than simply parliamentary arbitrariness) for any additions. Most people would understand that adding, say, North Korea or Belarus to the list wouldn’t magically make them safe countries, whatever parliament says; Rwanda may be slightly more arguable, but the principle is the same. And being safe at the time that a country is added to the list cannot, in any event, absolve the judges from making an assessment as to safety as and when they consider an individual case – it’s why we have judges and courts to consider individual cases rather than mechanistic rules. Still, oversimplistic solutions to complex issues and a detached-from-reality belief in the exceptional nature of the UK are not exactly unknown when it comes to Johnson (see, for example, Brexit). And it’s another stick with which his acolytes could beat the judiciary.

Getting the 'right' answer is all that counts

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According to Wikipedia, a kangaroo court is “…a court that ignores recognized standards of law or justice, carries little or no official standing in the territory within which it resides, and is typically convened ad hoc.” Since none of those three criteria applies to a standing committee of the House of Commons operating in accordance with pre-existing and well-established processes, and recognised within parliament as having the authority to carry out its work, it is clear that allies of the former PM are using a different definition – probably one which says that any process which finds the perfect human being known as Boris Johnson guilty of anything is by definition flawed and unfair. Faced with criticism of their comments, which clearly go beyond the obvious right to express an opinion as to the correctness of actions and decisions taken, and which directly impugn the reputations and integrity of those taking them, their response has been to double down on those comments. Even the non-apology from Goldsmith yesterday seemed to be more about the fact that he was a minister when he said what he said rather than any sort of retraction of his words.

There is, though, a valid point lurking in there somewhere – a committee of politicians judging other politicians has an innate flaw built in. Every single member of the House of Commons has been elected on a political platform of some sort; holding and expressing political views is what they do. And they’re paid to do it. Finding 7 members of the House of Commons who have not only never expressed a view on Boris Johnson, but who also don’t even have a view on Boris Johnson is an impossible ask. The whole system depends on the members of the committee being trusted to leave their opinions outside the door and make a judgement purely on what evidence is presented to them, whilst forgetting everything they know about the man and his past. It’s an inevitable consequence of parliament regulating itself that the people making the judgements will have strong political views.

The logical consequence of a situation where politicians no longer trust each other to be honourable and fair is to take the decision out of their hands and give it to an ‘independent’ body. Somehow, I think that the Jakes of this world would be horrified at any such prospect, and in any event, the fact that the ‘independent’ members of an ‘independent’ panel have not previously expressed an opinion doesn’t mean that they don’t have one. What they really seem to want is a system which produces the ‘right’ answer – i.e. the one that they want to see. There are methods of achieving that, but they don’t have a lot to do with honour, justice or democracy. But those qualities, like dignity, are grossly over-rated commodities to an increasing proportion of the Conservative Party.