Drowning slowly rather than quickly

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There was a time in UK politics when a report that Rishi Sunak was consulting Dominic Cummings about how to win the next election would have been treated as some sort of joke. It appears, though, to be true, and some of his own people are worried that Sunak could even have considered the possibility of bringing back so toxic an individual. What struck me, however, was the sheer arrogance of a man who seems to have convinced himself that he is such an expert in electioneering that he can take the wreck of a party – a wreck which he himself did so much to bring about – and turn it, in a few short months, into a party which can present itself as a credible future government. That, and the gullibility of a PM who seems to have swallowed the same idea hook, line, and sinker. Perhaps the PM can be excused, to an extent, for displaying classic symptoms of ‘drowning man syndrome’, although that merely serves to underline the point that many others have made, which is that he’s a politician who simply isn’t very good at politics.

We may never know the full details of the conversation; or rather, we may be left trying to judge which of the two men’s stories is most likely to bear a passing resemblance to truth. It is, of course, possible that Cummings knows a bullet when he sees one heading in his direction, and is secretly delighted to have had enough of a reason to say ‘no’ to Sunak and thereby avoid having to demonstrate his mastery of the impossible, although there’s nothing in his words which suggests such a degree of self-awareness, let alone any understanding of the depth of the problems which he did so much to help create. As for Sunak, he surely ought to have realised from Cummings’ statements and behaviours in the past that the idea that he could have a secret meeting where such matters were discussed without Cummings revealing enough of his own version of the event to act as self-justification and self-aggrandisement was the stuff of fantasy. But then again, ‘not very good at politics’ is not a description which has been used lightly.

In a way, I’m almost disappointed at the outcome. As long as there remains a chance that Starmer will somehow manage to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory (something which he seems, at times, to be doing his very best to achieve), an election upset remains a possibility. Cummings’ ‘assistance’ would have made for an interesting spectator sport; and allowing him to finish the demolition job on the Tory Party which he has done so well to date would have finished him off, as well as the party. Two birds with one stone, as it were. Sunak will just have to continue drowning slowly by his own efforts instead.

Ordering in the polish

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According to reports yesterday, the PM has stated that it will take a whole Panzer division to remove him from Downing Street. Calling in the German army to do a job which Tory MPs are too spineless to do themselves seems a little on the extreme side, but if needs must… It wouldn’t exactly be the first time that England has looked to Germany to replace its ruler – England didn’t end up being ruled by the Hanoverians and the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas by accident.

Meanwhile, the attempt to prop up the unproppable, and defer the inevitable, continues with the announcement that Guto Harri is to return to the PM’s side to assist in digging him out of the largely self-excavated hole in which he finds himself. Given the descriptions which Harri has himself used of Johnson in recent years (to which Johnson’s would-be nemesis, Dominic Cummings, has delighted in drawing attention), no-one can argue that he’s going in blind. Indeed, many must have wondered what on earth can be going through his mind, even taking this job on at this stage (although there were reports suggesting that he’d initially taken a six-month leave of absence from the day job – hedging his bets, perhaps – before being required to resign). I can understand, however, why an experienced PR professional might see this as the turd-polishing challenge of a lifetime, and with minimal risk. If he pulls it off, he’ll become a celebrity in the PR world, able to command ever higher fees for his services. And if he doesn’t, future employers are more likely to give him credit for being willing to try than blame him for failing. It’s not as if there’s anyone in the field to whom the nature and scale of the ordure that he’s agreed to try and tackle are not obvious.

I’d guess that one of his first actions would be to take the spade away from self-appointed assistant digger-in-chief, Nadine Dorries. With Ministers like her prepared to go over the top and declare publicly that the PM tells the truth at all times in all circumstances, despite all the mere factual evidence to the contrary, the hole gets bigger daily. A six-month fact-finding trip to a location where there is no internet coverage would be even better than a spade-ectomy. What Harri might struggle with, most of all, is uncovering the full scale of the potential damage that he’s trying to manage. Cummings is hardly going to give him the whole story (he prefers the steady drip-drip to catch Johnson unawares) and Johnson himself doesn’t see anything wrong with anything he does, so has nothing to which he feels he needs to own up. The potential for new scandals, or new twists on the existing ones, to emerge is somewhere between high and astronomical. And the probability that either the spin doctor or his master will be allowed the time to build a strategy for recovery is diminishing with every new story.

As spectator sport, it’s worth following. If only Wales were indeed just a spectator…

Is 'cheating foreigners' really UK foreign policy?

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There was plenty of evidence that Boris Johnson never intended to implement the agreement that he signed with the EU even before the agreement was signed, and the evidence is piling up even higher now. The EU must take its share of the blame here – given the very public history of mendacity and duplicity throughout Johnson’s career, they really have no excuse for believing that they could trust him. Believing that he really, really wouldn’t sign an agreement which he had no intention of honouring showed a high degree of stupidity and gullibility.

Johnson’s former bestie, Dominic Cummings, has ‘excused’ Johnson’s behaviour by arguing firstly that he wasn’t lying – he just doesn’t know what truth is, and was clueless about what he was signing up to – secondly that it is part of the PM’s job to cheat foreigners, and thirdly that the EU, China and the US regularly break the rules in agreements to which they have signed up, so it’s nothing unusual. It’s not exactly helpful to be defended against a charge of lying by being called stupid and ignorant, but it’s unlikely that Cummings was trying to be helpful anyway.

He may have a point, though, about others breaking rules at times. It’s disingenuous to suggest that there’s some sort of moral or legal equivalence between ignoring a few parts of an agreement if they’re found not to work and making an agreement which you have no intention of keeping – negotiating in bad faith from the outset is on a rather different scale – but it’s true to say that not all countries adhere to all parts of agreements which they’ve signed. It’s notable, though, that the trading blocs he specifically named (China, the EU, and the US) just happen to be the three largest and most important in the world. The biggest fish in the pond have more freedom to do as they like, however much many of us might dislike that fact. The UK, however, has chosen to opt out of being part of a big fish in order to become a small fish; the idea that it can behave with the same degree of impunity as the school yard bullies goes to the heart of the delusion which underpins Brexit. If the little kid wants to behave like one of the big bullies, he’d better make sure that at least one of the big kids is going to protect him. Alienating all three, aka ‘cheating foreigners’ as Cummings puts it, is unlikely to end well. As we’re all about to find out, unless there is some rapid backpedalling.

Time to escape the nightmare

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In days gone by, no Prime Minister would have been able to continue in post if even a small proportion of yesterday’s accusations by Johnson’s former chief adviser were true. But Boris Johnson is a man to whom feelings of shame or embarrassment, to say nothing of honesty or integrity, are totally alien. He has spent the whole of his life ignoring the rules and norms by which others live, and his experience merely serves to confirm that it is an approach which is rewarded rather than punished. The chances of him changing now are slim; unless and until the men in grey suits from his own party come knocking at his door, he is probably safe. And as long as he keeps them in power, there seems little prospect that Tory MPs are going to develop enough of a conscience to challenge him. It seems unlikely, therefore, that anything short of being escorted out of Downing Street in handcuffs by the boys in blue, accused of one or more serious crimes, will remove the main problem from office in the short term.

The chief accuser is hardly a paragon of virtue either, no matter how hard he tried to present himself as such yesterday. The man who accused others of lying as though that was a mortal sin is the same man who thought it entirely reasonable to paint large lies on the sides of buses just a few years ago. Lies in pursuit of his own objectives are acceptable, apparently – it’s only lies which don’t support his aims which are wrong. Nevertheless, no matter how tainted the witness, there was much in what he said which had a ring of truth to it. The Tory strategy of dismissing every accusation because of the known and obvious flaws of an accuser whose integrity they were so busily defending just a few short months ago looks like a desperate act. It might even work as a temporary fix, but any truly independent enquiry will make it look more like continuing to dig when they’re in a hole. Time will tell.

There is one point on which I find myself in complete agreement with what Cummings said yesterday. A system of government which somehow promotes people like Johnson and Cummings into positions of influence and authority is broken, and very badly so. Cummings himself seemed to be admitting that neither man was ever fit to hold the jobs into which they were somehow appointed. The danger is that attention will now be concentrated on the details of who said what, when and to whom. That is understandable; such matters are non-trivial, to say the least, particularly for the families of the tens of thousands of people who suffered an unnecessarily early death as a result of government incompetence. But saying sorry and replacing personnel are a wholly inadequate substitute for reforming and modernising the UK’s archaic and anachronistic system of government which allowed it to happen. There is certainly no appetite for that type of reform in the governing party, and there seems to be little in the main opposition party either. However broken the system might be, it suits both of them to retain it.

Perhaps Scottish and Welsh independence will be the stimulus which finally forces England to take a long hard look at itself and the way it operates. If it does, then the two newly independent nations will be doing England an enormous favour. I somehow doubt it, though. English exceptionalism is so deeply engrained that everything gets interpreted through that prism rather than shattering it. Being unable to help them doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t save ourselves, though. The sooner we escape from this broken semi-democracy the better.

Are we there yet? How do we know?

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Yesterday, Prof Richard Murphy posted an article claiming that, by any reasonable analysis, the UK now has a fascist government. He’s not the only one to have suggested something similar recently. One of the problems with the word ‘fascist’ is that is has become a term of political abuse applied to those of a general ‘right-wing’ bent which has largely stripped it of any hard meaning, such that labelling the government as such isn’t necessarily helpful. It’s very difficult to define what fascism is, as this lengthy piece demonstrates, because people who are regarded as ‘fascists’ in the past seem to have had a wide variety of different beliefs, and those beliefs weren’t fixed either.

What we can say is that there are certain common elements of states which we have historically labelled as fascist. Amongst those are a belief in the superiority of one nation or group, an authoritarian approach which seeks to subordinate law and the judiciary to the executive, over-riding parliamentary democracy, control of information, and demonisation of ‘others’. All of those are currently in evidence in the UK to an increasing extent. Another common characteristic is the ‘strong leader’ taking on the role of ‘national saviour’, but in fairness I doubt that anyone would put Boris Johnson in that category. He may harbour his own delusions here, but he isn’t an electrifying speaker and doesn’t possess any clear or consistent message to promote, even if he were capable of articulating it. He’s emerged as more of an incoherent bumbler than even his biggest enemies suspected would be the case. Perhaps the ‘strong leader’ is not such a requirement after all if the leader has the right people around him; there’s plenty of evidence that Cummings believes in the natural genetic superiority of some people (mostly himself) and that the bigger the lies, the more they’ll be believed.

It is, though, the trajectory rather than the current state which is the more important. The demonising of immigrants is nothing new, but the attacks on the judiciary and the stated objective of exempting the government from any form of accountability in the courts are new, as is the wilful contempt of international agreements. Labelling solicitors doing their jobs and protecting their clients under the laws of the land as ‘activist lawyers’ shows a disregard for the rights of individuals, as does the proposal to opt out of the human rights convention. Perhaps the most insidious of all is the way in which the public are not only increasingly inured to abrupt policy changes, usually announced outside parliament and without consultation, but also encouraged to buy in to an aggressive and punitive attitude towards those who don’t conform to whatever the latest rules are (unless those not conforming are in any way part of the government, of course).

One thing which history does teach us is that authoritarian regimes don’t always suddenly come to power overnight: there’s a process involved. And when there are a series of small changes, it becomes easier to accept each one individually and impossible to know when a point of no return has been reached. This was summed up rather well, I thought, by an unnamed Tory MP and ex-Minister who said that he has a speech resigning the Tory whip written and ready in his top drawer and that his colleagues are waiting for some sort of ‘final battle’ with Cummings adding, “But history shows there isn’t one final battle. It’s a series of capitulations.” That ‘series of capitulations’ on issues which are seemingly individually small is the biggest danger to what remains of our freedom and democracy. The only people who can halt the process at the moment are the Tory MPs in the House of Commons. It is said that there might be 20-30 Tory MPs prepared to vote against the proposal to breach international law; but with 365 Tory MP’s in the Commons, that would still mean that there are more than 320 prepared to vote in favour of international lawlessness, a fact which even traditional Conservatives now outside politics find hard to believe. Either those 320 have fully bought into the process themselves, or else they’ve already made too many capitulations to be able to stop. I’d like to believe that there are more honest and reasonable people in the Tory ranks, but – in another characteristic of an authoritarian regime – Johnson has already purged them. If a deliberate act of lawlessness isn’t enough to flush out those with reservations, it is hard to see what might be.

Can the state choose winners anyway?

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One of the issues at the heart of the failing trade talks with the EU is the question of state aid to industries. It’s a long-standing myth that the EU forbids such aid; it does not, it merely insists that all member states follow a common set of rules so that no member state can give an unfair competitive advantage to companies based in its territory. And that ‘level playing field’ is a key precondition of allowing tariff and quota-free trade across borders. Despite the way in which the Brexiteers have presented the issue, the EU is not, as I understand it, insisting that the UK abide by the precise same set of rules, merely that the rules are sufficiently equivalent that they do not confer an unfair advantage. The obstacle in the talks is that the UK a) is unwilling to share its proposed new rules, and b) takes the position that allowing the EU any oversight of such rules is an infringement of absolute UK sovereignty. The second point is undoubtedly true; absolute sovereignty is necessarily restricted by any requirement to agree changes to any rules with a trading partner, but that does rather overlook the fact that the same will be true of any trade agreement with any country or bloc. All trade agreements involve some degree of common rule-setting and any party which then unilaterally changes the rules (which is what the UK is insisting it has the right to do) can expect the other party or parties to retaliate by restricting trade in affected goods or services.

The first point is the more curious one. It’s possible that the UK’s reluctance to share its proposals is simply down to the fact that the government doesn’t itself have a clue about any proposed new regime. Given the levels of incompetence shown to date on other issues, that is certainly a strong possibility. Another suggestion is that there will be no strategy other than responding to events and opportunities as and when they arise. Again, the ‘seat of the pants’ approach to government which we’ve seen to date makes it impossible to rule that out. What is certain is that no sensible trading partner is going to sign up to a tariff and quota free agreement with a state which insists that it can unilaterally start giving out subsidies on a whim. 

Tom Peck suggests that “The Brexit we appear to be gearing up to receive is one which liberates Dominic Cummings to invest vast amounts of public money in risky tech start-ups; this was always the entire point of Brexit”, and that Cummings believes that “...in the future, only countries at the forefront of the fourth industrial revolution will be able to shape the future”. It’s a credible suggestion, and if that’s the aim, no-one should be surprised if the rest of Europe is unwilling to conclude a trade agreement with a country using state aid in pursuit of dominating the technologies on which they all depend. There are, however three problems with such an approach, regardless of the EU's attitude towards it.

The first is that it depends on Cummings and his ilk being better at identifying winners and losers than anyone else. The only person who believes in his omniscience is the man himself, but there is no credible evidence to back it up. And, as Richard Murphy points out here, the idea that the state is best placed to pick winners is complete anathema to traditional Conservatives in any event. It’s also contradicted by decades of experience.

The second is that, although the ‘UK’ has a very good record in science and technology, many of the scientists and technologists working in the UK are either themselves non-UK citizens or else are working in collaboration with international teams. Whilst the government ‘bigs up’ developments achieved in UK universities, for instance, it seems to overlook the underlying international nature of many of those achievements. Making it more difficult for the UK to attract EU citizens and cutting the UK off from some significant sources of collaborative funding don’t look like decisions that a country which seeks to be at the forefront of technology would take.

The third is simply one of size. China, with a population of 1.4 billion, could put 60 million people (equivalent to the entire population of the UK) to work in the same fields, and even if they were only 10% as effective, they would still achieve more. The idea that a small offshore European island can ever compete with that is a silly one; the only way that the UK can hope to compete is in co-operation with others.

And that brings us to the heart of what Brexit is about. The world’s past was all about competition and rivalry; the future, with issues such as climate change to deal with, has to be about co-operation and teamwork. The EU is a far-from-perfect vehicle, but at its heart is the idea that countries which competed with, and fought, each other in the past can build a better future by acting together. Brexit, on the other hand, is based on reviving old rivalries and conflicts, to the ultimate detriment of all.

Tory MPs are just grandstanding

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There are those who struggle to understand why someone who has spent his whole life aiming to take on the top job should be so willing to risk his hold on it for the sake of retaining one member of his team. But I think that misreads the nature of Boris Johnson’s ambition and the nature of the job that he thinks he’s doing. He never really wanted to be PM at all – the job he wanted was world king. And the sort of monarch he wanted and still wants to be is the absolute variety – none of this ‘constitutional monarchy’ nonsense for him. Being merely the Prime Minister of a small part of the world is a long way short of achieving his lifetime ambition, but in settling for something which isn’t even second-best, he’s trying to do the job as though it were the one he wanted. In his world, if the king says something is so, then it is so – anyone who says otherwise is a traitor.

We know from his time in school that he has always believed that normal rules and constraints don’t apply to him, and he has lived his life accordingly – brushing off and brazening out any and every situation or problem which would have brought down lesser mortals. To highlight just one incident from many years ago, the way he treated his participation in a conversation about having a journalist beaten up as though it was a huge joke should have ended any hopes he had of ever achieving high office. Being sacked for lying – twice – ought to have exposed the nature of the man as well but he has simply carried on regardless. The one thing that he has learned from all this is that the technique works; nothing embarrasses him, nothing makes him feel any shame or regret, nothing dents or damages his enormous ego and self-esteem.

So, faced with an apparent crisis with his chief advisor having been caught out cheating and lying, with his own daily lies being exposed every more clearly, why wouldn’t he believe that he can simply bluster his way through the bad patch until people’s attention turns to something else? What if he is losing support amongst his own MPs – this is a man who turned a majority government into a minority government just a few short months ago by expelling anyone who disagreed with him. He then proceeded to win a huge majority of seats in the general election which followed. Why wouldn’t he believe that he can do it again? “With one bound he was free” was the leitmotif of Dick Barton, but it could equally be the phrase which encapsulates the charmed life of the chancer who currently holds the position of Prime Minister of the UK.

Whilst observers speculate on how long he can hang on to his right-hand man, seen from his position the problem is merely one of riding out the storm until people find something else to talk about. As king, he has the sovereign right to appoint who he wants when he wants; he and his immediate courtiers have the absolute right to do as they please when they please; having to answer questions from subjects is all a bit of a bore and a waste of his valuable time. Mere disagreement from those he regards as lesser people doesn’t and won’t phase him, just as it never has in the past. Some Tory MPs are breaking ranks to express a contrary view but experience has taught him that he can safely ignore them. The Tory party has traditionally been ruthless in removing its leaders but he’s purged the party to such an extent that I wonder whether it is any longer capable of such action. Unless the rebels are prepared to commit regicide, verbal criticism in response to constituent pressure is just grandstanding.

Lining up his next career move

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Most people are aware of the first law of holes: when you’re in one, stop digging. This is another of those rules for ordinary people to which the PM does not feel beholden, as we saw yesterday. Not only did they not take away Cummings’ spade, they seem to have given him a mechanical digger with which to make the hole many times deeper. Given the well-known generosity of the owner of JCB to the Tory party, perhaps it was a subliminal reciprocal advert, highlighting the efficacy of the machines. During the election campaign, the PM famously used a real JCB to demolish what looked like a polystyrene wall to emphasise his ‘Get Brexit Done’ message; in a display of poetic justice, his chief advisor used his imaginary one yesterday to demolish the wall of lies which the PM had erected on his behalf only 24 hours previously. Not only did he directly contradict some of what had been said in his defence just a day earlier, he proceeded to ‘explain’ himself in a way which has attracted widespread ridicule. Still, if push comes to shove, he’s made himself a hot prospect for a new role as the front man for a prominent chain of opticians. “Should’ve gone to Specsavers” will surely trip naturally from his tongue.