War shouldn't be a diversion from parties

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An understanding of history is always useful in considering current events, but there can be a problem when people look at that history through a very narrow filter. The current UK government seems unable to see anything except through the filter of ‘the war’, which is colouring their judgement more than a little. For Ukraine, see Czechoslovakia; for the Donbas, see the Sudetenland; for Putin, see Hitler (minus the moustache and with cropped hair). The comparison breaks down completely when they get to ‘for Johnson, see Churchill’, of course. Whilst there are some obvious parallels, assuming that the outcome will therefore be the same is a dangerous and simplistic place to start – yet all the UK’s statements suggest that is exactly what they are doing.

Whilst the EU, and especially the French, are at least trying to engage in rational discussion, sending the UK’s, shall we say ‘geographically challenged’, Foreign Secretary to shout slogans at the Russians in an attempt to boost her leadership credentials to dictate where, on Russian soil, Russian forces are allowed to be stationed looks particularly counter-productive. Fortunately, the Russians understand that the current UK government is an international joke as well as a domestic one, and are treating the Foreign Secretary accordingly. Johnson’s bluster about the UK leading Europe in responding to the situation is just that, bluster; and his government’s clumsy comparisons with the events of 1939 even managed to upset the people they claim to be trying to help.

Nobody knows whether Putin will decide to mount a full-scale invasion (or even a more limited incursion in 'support' of what he sees as ‘Russians’ in the eastern part of Ukraine). The ‘intelligence’ which leads some politicians to claim that they do know is of the same dubious quality as that which told us that Saddam Hussain had weapons of mass destruction which could be turned on us in 45 minutes. What we do know – to misquote Churchill – is that “jaw, jaw is better than war, war”; one of the lessons of the past which the current government seems to have difficulty understanding in its desperate search for a diversion from parties and police investigations. The best contribution the UK government could make to peace in Eastern Europe at the moment is to lock Liz Truss and Ben Wallace away and get Boris Johnson back to the much safer (for everyone else at least) ground of parties and prosecco, allowing the serious European leaders to try and negotiate a way forward, building on existing unimplemented accords. If they had any sense of self-awareness at all, Johnson and co wouldn’t even need to look back as far as the 1940s to understand that making international agreements and then failing to implement them merely stores up trouble for the future.

Putting it in writing

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One of the issues at the heart of the Downing Street gatherings affair is the idea that the people who made the rules didn’t stick to them; that they behaved as though they were allowed to follow a different process to everyone else. In that context, the approach adopted by the police of sending questionnaires to 50 suspects (and that is indeed what they are – suspects, rather than witnesses) asking for their responses is a curious one. Maybe there are some lawyers out there who know better than I, but I’ve never previously heard of a case where the police wrote to suspects asking for their confessions on a pre-printed questionnaire rather than interviewing them. It looks very much like a unique process designed specifically as a means of investigating people who already believe that normal processes don’t apply to them. They claim that the questionnaire is equivalent to a police interview and that the responses “will be treated as written statements made under caution”. I wonder how the police will react in future if any suspected criminal demands the right to answer a questionnaire in his own home and to be allowed a week to prepare his responses and talk to his fellow suspects rather than have a face to face interview with a police officer down at the station. Actually, I don’t wonder at all – I’m pretty sure that I know what the reaction would be. It looks like another case of ‘one rule for us…’.

The Met also claim that the questionnaires “have formal legal status and must be answered truthfully”. Yeah, right. We’re talking about Boris Johnson here; the assumption that he will see those words and decide to give honest answers looks like rather a significant flaw in the approach. He has a simple choice: he can either tell the truth and therefore admit that he’s been lying all along, to parliament as well as the media, or he can simply repeat his previous lies. And there cannot be many people – outside the Metropolitan Police Force, of course – who aren’t reasonably certain about which he will choose. Lying is his default option, even when he doesn’t need to because honesty would serve his cause better.

The question is surely not whether he will return a pack of lies to the Met, but what will they do with it when they get it. Based on their performance to date, it would hardly be surprising if they said something along the lines of, “OK, sir. Sorry to have troubled you”, no matter how much hard evidence they have proving his guilt. It’s unlikely that they’ll have the guts to add ‘intending to pervert the course of justice’ to the charge sheet. Whether he's fined, or let off because of his lies, the issue doesn’t end, no matter how much the PM wants it to and thinks it should; it merely returns from the criminal to the political sphere. And, again based on the Met’s record, the probability that his responses will be leaked is not insignificant. Perhaps there is an advantage to this unique written procedure after all.

Major is talking to an audience which no longer exists

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Ex-PM John Major’s speech this week seems to have gone down particularly badly in the party he used to lead. As a pro-EU figure, he’s been roundly trashed by the Brexitmaniacs who currently run both the party and the UK. It’s a pity, because there was a lot in the speech which was apparently nothing to do with Brexit. I say ‘apparently’ because there is actually a connection: the mindset which led to Brexit is the same one which led to many of the other things which he criticised. One passage in his speech struck me as a particularly powerful one, and certainly struck a chord with me. He asked:

“Can it really be a crime to be frightened; homeless; desperate; destitute; fleeing from persecution, or war, or famine, or hardship; and to cross half the world on foot and dangerous waters in an unsafe boat, in the hope of finding a better life?”

It’s a good question, and one to which the current cabinet, unfortunately, have already given a resounding ‘yes’ in response by promulgating a law to criminalise exactly that. By way of contrast to Major, we also had the hapless Culture Secretary this week telling us that the only thing that might make her lose faith in the current PM would be “if he went out and kicked a dog”. It’s only a ‘probably’ even then, mind. She’s fine with criminalising refugees, making the poor even poorer, law-breaking by government ministers, and repeated blatant lies, just as long as no dog is harmed in the process. It would be hard to find a better illustration of the gulf in values between Major and Johnson than the contrast between those two statements.

The problem for Major is that he doesn’t seem to understand that the people he thinks he’s trying to appeal to – the decent, honest members of the Conservative Party – no longer exist. They’ve either been driven out, or else gone over to the dark side in the belief that their own interests are better served by doing so. He’s wasting his breath.

Growing bananas by the Thames

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Proving that there’s a direct causal link between a political donation and a favour granted is difficult at the best of times. The PM’s flat redecoration was funded by a man who was also seeking support for a pet project, and linking the two things in a single e-mail, as the PM appears to have done, inevitably raises the suspicion that there is a relationship between the two. Labour’s request that the police investigate is good knockabout politics, but is unlikely to be enough to ‘prove’, to the standard of evidence required by a court of law, that the one facilitated the other. The PM’s defence, through his spokesperson, is that the project never went ahead, so there was no corruption. It’s a bit weak, though – it could equally be argued that the ‘favour’ was giving the matter consideration. There is no doubt that it was indeed ‘considered’ before being rejected, and the question is surely whether publicly-funded time and effort would have been expended on even considering it if the request hadn’t come from a major donor.

There was a rather more clear-cut example of the relationship between donations and access last week, when another donor asked for his money to be refunded, apparently because it didn’t get him the level of access to ministers that he was led to expect. It comes to something when the degree to which donations and access are linked is regarded as being so normal that legal action can be threatened in an effort to enforce the implied terms of what might look to some as an essentially corrupt contract, or else demand repayment for default. But why does anyone think that rich people and businesses make large donations to a political party in the fist place? Whether the expectation is that they will get special favours, or merely that the overall legislative and regulatory climate will benefit them, is a question of degree not kind. An implicit quid pro quo is ever present, and is not a bug but a feature of political funding in the UK.

The UK is increasingly resembling a banana monarchy – like a banana republic but with a hereditary head of state. Whilst it’s true that we don’t actually have large scale banana production yet, that’s only because would-be banana producers haven’t yet bought sufficient access to the PM to be able to convince him that a giant banana plantation alongside the Thames is almost as good, in terms of his legacy, as a new garden bridge over the river. OK, the bananas wouldn’t grow alongside the Thames, but then we never got the bridge either. Some people made a lot of money from it, though. And isn’t opening up opportunities to make money what those large political donations are ultimately all about?

Taking the long view

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In 2018, Jacob Rees-Mogg informed us that it would probably take around 50 years to see the benefits of Brexit. One thing that we can say, with absolute certainty, is that fifty years from now, Jake will either be 102 years old or dead, and, whilst I make no judgement about the relative desirability of the two alternatives, population statistics tell us that the second outcome is considerably more probable than the first. That should make his new job, as Minister for identifying the benefits of Brexit, something of a doddle for the next four decades or so; he won’t have to look very hard to confirm his judgement that the benefits have yet to arrive. To make a real success of the job, he only needs to do three things. The first is to defeat the odds and remain alive, the second is to remain in government for a mere half a century, and the third is to find some benefits - or, more likely at that age, to remember what it was he was looking for. If the odds against the first aren’t good, the odds of his still being in post fifty days from now, never mind fifty years, are looking even worse. As for the third... Probably best not to get too comfortable in his new office.

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…

Getting a good return on our investment

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There was a great deal of criticism of the PM last year for employing a team of private photographers so that the Downing Street press team could exclude media photographers from events and show only the pictures that they wanted us to see. However, there is a story in the Guardian today telling us that the official photographer has handed over pictures of Boris Johnson enjoying a beer at the birthday party which he still says that he can’t possibly be expected to know whether it occurred or not, let alone whether he attended, until the Met finish their investigation and the full Sue Gray report is released. If the Guardian story is true, employing those private photographers might turn out to provide the best return of any investment of our cash that he’s made since taking office.

It's a very long slogan

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It’s probably a mistake to take the UK Government’s verbose White Paper on ‘Levelling Up’ too seriously. It’s likely that we will have a new government before it ever gets converted into legislation, let alone action, and with even the supposed author having allegedly described the content as “shit”, it’s unlikely to survive the imminent fall of the man who invented the term ‘levelling up’ without having a clue what it meant. That is especially true if his successor turns out to be the current Chancellor, who has done his best not only to neuter the paper by refusing any significant new funding, but also to make people in the poorer parts of the UK even poorer by his decision on Universal Credit and his less than half-hearted attempt to be seen to be doing something about the cost of living crisis whilst making it worse.

There is little purpose, therefore, in any detailed analysis of something which is likely to be either ditched within weeks or else relaunched to mean something very different and a great deal cheaper. There has always been a huge contradiction at the heart of the vagueness, as a result of the PM’s propensity to promise different things to different people. In launching his crock of brown matter this week, Gove referred to the need to “shift wealth and power decisively to working people and their families”. Leaving aside the unlikelihood of the Tories ever wanting to shift wealth and power to working people, the PM has already promised his MPs and the electorate that his levelling up agenda will be achieved without taking anything away from anyone, and especially not from Tory areas in the south-east of England. Promising both to leave current wealth untouched and to shift it elsewhere is typical of the Johnson approach, but it is an impossible combination. Levelling up is, of course, possible without transferring wealth – but it depends on both creating more wealth, and ensuring that new wealth is created where it is needed. The timescale for doing that would be very much longer than the already hopelessly over-optimistic one laid out in the White (perhaps I should say Brown) Paper; and it would need the government to take much more control over the way the economy operates, something which is anathema to any conceivable successor to the PM.

‘Levelling Up’ remains what it has always been – a vague slogan which sounds like a good idea in principle. At 332 pages long, it now even fails the test of being a good slogan.

Strange tactics

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The untrue smear used by Johnson against Starmer this week was a low blow, so low that an increasing number on his own side have been repelled by it, and some of his ministers have been forced into giving farcical responses to questions. He’s presumably working on the assumption that if he can only somehow demonstrate that everyone is as bad as he is, then people will forgive his own sins. It’s a curious tactic, though, for at least two reasons. Firstly, he accused Starmer of prosecuting journalists instead of paedophiles, but there is surely a danger that he might also be reminding people that some journalists might deserve to be prosecuted – especially those, perhaps, who conspire to have their colleagues beaten up, yet somehow get away with it. But secondly, insisting that the man at the top must take the blame personally for everything done by those under his management is a risky tactic for someone who is reportedly on the verge of sacking a number of staff in order to preserve his own skin. Even if the tactic weren’t proving to be so counter-productive on his own side, neither comparison strikes me as being particularly helpful to himself.

Putin's not-so-secret weapons

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The initial reaction of many to the announcement yesterday that the UK Government is giving Ukraine £88 million to, amongst other things, deal with corruption would surely have been laughter. But actually, it makes a lot of sense – the current UK government has, after all, become a world leader in the field of corruption. I can entirely understand how mere amateurs like those running Ukraine would be keen to benefit from the UK experience of being corrupt and getting away with it. Although the lessons might look on the expensive side, once they learn how to set up the right processes to funnel the training contracts to friends and donors at inflated prices, they will soon discover that the sum being given is nowhere near enough. As to how the UK will find this money – well, there are surely enough Russian billionaires in London willing to pay for a seat in the Lords.

That brings us to the first of Putin’s secret weapons when it comes to dealing with the UK’s threats. Those demanding sanctions against those Russian oligarchs who are bankrolling Putin are missing the point: the Tories have already been going after those same oligarchs for decades, usually in pursuit of political donations. What Putin knows is that any sanctions against the crooked oligarchs who maintain him in power will hurt the UK’s financial markets (and probably the Conservative Party’s coffers) more than they will hurt him. What the rest of the world refers to as laundering of dirty Russian money is actually, to the UK government, taking advantage of the Brexit bonus of not following the same rules as the rest of the world.

And his second secret weapon is that, apparently unbeknownst to Johnson and his cabal, there are people in Moscow whose English is good enough to read and understand the UK’s media output. And they therefore know that not only is Johnson a lame duck but also that nothing he says can be taken seriously, since it is almost certainly untrue. This one is more than a little dangerous, however, for the rest of Europe. Even if Johnson, in his delusional belief that he is leading for the whole of Europe on the issue, manages to hold a conversation with Putin without insulting him (there’s a first time for everything, but it seems unlikely), when he says that an invasion will be a complete disaster for Russia, does he really mean that it will be a huge success? (And can our friends have some of the reconstruction contracts after the event?)

Those arguing that we should forget all about the rule-breaking at Downing Street so that the PM can concentrate on the supposed threat from Russia are completely missing the point. There are few, if any, situations that the PM cannot make worse with effortless ease. Distracting him from foreign policy is exactly what the rest of the world needs the UK to do if it wants to maintain the peace in Europe. It’s our duty.