Fruitful distractions

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Fair play to the Tories – not a phrase which appears often here. When it comes to finding a distraction from the major problems of the day, mostly caused by them in the first place, their creative ability knows few bounds. Thus it was that yesterday, when the newly appointed (and soon to be ex) PM was striding across the world stage doing his best to avoid justifiable criticism for the UK failing to meet its climate targets (to say nothing about its plans to distance itself even further from those targets by exploiting new oil and gas reserves) by staring pointedly at the Russian Foreign Minister (who must, surely, have been absolutely terrified as a result), his team back home came up with an even better distraction technique. They issued a formal denial that the Deputy PM had ever thrown any tomatoes at staff. The other world leaders must have been mightily amused - or, more likely, utterly bemused.

It was a brilliant move, although on closer examination, the denial was somewhat incomplete. There was no denial that tomatoes had been launched on a ballistic trajectory across the room, the denial solely related to the alleged target. During the tomato-related incident – which will surely come to be known as tomato-gate – we are sincerely assured that no persons or animals were in any way physically harmed, although it seems that some of those present might have interpreted it as threatening behaviour, a bit like a shot across the bows of a ship. More importantly, the denial only covered tomatoes, leaving open the possibility that other fruits and vegetables, some with a much greater propensity to wound or injure (imagine the potential damage resulting from hurling a large watermelon, for instance) might have been deployed. For completeness, we should demand a comprehensive list of all the fruits and vegetables which the Deputy PM has never thrown at staff. Tory MPs must also lay urgent questions about which other cabinet ministers may, or may not, be in the habit of throwing fruit around during meetings. Only then will their party realise the full potential of their attempt to use allegations of fruit-throwing as a distraction technique.

Seeing no evil

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Recruitment processes vary greatly. In the public sector particularly, great emphasis is placed on fairness and transparency, and recruiters are often advised to discard all previous knowledge of the applicants, even in the case of internal applicants, and to base their decision solely on the application form and interview. This has long struck me as being potentially more than a little dangerous – if there is information which is known which might make a candidate unsuitable for appointment, choosing to ignore that information because it wasn’t mentioned on the application form and didn’t arise in response to interview questions can lead to a silly appointment. The private sector often works rather differently, as a result of which there can sometimes be a lack of transparency.

There is one appointment process which appears to be utterly unique, however, and that is the process by which a Tory Prime Minister appoints his or her cabinet. Apparently, the standard response to a suggestion from a close aide that “There may be a serious problem in appointing X” is not to ask for more information as any rational person would be likely to do, but to say something along the lines of “Tell me no more – I’m going to appoint X anyway, and I want to be able to deny that I ever knew any details of the problem”. What it really tells us is that the biggest problem of all is appointing one of the three brass monkeys to the highest post in the land. And that the Tory Party has an apparently limitless supply of brass monkeys.

Rewarding a rare achievement

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Very few government ministers ever get sacked; they invariably ‘resign’, and almost never entirely of their own accord. Nods, winks, and outright threats combine to make it entirely clear when a letter of resignation is expected, and it would not be at all surprising to find that letters are sometimes written for doomed ministers and handed to them for them to append their signature. Gavin Williamson’s departure yesterday has been presented to the world as a resignation, but it is clear that the ‘resignation’ was preceded by a decision in Downing Street to withdraw the proposed defence of the Minister, making it clear what action was required of him.

Having been given a knighthood to reward his previous failures, this is a superb opportunity for another award of some sort. A lifetime achievement award is surely in order for a man who has succeeded – uniquely, as far as I’ve been able to ascertain – in getting sacked from three different cabinet jobs by three different Prime Ministers, and all in the space of less than four years. Perhaps Sunak’s successor, due to be appointed within the next few months, will give him an opportunity to add to his score. One might think that no PM could ever be so stupid as to appoint him again, but there were those who thought the same thing after his last two sackings. The previous peak of his career – before being elected to parliament in 2010 – was, apparently, to win Fireplace Salesman of the Year in two consecutive years in 2006 and 2007. A third award would look good on his mantlepiece, positioned nicely between the two of them.

A tale of two honourable members

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Once upon a time, there were two ambitious Tory MPs, desperately trying to climb the greasy pole towards the top job. One got as far as being health secretary during a pandemic, during the course of which he managed to condemn thousands to an early death by sending them to unprepared and ill-equipped care homes, whilst doling out lucrative PPE contracts to mates and associates with no previous experience in the field. None of that could stop his inexorable rise which was, instead, halted by some CCTV footage of an illicit liaison with one of his staff. The other actually reached the very top job, and was responsible not only for appointing the first to a job for which he was woefully inadequate, but also advocated that even more bodies should be piled high in the streets. He was also partial to the occasional sexual peccadillo, and equally inadequate for the job in which he found himself, but was shameless and brazen enough to laugh, bluster and lie his way through his own failings. The last straw which brought him down was his inability to be honest about what he knew and when about the sexual peccadillos of another person whom he had appointed to a government job.

Whatever, both men, finding themselves prised out of the jobs which gave meaning to their existence, decided to bunk off from their other job – that of being an MP – and its expectation that they might serve their constituents as well as turning up for the occasional parliamentary vote, and seek their fortune elsewhere. The first signed up for reality TV (so called, apparently, because it bears no connection whatever with what 99.99% of the population would recognise as reality), whilst the other took himself off to give a lecture in the US before taking (another) luxury holiday in the Caribbean.

So far, so similar: but then observe the reaction. The first became the subject of much opprobrium from his former colleagues, even losing the whip, whilst over 100 of those same colleagues (allegedly – the counting skills of a man who appears less than entirely certain about the number of his own progeny must necessarily be treated with considerable caution) welcomed the second back with open arms as some sort of prodigal son. Given that the basic offence committed by both is the same (abandoning their constituents during term time to seek rewards elsewhere), the differing responses of their party seem rather strange. It could be, of course, that ‘Matt’* simply went to the wrong school, which failed to inculcate a sufficient sense of brazen indifference and/or allow him to make all the right connections. Alternatively, it could simply be that his colleagues look down on a man who accepted a few thousand for some pretty degrading activities and prefer the chutzpah of ‘Boris’* who apparently charged $150,000 for giving a 30 minute speech, the basic premise of which was that his chaotic period in office made him some sort of expert in global issues. Perhaps it was neither, and was all down to good old Tory values, under which milking one’s position to extract vast sums on false pretences from unsuspecting Americans is simply more acceptable than the public consumption of marsupial genitalia for a comparative pittance. About the only thing of which we can be certain is that neither response had much to do with lokking after the needs and interests of the men’s constituents.

(*Some names have not been changed to protect the guilty)

Humpty-Dumpty for PM

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In defence of the PM’s decision to reappoint as Home Secretary an individual who has breached security rules and the ministerial code, government ministers went on the airwaves yesterday to claim that she had made a mistake, accepted the fact, and apologised, and that her re-appointment was therefore entirely acceptable. Sunak himself said much the same: “The home secretary made an error of judgement but she recognised that she raised the matter and she accepted her mistake”, before going on to say that she would be cracking down on criminals, such as burglars. Bearing in mind the fact that she deliberately shared a confidential document with someone who had no right to see it, to say nothing of the widespread suggestions that this was actually a pattern of behaviour rather than a one-off, it could presage a whole new approach to crime and punishment. Just imagine the savings for the criminal justice system if the criminals being cracked down upon had merely to admit a mistake, apologise, and resume their criminal activity unhindered. Sunak’s definition of ‘integrity’ seems to differ little from that of Johnson.

Then we have his approach to answering questions in the Commons. There is an old party game in which one person gives the answer to a question and the rest have to work out what the question was – my favourite was “9W”, which was apparently a response to the question, “Mr Wagner, do you spell your name with a ‘V’?”. The idea is that there is at least some possibility of working out how the answer related to the question, but Sunak (like both of his predecessors) seems determined to take it to a new level. According to Hansard, the question to which “I was pleased to have a call last night with the First Minister of Scotland” is the response was “…will he admit his mistake and sack the Home Secretary without delay”. It’s not at all clear that he has understood the rules of the game, but it certainly fits the Tory definition of ‘accountability’. To say nothing of underlining the utter pointlessness of Prime Minister’s Questions.

It shows, though, that he is, at heart, a party animal, always willing to have what passes in his life for fun and games. He’s also joined in the great pensions hokey-cokey. Whether the government is or is not in favour of the triple lock currently seems to change by the hour. It was certainly in the 2019 manifesto, and he’s committed to that manifesto, but was unwilling to commit to this part of it yesterday. His chancellor was unwilling to commit to it just over a week ago, then was, according to last week’s outgoing PM, completely committed to it, but this week is unsure again. It's all part of the Tory definition of creating ‘certainty’.

Integrity, accountability, certainty – three keywords which mean exactly what Sunak wants them to mean. No more, no less. Inside Sunak lurks none other than Humpty-Dumpty.

Unite and die

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It is a curiosity of the English constitution that the replacement of the Prime Minister is regarded as a complete change of government, creating a clean sheet where what has gone before can be consigned to the dustbin of history as though the ‘new’ team somehow had no hand at all in any of it. Thus the new PM can vow to ‘correct the mistakes’ of previous administrations with an attempt at keeping a straight face. Admitting that there were mistakes and attempting to correct them is generally a good thing rather than a bad one, of course; but it presupposes that the person seeking to correct them recognises what is and what is not a mistake in the first place.

That brings us to the reappointment of Suella Braverman as Home Secretary. Appointed by Truss only a few short weeks ago and sacked by Truss just one week ago, the task facing Sunak was a very simple one of deciding which was the mistake – the original appointment or the sacking. He has, in effect, decided that the mistake was the latter, sacking someone for an open-and-shut breach of the ministerial code, and that appointing a woman whose fondest dream is to give herself a Christmas present by short-circuiting the legal processes to send a planeful of desperate people on an involuntary trip (handcuffs would presumably be a bonus) to a country with which they have no connection, run by an oppressive regime, and where their future prospects look poor, to say the least, was one of Truss’s better decisions. To Sunak, possession of a gaping hole where a person’s sense of humanity should reside is an asset; breaking rules can be ignored in his attempt to bring what he calls ‘integrity’ back into government. 'Integrity' - that's another word whose definition seems to be flexible.

A key part of his message to his party is that it must unite or die. But if ‘uniting the party’ makes it necessary to keep the Bravermans of this world sitting around the cabinet table, the two words are not as mutually exclusive as he seems to think. Just as he defines mistake in a way which many others may feel is perverse, so the rest of us may define ‘success’ in a way which might not be entirely to his liking. The good news is that, if he achieves both the unity and the death of his party (as currently seems likely) he may well go down in history as the most successful Tory PM ever. In footballing terms, a footnote to history might describe this winning goal as having ‘assists’ from Johnson and Truss. But it's the goal that will be remembered.

Out by Christmas?

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It seems increasingly likely that Rishi Sunak will become the UK’s next soon-to-be-ex-PM by the end of the day, either because Mordaunt fails to reach the threshold of 100 nominees or else because an indicative vote amongst MPs shows her so far behind Sunak that she succumbs to the inevitable pressure to withdraw rather than potentially allow the Tory Party’s membership to override the views of MPs again. Either way, it will be presented as the start of an outbreak of party unity. That will, though, just be another pretence.

Johnson claimed that he had the numbers to enter the race. That’s almost certainly a lie, according to many commentators, and there is indeed no reason to suppose that his long-standing divorce from truthfulness has in any way been impacted by a six week absence from high office. His inability to face the fact that he simply doesn’t have the support means that he has been forced to alight on some other reason for withdrawing from a race that he had never formally entered, and he came up with the line that he could not unite his warring party. It’s one of those strange statements which treads the boundary between truth and falsehood: whilst it’s certainly true that he cannot unite his party, the idea that he believes that he can’t, or that this is his real reason for not standing, is for the birds, such is his unshakeable belief in his own talents.

The accidental truth, though, that Boris Johnson cannot unite the Tory Party conceals a much greater truth of more general application: nobody can. And however much they try to present the forthcoming coronation of Sunak as a mark of unity, Sunak can’t do it either. The party is hopelessly divided into factions whose only mutual factor is an intense loathing of each other. And whilst part of that is about policy issues – such as levels of taxation and public expenditure – an awful lot of it is deeply personal. Johnsonites won’t forgive Sunak for, as they see it, knifing their man, and the path being followed by the current Chancellor (who may or may not still be in office tomorrow) is utterly unacceptable to the free market ultras, for whom cutting taxes and slashing public expenditure is an article of faith. Whether the policy of the new government can somehow be made attractive to ordinary voters is little more than a side-show compared to the difficulties of getting it through a jittery bunch of Tory MPs fearful above all for their own futures.

The electoral system in use in the UK forces any party serious about winning a majority to become something of a broad church. Whilst that’s traditionally been more obvious in the case of Labour, it’s always been true about the Tories as well. Unity around the desire for power and for the trappings of office has long enabled the Tories to conceal the fact better, but differing views about the relationship between these offshore islands and the mainland of Europe have been bubbling away internally since the days of Thatcher, and the ‘victory’ which Brexit represents for one Tory faction has been the catalyst for a descent into an all-out ideological war which has become highly personal in the process. There will be no bridging of the void this side of a general election, and it’s entirely possible that they may burn through a few more PMs before then. Why Sunak – or anyone else except Johnson with his grossly inflated sense of self – would actually want the job in the circumstances is beyond my understanding.

A proportional system would allow the major parties to fragment into more cohesive and united individual parties, and force negotiations between those parties about agreed programmes for government. Sometimes, those agreements would break down, just as the internal agreement within the Tory Party has broken down now. The difference is that such a breakdown between parties would create the opportunity and the mechanism for those differences to be judged by the electorate if no alternative could be formally negotiated. The current system tries to hide the differences and pretend that there is a coherent government in place, on the basis of an artificially high ‘majority’ in an election 3 years ago. It’s a sham, and the only remaining question is whether any pretend peace between the factions can hold until Christmas. It looks unlikely, although if Sunak sends MPs home for Christmas early (around the middle of November, perhaps), he might improve his prospects. Johnson is probably calculating that he’ll get another chance sooner than many imagine.

Staying afloat on a tide of outrage

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When it emerged on Monday that Liz Truss had been meeting the Chair of the 1922 for ‘routine discussions’, I’m sure that I was not alone in assuming that this particular 'routine' was the one where the PM was passed a figurative bottle of whisky and a loaded revolver. It’s certainly starting to look like a routine occurrence. However, by the time she got to the House of Commons, it looked like she’d drunk the entire bottle and then forgotten to use the revolver. Or, given past performance, fired it and missed. Six times.

As she then sat on the bench surrounded by the circling sharks, wearing a fixed non-expression while a standing Jeremy Hunt trashed everything she’d said, including things uttered only in the previous few days as well as things she hasn't even said yet (past, present, future - all happen simultaneously in Trussland), the image from the past which came to mind was of Yeltsin dictating terms to Gorbachev as the Soviet Union disintegrated. Like Gorbachev, she retained the job title, but all power had already flowed out of her grasp, even if the full realisation hadn’t quite sunk in.

Today, she is due to face the House of Commons herself for Questions to the PM. Perhaps Starmer will have an off day; perhaps he will struggle with some sort of strange internal sense of kindness. But barring either of those (or a reloaded revolver being quietly passed to her before she gets to her place), she is facing further utter and very public humiliation over things she’s said and is still saying. It can surely only be a serious deficiency in the functioning neuron department which prevents her from understanding just how humiliated she has already been, and just how pointless it is to continue the farce.

Closer to home, our very own First Minister showed a very rare flash of anger yesterday. It has outraged the Tories, of course, but they would probably be outraged if they discovered he had dared to eat cornflakes for breakfast (unless he hadn't, in which case they'd be outraged at that). Outside the ranks of the perpetually outraged, it will probably have done Drakeford more good than harm (although we should probably also exclude those who are opposed to cruelty to dumb animals). The Tory ship, as badly holed as it is, can surely not continue floating for much longer. Expelling vast clouds of faux outrage through the ever-increasing number of holes in an attempt to keep the water out is necessarily a time-limited operation - even RT's apparently limitless supply of the stuff must come to an end at some point.

Sometimes, abandoning the ship is the only sensible course of action

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As they survey the wreckage of their party and watch the political death throes of this month’s outgoing PM, the minds of Tory MPs seem to be more than a little preoccupied by the question of who should become next month’s outgoing PM, and what the mechanism should be for choosing that next lame duck. It’s the sort of short-sighted perspective which is probably the inevitable outcome of their personal obsession with retaining their own job, but the more important questions for the rest of us are who should succeed next month’s outgoing PM, how, and when.

Whilst watching the implosion of successive Tory governments with ever increasing rapidity is a fun spectator sport, it’s not the end, nor even the beginning of the end, of the pain unless there is an alternative available which is not only credible (and without needing to move a muscle, the possibility of a Starmer government has come to look not only credible but unavoidable, as he watches the ratings of Labour’s traditional opponent reverse past him at incredible speed), but which also has a different plan, which escapes from the underlying beliefs which have led to the implosion. On that latter point, Starmer is looking a good deal less credible; and changing the personnel whilst keeping the mission largely intact will do little to help the lives of those being so badly damaged by the ideologues of the Tory Party.

There are, of course, a number of different reasons for the implosion, but the centrality of Brexit cannot be ignored. However, it isn’t Brexit itself which is the underlying problem so much as the delusions of grandeur which underpinned the whole exercise. The ill-fated budget was based on the same delusion as Brexit itself, which is that the UK is a major player in the world economy on a par with the US and China and can behave with the same disregard for rules and norms as those two countries can, unlike perceived ‘minor’ players such as Germany or France which should know their place, and be ever grateful for the UK having saved them during ‘the war’. The more evidence accumulates to support the alternative proposition – that the UK is, in fact, nothing more than a middle-ranking off-shore island of Europe – the more that evidence must be denounced as fake and irrelevant by politicians who simply double down on the notion that ‘we’ cannot be expected to accept such a lowly status and must be given whatever ‘we’ want.

How different, really, is Starmer’s position? Continued references to ‘making Brexit work’ without saying how suggest the answer is ‘not a lot, really’. In truth, Brexit doesn’t even need to be completely reversed in order to achieve a workable state of affairs; it just needs a willingness to move a great deal closer to (and preferably to join) the single market and the customs union. Without doing that, ‘making Brexit work’ is just a meaningless slogan, which there is no way of implementing. Yet the starting point of the probable next-but-one government (after both this month’s and next month’s outgoing PMs have duly outgone) appears to be that only minor changes in the tone of discussions are required and all will be well. It’s no less deluded than the current lot – and ultimately it’s pretty much the same delusion at work.

Escaping our current plight requires more than a change of the hand on the tiller; it requires the UK to develop a realistic understanding of its position and status in the world, a willingness to co-operate with others, particularly our closest neighbours, and an overhaul of political structures and processes which give outright total power to cultists on the basis of a minority of the votes. When I look at Starmer and Labour, I see none of that, only a lust to have their turn at pulling the levers. It would be comforting to think that, shorn of Scotland, Wales and the remainder of Ireland, English politicians would at last be forced to confront the reality they’ve been ignoring for decades, but it seems more likely they’ll just double down on the same delusions in their reduced territory. Remaining in an arcane union out of some sense of responsibility to help them (Welsh Labour’s favoured position, apparently) merely dooms us to be dragged along by the same delusion for the foreseeable future.

Clarity is a virtue. Usually.

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If there’s one thing that can be said with certainty about this month's outgoing PM, Liz Truss, it is that she is always ‘very clear’. Reminding us just how clear she is has become something like a trademark catch-phrase, a form of words which seems to open almost every sentence which utters forth from her mouth. The difficulty is not that what she says isn’t clear, it is that she has an amazing ability to be very clear about two complete opposites at the same time.

·        She was very clear that abolishing the highest rate of income tax was absolutely (another favourite word) the right thing, and equally clear that scrapping the proposal to abolish it is also the right thing to do.

·        She was very clear that increasing the rate of corporation tax, as proposed by Rishi Sunak in a budget which now seems like it took place sometime last century, would definitely cause a recession and would in any event not raise any additional revenue. She’s now equally clear that going ahead with the increase is an important part of her plan for growth and will also raise an extra £18 billion for the government’s coffers.

·        She is very clear that the government can increase planned expenditure, cut planned revenue and borrow less all at the same time, and that there is absolutely no need for any cuts to departmental budgets. She’s now equally clear that the numbers need to add up, and that means some hard decisions on spending will have to be taken.

Being clear is usually a virtue, and she now seems to be very clear that she’s done quite enough to convince people that she has a clear way forward which is clearly understood by everyone. Clarity, though, is a bit like beauty: it’s all in the eye of the beholder, and in this case there seems to be a distinct lack of beholders sharing her perception. To be entirely fair to her, though, there is one big thing that she has achieved. Tory MPs are now falling in behind her in droves, exactly as she asked. I wonder when she’ll realise that most have them have knives in their hands, even if the rest are armed only with the traditional offering of a glass of whisky and a revolver. Perhaps Brutus Kwarteng will initiate the final denouement next week by making the customary personal statement allowed to ousted ministers. Pass the popcorn.