Politics: the charade goes on

By Richard North - July 9, 2022

After the tumultuous events of Thursday, yesterday was bound to be a bit of an anti-climax, as indeed it was. Even the assassination of a former Japanese prime minister, confined largely to the foreign news sections, failed to break into the media doldrums.

The Ukraine war grumbles on with no particular distinction, other than Putin declaring, on day 134, that “We’re only just getting started”. The pseudo-resignation of Johnson, though, has also hit the headlines over there, with regrets being expressed.

Nevertheless, the view taken is that his (eventual) departure will make very little difference to the UK’s support for Ukraine. There is a broad cross-party consensus behind giving aid to the country and most of the leadership candidates are likely to pledge continued support.

That leaves the UK media to split their attention, largely between retrospectives on the Oaf’s career, the accounts of his downfall and the tedium of the build-up to the leadership contest, as candidates launch their campaigns.

As regards the retrospectives, sentiment is also split. On the one hand, you have the love-struck fawning of Charles Moore who believes Johnson to be a “political genius”, and the hard-headed realism of Rachel Sylvester.

It may come as a surprise to some readers to find that I prefer the Sylvester version, which includes the well-worn gem from Max Hastings (drawn from an earlier piece, written last February) that: “The only people who like Boris Johnson are those who don’t know him”. Sylvester has updated that view with the suggestion that Tory MPs turned on their leader because they had concluded that the more the voters saw of him, the less they liked him.

In a way, Johnson and Farage share that trait. When the support for Ukip under Farage’s leadership was at its height, there were more ex-members than there were on the then current membership list, with most of his original supporters having deserted him, vowing never to have anything to do with the man.

The nascent dislike for Johnson can hardly have been improved by yesterday’s judicious leakage of a copy of the invoice for Johnson’s refurbishment of his Downing Street flat. It stands in excess of £200,000 – rather more than the value of my four-bedroomed house in Bradford.

One particular item singled out for attention, apart from the £2,260-worth of “gold” wallpaper, was the £3,675 drinks trolley, based on one owned by the late ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev.

While many working people might struggle to spend that on their one and only car, necessary to get them to their minimum-wage jobs, this speaks volumes for the “Tory values” embraced by The Great Leader who was once paraded as “on the side of ordinary voters”.

Writing back in February, Sylvester noted that the prime minister’s allies were insisting that he was determined to fight to stay in No 10. He had taken to singing Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive to his staff.

Helpfully, it was felt that the crisis in Ukraine could buy him some time. Loyal ministers had started making the case that the last thing the country needed then was a “vacuum” at the centre of government – demonstrating the obvious truth that Johnson was using Ukraine to deflect attention from his domestic woes.

Even then, though, many senior Tories thought Johnson’s time was running out. MPs had started quoting an adaptation of a Turkish proverb: “When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn’t become a king. The palace becomes a circus”.

Then Johnson was described by Andrew Mitchell, the former chief whip, as “a bit like a medieval monarch, ruling in a medieval court”. Much of being prime minister is hard work and laser-like dedication to the detail, Mitchell said, “and that is just not Boris”, adding: “It feels now very much as though Boris thinks what’s in Boris’s interest is in the national interest and I’m afraid it is not”.

Despite the furore over “partygate” though, Johnsons managed to survive and after his foreign Odyssey, culminating in the Nato summit in Madrid, he must have thought he had gotten away with it. How appropriate it was that this sexually incontinent man should have been brought down by the antics of a homosexual groper.

But then, Sylvester writes, citing a former Downing Street aide, “you are only Teflon until you are not”. This source adds that, after the job of prime minister, there’s nowhere else to go. It’s the end of the road.

The former aide notes, as many have before, that he will probably make lots of money on the circuit with speeches and books but, he says, “that’s not what he wants. He will be incredibly frustrated and unhappy because his biggest ambition has failed”.

This is supposed to be “a sad end to what was such a promising life”, although I cannot in my heart find so much as a scintilla of sadness. May he rot in hell with his £3,675 drinks trolley, after living long enough to reflect on the damage he has done to the body politic.

What comes over from Sylvester’s account though, and the many like it written previously, is the weary predictability of it all. Johnson’s character and his manifest defects were well-known long before he became prime minister and, but for the collective brain-fart of the Conservative Party, should never have been elected leader.

As for Johnson at the moment, we still have the bizarre situation where a prime minister, despite having managed to lose the confidence of his own government, is still in place having defeated attempts to remove him. While the Telegraph wibbles about his successor needing to be “in place within days not weeks”, it is as impotent as the rest of the establishment.

The best on offer seems to be secret Conservative plans that will impose a new prime minister on the nation by 5 September, “under plans to be approved by the party’s high command early next week”.

In the meantime, it is feared that as many as 16 candidates could enter the contest, turning the selection into a bigger charade than even the most cynical of observers might have expected. It will be a test of the party to see if it is even capable of bringing a semblance of order to this bunfight.

Some concern is showing through, with “a senior party source” saying that, under proposed rule changes, “there will be a threshold so that candidates below that threshold will not be allowed to continue”. We want to reduce the field to serious candidates, he says, “and if you can’t get a reasonable proportion of the party to support you, we don’t want grandstanders”.

The first round of voting is planned for Wednesday and the second for the following day, followed by hustings meetings for the survivors on 18 July. More voting is planned for 19 and 20 July, with the final two candidates declared on 21 July. There is then expected to be a postal ballot of the Party’s 200,000 members, with the new leader declared by 5 September.

This, though, must surely be the last time we go through this affront to democracy, where a leader is appointed by a party caucus and imposed on the rest of the country without a popular vote. The last time this happened we ended up with Johnson as prime minister, which is adequate testimony to the trustworthiness of the process.

Either the fall of a prime minister must automatically trigger a general election or, preferably – in my view – we must recognise the reality and concede that we should have a directly-elected prime minister.

For too long, we as a nation have been overly tolerant of our democracy being hijacked by the elites, the selection of Johnson as a suitable office holder being the latest in a long line of insults.

What we do about it will be the subject of our next Harrogate Agenda meeting on 5 November, held in London under the umbrella of a newly imposed prime minister. Next week, I will post more details of that meeting, and will hope to see many of you there.