We’ve got a wrong ’un in Downing Street. Does anyone have the balls to dislodge this impostor, or must cowering Tory MPs outsource their courage to the voters of North Shropshire next week?
There has to be an alternative to the dismal trickle of dirty little stories that only tell us what Boris Johnson’s parliamentary party long suspected, and the country is now learning fast. The prime minister has been rumbled — and for Johnson it’s over.
That much we know. The remaining question is whether he’s going to cling wretchedly on next year with his squirming parliamentary party drifting towards an electoral bruising — or does there exist someone on the government benches, someone notable or someone as yet unknown, with the courage to step into the light and say out loud what everyone else is thinking? That’s what Margaret Thatcher did when the whole world could see Ted Heath was finished. Over brandy in the members’ smoking room distinguished senior colleagues whispered about frontrunners in the “second round”. She saw there had to be a first round.
To that first round in a moment because we needn’t tarry long over the reasons for it. There’s a moral toad crouching at the heart of the British establishment, and it remains uncertain whether that establishment — from a constitutional monarch down through a whole delicate web of formal and informal contacts and connections, operating on information often unarticulated and principles of decency that gentlemen don’t write down — is capable alone of purging itself of the amphibian.
He knows no rules and trades on respect for codes of honour that others take for granted. Lord Geidt, formerly the Queen’s private secretary and now Johnson’s adviser on standards (I remind you that the previous one, Alex Allen, resigned in protest against his boss) is his latest victim. Geidt assumed a gentleman wouldn’t tell him a barefaced lie about his scratching around for inappropriate ways of paying his interior decorator. Geidt’s assumption was correct. A gentleman wouldn’t.
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Though it perhaps excites less popular fury than reports of unlawful Downing Street revels, the Downing Street refurbishment affair is the more serious. Interviewers are often blindsided by flat denials, but his interrogators over the illicit party were mostly only journalists: fair game (in Boris’s book) for the Lie Direct. Parliamentary colleagues, the electoral commission and commissioners for standards are another matter. We see now why Johnson was so keen to use the Owen Paterson business as a smokescreen for the removal of the parliamentary commissioner for standards, Kathryn Stone.
“From his every engagement with real human beings,” I wrote on this page five weeks ago, “somebody emerges broken, and it’s never Mr Johnson.” So permit me a personal word about Downing Street’s (then) press spokeswoman-designate, Allegra Stratton. I know her. She is a good person. In a mock-interview before last Christmas, a rehearsal for the job she never did, her embarrassment at an unexpected question about the now-infamous party was obvious, and her inability to spin her way out of it does her nothing but credit. Nice people, when embarrassed, often grin. Now she has been made the fall-guy for the PM himself, and for a party that (so far as I know) he is still saying didn’t happen. His first, his instinctive response to any accusation is to fib. His second is to tip somebody else into the slurry. It was the action of a cad.
So what (or rather who) next? I had supposed the contest was between Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt, but noises from the undergrowth are that the foreign secretary, Liz Truss, is emerging as a serious competitor — at least in the eyes of the cohort of new and younger MPs.
If so, they are making a serious mistake. There looks to be a real danger that the Tories, on the rebound from one empty vessel, may fall for the charms of another. Truss is at least no moral reprobate, but look hard and there’s nothing there: nothing beyond a leaping self-confidence that’s almost endearing in its wide-eyed disregard for the forces of political gravity.
Three days ago she gave a speech at Chatham House, “Building the Network of Liberty”: a barely disguised puff for her own leadership prospects. If you’re tempted to take Truss seriously, please read the speech. Like a hiker bounding across a bog, springing from reed-tuft to reed-tuft fast enough to avoid any tuft sinking beneath the weight it’s asked to bear, the speech leaps from one overweening vacuity to the next, never pausing long enough to explain what, in practical terms, a foreign secretary might actually mean.
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The free world, she says “has taken its eye off the ball”; there follows the usual attack on “woke” thinking. But “it’s time to wake up”; “[Britain’s] scientists are saving the world through their miracle vaccines”; we need “the age of ideas, influence and inspiration” (not “the maelstrom of militancy, mistrust and misinformation”). With a ghastly inevitability there follows the Magna Carta, the rule of law and the free market in “the greatest country on Earth” where, whoever you are, “you can achieve your dreams”. We have “unrivalled influence in the world”.
Practical examples, however, are in short supply, though the Beatles and Tim Berners-Lee get a mention. Plus “we were the first European country to impose sanctions on Belarus”. Also mentioned are “free trade agreements with 70 countries”, almost all of them replicating the agreements we already had. It is time, she concludes, “to dump the baggage, ditch the introspection and step forward, proud of who we are and what we stand for, ready to shape the world anew”.
Can you get algorithms to write this stuff? The word “liberty” keeps reappearing. In an ill-disguised pitch to the libertarian tendency among many new young Tory MPs, Truss presents herself as Britain’s answer to the French Marianne, although without the ribbon cockade and red cap.
As a leadership hopeful, Truss puts me in mind of those dreadful kebabs that, legless after a pub-crawl, you lurch towards at midnight. They seem like a good idea at the time, but peer into the bread pouch and the contents do not live up to the promise. It would be a pity if the parliamentary Conservative Party, drunk on Boris, turns out to have developed a taste for hollow posturing and, having tired of a charlatan, falls into the arms of another sham.
Boris is set to shrink in our rear-view mirrors. After three years of clowning, it is depth, honesty, thoughtfulness, managerial skills and a certain understatement that the party and the country should be hungering for. It will soon be time for candidates who embody these quieter attributes to come forward.