What next in the government’s Advent calendar of dishonesty and hypocrisy? Behind door one there was the cheese and wine party in Downing Street. Door two gave us canapés with Gavin Williamson. Door six, Carrie Johnson’s alleged lockdown-flouting bash. Door eight, the news that Boris Johnson had WhatsApped a donor for more cash for his flat refurbishment several months before he was meant to know who had paid for it. Door 11 was a drinks party in the Treasury for those who’d been “working really hard” on the spending review, while those who had been working really hard on Covid wards enjoyed no such fun. Door 12 had a photograph of the prime minister as quizmaster at another No 10 bash.
With bated breath we await the uber-revelation behind big door 24. Perhaps footage of a Johnson-attended party at which he and assorted billionaires sank Bollinger, ate roasted labrador, played pin-the-ciggie-on-the-universal-credit-claimant and raffled the chance to privatise Great Ormond Street Hospital?
No 10 will be hoping that the big vaccination push announced yesterday will shove partygate from centre stage, but this is optimistic given the cut-through; even Ant and Dec have been ridiculing the prime minister on primetime I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here! With Omicron cases surging, a third of the public are now less likely to follow coronavirus rules after the Christmas party revelations. Never before have so many paid the price for a few glasses of warm white wine.
In one way the avalanche of partygate stories was helpful for the government, because it helped to bury the most shocking revelation of last week: a Foreign Office whistleblower’s testimony about just how terribly the evacuation of Kabul was handled. This included the allegation that No 10 had intervened to push Ministry of Defence resources towards the evacuation of Pen Farthing’s menagerie, limiting the number of humans who could be rescued. At the time, Ben Wallace, the defence secretary, made clear how irritating he found the Noah’s Ark mission, so who was driving it? A worker at Farthing’s charity says he had contacted the prime minister’s wife on the issue. The whistleblower suggests there was “an instruction from the prime minister” to use “considerable capacity” to help the animal rescue. It is not too much of a stretch to imagine that Carrie, an animal activist, may have twisted the arm of the prime minister, and that he, wanting an easy life, ordered the minions to make it happen.
Might this explain the newly revealed letter to Farthing from the prime minister’s parliamentary private secretary Trudy Harrison MP, in which she confirmed that the MoD would “ensure that a flight slot is available” for the animals? Downing Street continues to deny prime ministerial involvement, saying that Harrison was writing in her capacity as a constituency MP . . . but Farthing isn’t her constituent. For heaven’s sake. Do they not think we check this stuff out?
Advertisement
The common threads running through all of this — cavalier arrogance, casualness, dishonesty — are of course threads which run through the prime minister’s personality. We can’t lay all government failures at Johnson’s door but the culture is set at the top, and the culture he has set is proving disastrous in a number of ways.
Some of the criticism of Johnson is overblown. He is not the devil incarnate, nor a nasty or vindictive person, but he is careless. He is careless with important things, such as the truth and the good word of a prime minister, and I doubt the veteran of numerous scandals actually cares much about any of this. I worked as his speechwriter many years ago and recall a joke he made a couple of times after being told off by a handler for one of his gaffes: “You’ve let yourself down, you’ve let me down, you’ve let the school down . . . said the inflatable headmaster to the inflatable boy in the inflatable school . . .” A silly line, but it captures Johnson’s response to reproach: to smirk.
He doesn’t do remorse. In television interviews you will see that when presented with his own failures or scandals, he struggles to restrain a roll of the eyes. This is because the prime minister hears much of public outrage as whining white noise, the mithering of moralistic and mediocre people who don’t really understand the way the world works. Words like “integrity” are for squares. His literary hero is George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman, who believes there is a point “where treachery is so complete and unashamed that it becomes statesmanship”. Better to be a bounder than a bore, whatever the collateral damage. And so we are in for more of plan B: Brazen-it-out. Johnson will be rallying his team with cries like “tin hats on, folks!” and reassuring them it will all blow over. You have heard of terminal velocity; Johnson is betting that public outrage has reached terminal ferocity, the anger plateauing at a level which is not quite fierce enough to force him out of office. Expect the fightback to involve a lot more of Johnson on building sites up north, in hard hat and neon tabard. “We’ve got to get back to what this government is all about,” his weary advisers will be saying, as though anyone has a clue what that is.
And that is the central problem with the Johnson administration. It is not the habitual lying, the arrant hypocrisy, the promotion of mediocre ministers, the contracts-for-the-boys corruption. It is that there is no clear mission at the heart of this government because there is no clear mission in the head of this prime minister. The scandals and gaffes would be more easily tolerated if the government were commanding real respect elsewhere but it isn’t. Several areas cry out for attention but where are the big ideas on the future of the NHS? Or social care? Public service reform is dead as a dodo but no one notices because we are all too busy wondering who was eating kettle chips in the Downing Street press room a year ago.
Surveying the wreckage that is the British government’s reputation I am less angry at Johnson himself than at those who enabled his ascension to No 10. Like some organism that single-mindedly divides its cells over and over again, he was always going to single-mindedly reach to fill the highest office that would have him. It was up to Conservative MPs who knew he was wholly unsuited to the job to block his path to Downing Street, but a callow and shallow party kept repeating the old line about Johnson being a winner and they wanted a piece of the power.
Advertisement
If those MPs wish to repair the damage done, they must move sooner rather than later to replace the prime minister. Each further month of lying and chaos damages public trust and demeans the country. Britain deserves better. And who knows? It might even come as a relief to Johnson when the party’s over.