Quotulatiousness

October 25, 2022

Rishi Sunak becomes Britain’s latest Prime Minister

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I don’t know how the oddsmakers rate the new PM’s chances, but there’s bound to be money made and lost on how long he sticks around. In The Line, Andrew MacDougall wishes Rishi Sunak good luck in his new post:

Rishi Sunak shortly after becoming Chancellor of the Exchequer in 2020.
Wikimedia Commons.

It says something about the current dysfunction in British politics that the elevation of a third prime minister in a matter of just two months — without a single vote cast, by anyone — is seen as a relief. So all hail the new PM Rishi Sunak, a.k.a. the man who lost to Liz Truss eight weeks ago, as he takes the wheel of this drunken nation.

Sunak won the leadership of the Conservative Party — and through it, the premiership of the country — in the short and sharp race triggered by the spectacular end of the Trussterfuck all of (checks notes) four days ago. With the declared support of nearly 200 of his Parliamentary colleagues, Sunak was able to see off challenges from former prime minister Boris Johnson and current House Leader Penny Mordaunt. Both Mordaunt and Johnson declined to seek a vote by the party membership, prioritizing “party unity” instead.

It will now be up to the 42-year old Sunak, an MP for only seven years, to deliver that party unity. And good luck, as they say, with that. Because the Tories are now riven into warring factions which appear to have no more in common with each other than Jagmeet Singh does with success.

Yeah, it’s that bad.

A good first step for Sunak would be to not repeat the errors of the Truss … era? When you’re in a hole, stop digging, etc. Thankfully, Sunak already has credibility here, having spent the summer telling everyone that Truss’s economic policies would be disastrous. The former chancellor of the Exchequer is, thank Christ, well acquainted with economic reality and is expected to continue the new course set out by Jeremy Hunt, the current chancellor, who has spent his time erasing all of the dick-and-ball doodles Truss scribbled onto the economy. This will surely please the international bond markets, who are the actual rulers of the United Kingdom. It will also please mortgage holders, whose payments are now expected to go up less than during Trussonomics.

But it won’t please everyone.

Robert Hutton in The Critic, for one, welcomes the new robot PM:

The morning had been hugely enjoyable, hours of watching Tory MPs rushing to endorse Rishi Sunak while there was still time. Boris Johnson had suddenly disappeared from view, claiming that he could have won, easily, but had decided not to try. Penny Mordaunt tried her best, and claims to have come within touching distance of the 100-nomination threshold, but, just before Sir Graham Brady was going to announce the result, she issued a statement saying that she hadn’t made it. It was, of course, significantly more gracious than Johnson’s. For all the claims that his time on holiday has made him a more thoughtful and humble figure, his Sunday evening statement suggests he is as much of a petulant man-child as he ever was.

And so to the desk-banging. In fairness, the appointment of Rishi Sunak as leader and prime minister-in-waiting was, for a lot of Tory MPs, an unexpected and huge relief. People who six long weeks ago thought they’d never see the inside of a ministerial car again now glimpse a future bright with possibility, at least as far as they personally are concerned.

[…]

The oddity to the day was that we hadn’t heard from our incoming prime minister. In fact, he didn’t seem to have spoken a word in public since the start of September. Finally he popped up, and we worked out why they’d been keeping him away from the cameras.

It was a brief statement, throughout which he stared at a point just off camera, giving the impression to the viewer that he was looking over your left shoulder, hoping to catch the eye of someone more interesting who was standing behind you.

He opened by paying tribute to Liz Truss “who has led with dignity and grace through a time of great change”. Or, as the rest of us call it, “September”. His delivery was awkward, as though he had read about public speaking in a book, with frequent random pauses. “I am,” he said. “Humbled. And honoured. To have the support of my parliamentary colleagues. And to be elected as leader. Of the Conservative. And Unionist Party!”

Sebastian Millbank, on the other hand, sees Sunak as heralding the end of British sovereignty:

Sunak will be praised, despite being arguably the most privileged man in British politics, as being a triumph for diversity and social mobility, Britain’s first ethnic minority Prime Minister. But he’s also our first Californian Prime Minister — a man who believes heart and soul in the Silicon Valley “Californian ideology“, and boasts of his time in Stanford as a formative experience that gave him a “bigger, more dynamic approach to change”.

In choosing Rishi Sunak in a panicked attempt to retain power and calm the markets, Tory MPs have signed away what is left of British sovereignty over our own affairs. You will hear claims that “this is how the British system works”, that in a parliamentary democracy he need only win the confidence of parliament, and does not need to go to the country.

This is sheer and utter nonsense. The Conservative majority was elected, in its current form, on the basis of the 2019 manifesto, with its promises to strengthen the public sector, heal regional inequality, and reclaim sovereignty over our borders, law and finances. If Sunak and his party no longer intend to honour those commitments, they must win a fresh mandate in a general election.

September 9, 2022

Britain’s “Lord of Misrule” at the end of the “Borisarchy”

Filed under: Britain, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Quillette, John Lloyd considers the parts of Boris Johnson’s personality that allowed him to achieve the premiership but not to retain it:

The respectable consensus on Boris Johnson’s resignation is that the Lord of Misrule was an opportunist who rose to power amid the mayhem of Brexit that he’d helped to create, but that his fecklessness finally caught up with him. There’s something in that, but more in what’s not. Although his critics will refuse to admit it, what’s mostly missing is the laughter, which is now a more important factor in British public life than before.

Much of public and media life in the UK — and it isn’t unique in this — is a search for laugh lines, and Johnson — instinctively but also with calculation — played heartily into this. He always had. In a largely affectionate biography, Andrew Gimson, Johnson’s former colleague at the Spectator and the Daily Telegraph, writes that, “To make people enjoy being led by him was an aspect of leadership which Boris mastered at a very young age. He made people helpless with laughter, and so great was their enjoyment that they scarcely cared what he did with their support, as long as he kept on amusing them.”

With the laughter came Johnson’s inchoate libertarianism — a strong aversion to condemning activities in which others like to indulge, especially those in which he likes to indulge himself, such as adultery. He is fond of telling the story of when Churchill, Johnson’s lodestar as a public figure, was taken aside during his second administration (1951–55) by his chief whip and told that a cabinet minister had been discovered having sex with a guardsman in Hyde Park at 3am on a freezing morning in February. The press had found out, which the whip advised, meant the minister would have to resign. “Caught with a guardsman?” Churchill asked. “Yes Prime Minister.” “In Hyde Park?” “Yes Prime Minister.” “On a park bench?” “That’s right, Prime Minister.” “At three o’clock in the morning?” “That’s correct, Prime Minister.” “In this weather! Good God man, it makes you proud to be British!”

To Johnson, this is evidence of Churchill’s goodhearted tolerance and defiance of narrow prejudice (this was a time when homosexual acts were quite severely punished), which are matched only by his own in generosity and wit. To be generous and broadminded in his speech (he is said to be quite mean with his money) is attractive to the many sinners among us. We see in the Prime Minister a person with the moral outlook of Casanova and yet (or, and so) finds attractive women willing to dally with him — a cheering thought. As one of these, Allegra Mostyn-Owen, who became his first wife, later admitted, “at least he made me laugh.”

[…]

Accustomed to lying to wriggle out of embarrassments like the discovery of an adultery, he continued to mislead when he joined aides for impromptu parties at No. 10, when the strictest lockdowns and prohibitions on the public were in force. How could a man of such intelligence fail to realise that his bluster would unravel almost as soon as they were uttered? He had, it seemed, an inbuilt arrogance — a conviction that he was able to avoid consequences that brought others down, but which only made him stronger.

In the end, he ran out of that road. Ironically, what finished him was denying that he knew that a government whip, Chris Pincher, had a history of groping other men. Johnson refused to take the scandal seriously enough to fire Pincher, as his senior colleagues pressed him to do — an echo of the Churchill joke he liked to tell, and a reaction which accorded with his libertarian instincts. However, his colleagues finally wearied of delivering statements to the media that made them look ridiculous within days or even hours. It was the last straw.

When Lord Dannatt, a former head of the British Army, was confronted with the (admittedly faint) possibility that Johnson would be considered for the post of NATO Secretary General, he was quoted as saying: “There is no doubt that [Johnson] has done a lot of good, and our full support for Ukraine is just fantastic. But I am afraid that these are personal things, a lack of integrity, a lack of trust. Frankly, we do not want to put Boris Johnson on the international stage for further ridicule. He is a disgrace to the nation.”

September 8, 2022

Liz Truss replaces Boris Johnson

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Spiked, Brendan O’Neill looks at some of the many, many tasks already piled on new British PM Liz Truss’s desk in the wake of Boris and the pandemic:

So it’s prime minister Truss. No big surprise there. What we need next, though, is something that would be very surprising, almost unfathomably so. We need a PM who can buck the crisis of political will and take clear, firm action to save the country from economic collapse and existential malaise. Is that Truss? I’m sceptical, but we shall see.

At first glance, Truss would seem to be singularly unsuited to the task at hand. That task is nothing less than a revolution of will, a rediscovery of the political mettle that has been glaringly absent in Britain these past few decades. We live under a political class that is cautious, bereft of daring; which is hyper short-termist, more concerned with dodging controversy in the present than laying out a plan for the future. The energy crisis is the bastard offspring of this evacuation of vision from politics.

And in Truss we seem to have a leader who is more technocratic than visionary, more given to following the political consensus than to shaking things up. As the Telegraph put it, Truss has been a “dutiful servant”. Despite being something of a Tory party outsider – considered by many insiders to be “a bit odd” – Truss has always “diligently backed the consensus within the party”. She seems overly media-oriented, too. She’s clearly had her gauche edges smoothed by media training and she devotes a lot of energy to “savvy social-media use”. A politician who prefers consensual calm to bold action, and who is more concerned with virtual likes than real-world impact, is not what crisis-ridden Britain needs.

And yet, Truss is far from alone in lacking political audacity, in seeming to prefer the small bureaucratic task of managing public life rather than overhauling it. In this, she’s fairly typical of today’s managerial elites. Also, Truss’s political clarity seemed to improve during the leadership contest. She even became a little more daring in what she said – for instance, by bristling against Net Zero policies. No, this doesn’t prove she’s the leader we need, but it is a reminder that politicians often find themselves, and their cojones, in the heat of battle. Will the pressures of the crisis similarly bring out Truss’s slightly edgier side? We should hope so.

On that crisis, let us be clear: it is incredibly serious. It is the most serious crisis Britain has faced in decades. The political and media elites seem unwilling to acknowledge just how deep and menacing the crisis is. Even their focus on households’ rising energy bills suggests they do not appreciate the enormity of what is unfolding. Yes, millions are worried about how to keep the lights on this winter, but the impact of the energy crisis on business and industry will be graver still. Numerous businesses look set to go under, precipitating economic collapse and mass unemployment. Choosing between heating and eating will be a luxurious memory in the event of the joblessness and poverty that would follow such a calamity in British capitalism.

On a somewhat lighter note, it turns out that Liz Truss isn’t the same person as @LizTruss on Twitter:

August 27, 2022

On the verge of leaving No. 10 Downing St., Boris is still Tory voters’ top choice

Filed under: Britain, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In UnHerd, Dominic Sandbrook discusses the astonishing popularity of disgraced Tory PM Boris Johnson among ordinary Tory voters:

Prime Minister Boris Johnson at his first Cabinet meeting in Downing Street, 25 July 2019.
Official photograph via Wikimedia Commons.

With just over a week to go until the climax of the Conservative leadership contest, the name of the people’s favourite is surely not in doubt. After five ballots of MPs, weeks of campaigning and more than ten public hustings, the will of the members could not be clearer. The punters have weighed up the two candidates, examined their pasts, studied their principles and reflected on their promises. And faced with a choice between Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss, the finger of fate points to … Boris Johnson!

Such is the implication of a recent YouGov survey, which found that fully 49% of Tory members would choose as their leader the darling of the Greek tavernas, if only he were allowed to run – a higher proportion than those backing Sunak and Truss put together. And as The Times reported earlier this week, this was echoed in findings of focus groups among swing voters, who seem exceptionally unenthusiastic about either of Johnson’s potential successors.

Again and again, in fact, the same theme appears: Boris was robbed. “I really liked Boris and I was really, really disappointed in the way he was treated,” said one swing voter in Esher and Walton, speaking for the rest. “They’re picking on minor things. You know, furnishings and wallpaper and making such a big deal about it. And it’s the media. The media are the ones that turn everyone against him.”

Was Boris robbed, though? You didn’t often hear that line in June and July, when he narrowly survived a no-confidence vote, led his party to crushing defeats in the Wakefield and Tiverton and Honiton by-elections and was forced to watch the collapse of his government as some 31 ministers from all sides of the party, equating to just over a quarter of his entire administration, resigned in protest. On 7 July, the day he finally threw in the towel, YouGov found that his public favourability had sunk to truly diabolical levels, with just 19% having a positive view, and fully 72% a negative one. That made Johnson even more unpopular than Theresa May just before she quit, and almost as unpopular as Jeremy Corbyn at his nadir. So much, then, for the populist hero of the Red Wall masses.

And yet, as extraordinary as it may sound, the Big Dog’s fightback began that very afternoon. The opening shots came as he stood outside 10 Downing Street, reminding the cameras of his “incredible mandate: the biggest Conservative majority since 1987, the biggest share of the vote since 1979”. Then came Johnson’s insistence that it was “eccentric to change governments when we are delivering so much”, and his dismissal of the Westminster “herd” that had moved against him. And then, in his final Prime Minister’s Questions appearance a fortnight later, came those ominous words “Mission accomplished, for now”, as well as that classic Johnsonian sign-off: “Hasta la vista, baby.” The only surprise is that he didn’t use another Terminator payoff: “I’ll be back.”

Ever since, the idea that Boris was robbed, cheated, stabbed in the back has been gathering force. The Tory tabloids insist that he was the victim of a “putsch“, while his adoring Culture Secretary, the ridiculous Nadine Dorries, maintains that he was removed by a “ruthless coup” led largely by Sunak. And among Tory activists, the idea that he was toppled by a sinister media campaign has almost visibly gathered strength — enthusiastically fed, it has to be said, by Liz Truss. When, at one Tory hustings earlier this month, the former Sun political editor Tom Newton Dunn asked if Johnson had been the author of his own downfall, an activist shouted that it was “the media”. “Sounds like you’re being blamed, Tom,” said Truss with a smirk, “and who am I to disagree with this excellent audience?”

August 8, 2022

Boring British politicians

Filed under: Books, Britain, Government, History, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Katherine Bayford compares the last set of cabinet ministers appointed by lame duck PM Boris Johnson with some of the Parliamentarians of the 20th century … and it’s difficult not to feel nostalgic for a past Golden Age at Westminster:

Prime Minister Boris Johnson at his first Cabinet meeting in Downing Street, 25 July 2019.
Official photograph via Wikimedia Commons.

One of Boris Johnson’s final, whimpering acts of power in his premiership was to appoint a new cabinet. Fatally wounded by a team of ministers made up of those with little charm, intelligence or experience, who was actually left for Boris to replace them with?

A veritable who’s-that of the worst unknowns that can be found down the side of parliamentary benches was swiftly conscripted in. I tell a lie — Johnny Mercer MP achieved mild public recognition for defending elderly soldiers accused of war crimes and getting very angry at certain risqué insinuations made in the comments section of the Plymouth Herald.

[…]

There is nothing unusual about this class of minister, however. They are representative figures: dim, without verbal sparkle, frequently light on narrow policy insights and wider understandings of social and economic history. The median British politician has been like this for decades now. Tony Blair would bemoan the shoddy material he had to work with at every reshuffle, and David Cameron likewise found himself struggling for a front bench neither too hateful nor too stupid. The difference in political acumen and sophistication from the most forgotten of ministerial interviews from fifty years ago reveal a steep decline in both the eloquence and elegance of our politicians.

Perhaps the 20th century spoiled the voting public. Pick any decade and you will discover frontline politicians with vast hinterlands. Harold Macmillan recited Aeschylus — in the original Greek — whilst lying shot in the trenches. Enoch Powell rose from private to brigadier during the Second World War, after becoming the youngest professor in the empire. When Winston Churchill was attempting to stay solvent in the face of decades worth of excess, he maintained financial buoyancy by being the highest-paid journalist in the world. Publishers adored him. He could be trusted to write a million-word definitive biography of his relative, the first Duke of Marlborough. Roy Jenkins would in turn distinguish himself as a biographer of Churchill — as well as Gladstone, and the Chancellors of the Exchequer at large. Second-hand embarrassment is the only proper response when comparing such authorial endeavours to Boris Johnson’s biography of Churchill.

It’s not a matter of our politicians not being able to write anymore. Compared to the recent past they can barely speak. Political debates have succumbed to an entropic, deadening mediocrity. Recent discourse between a patronising, bland Sunak and a po-faced, blank Truss was not a nadir: it was standard fare.

Look upon this 1970 debate between Jenkins and Powell. Both men hold articulate and intelligent positions, arguing intricately and considerately, with a commitment to truth rather than point-scoring. They agree where relevant and have an ability to articulate clearly and fluently. Half a century on, political debate of such quality seems unrealisable. When watching vintage ministerial debates, the viewer is struck by the level of knowledge and attention that the speakers assumed their audience would possess, whether on the finer points of tackling inflation or whether IRA bombers deserved to the death penalty.

The slightest glance at cabinets fifty years ago demonstrates a far higher set of standards and abilities than those found today. Harold Wilson — always keen to consolidate as much power as possible — nevertheless packed his cabinet with the best and brightest, even if he kept them in positions in which they wouldn’t be able to outshine him. Wilson himself was a subtle and clever debater, not above using cheap PR tricks (such as his much-perfected pipe smoking) but always as a tool to realise his political vision.

Mediocrity requires mediocrity in order to survive. When judged against excellence — or even simple competence — the insufficiencies of today’s politician become intolerable. It is this which leads the public to distrust politicians more than their policy choices.

August 4, 2022

Boris wanted to be another Churchill, but he turned out to be another Lloyd George

Filed under: Britain, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Long before Boris Johnson achieved his goal of becoming Prime Minister, he was consciously modelling himself on Winston Churchill … but his real life adventure showed him to be much more the next coming of an earlier PM than Churchill:

Boris Johnson labours under the illusion that he is another Churchill. Actually the resemblance, astonishing both in gross and in detail, is to Churchill’s other great contemporary, David Lloyd George.

Indeed, the parallels between the two men and their careers are so close that it’s tempting to give Karl Marx’s dictum yet another dust-down and talk of history happening twice: first as tragedy and then as farce. Which would make Boris Johnson Napoleon III to the Welsh Wizard’s imperial premiership.

Which, to be truthful, sounds about right.

[…]

Consider A.J.P. Taylor’s masterly pen-portrait of Lloyd George:

He had no friends and did not deserve any. He repaid loyalty with disloyalty. He was surrounded by dependants and sycophants, whom he rewarded lavishly and threw aside when they had served their turn. His rule was dynamic and sordid at the same time. He himself gave hostages to fortune by the irregularity of his private life. But essentially his devious methods sprang from his nature. He could do things no other way.

There is scarcely a single word that does not apply equally to Boris Johnson.

These two extraordinary, outsize personalities also benefitted from extraordinary times. Lloyd George became prime minister in 1916 at the nadir of the First World War when it seemed, as he himself wrote, “we are going to lose this war”. Johnson reached Number Ten at a comparable moment in domestic affairs, when the three year-long crisis brought about by the furious rear-guard action of the Remainer elites against the Brexit referendum threatened to turn into a sort of national nervous breakdown.

Both therefore took the premiership over the political corpse of their failed predecessor (Herbert Asquith and Theresa May), and both were haunted by their unquiet ghosts. Finally, both had a single, though infinitely difficult, job: Lloyd George’s was to win the war; Johnson’s to cut the parliamentary Gordian knot and “Get Brexit Done”. And both were given, or took, carte blanche to do it.

Taylor makes no bones about it and calls Lloyd George “dictator for the duration of the war”. He even invokes the comparison with Napoleon I. Contemporaries, like the former Tory premier, A. J. Balfour, used the same language: “If [Lloyd George] wants to be dictator, let him be. If he thinks he can win the war, I’m all for him having a try.”

July 12, 2022

Ed West – “Farewell then, Boris Johnson, and to paraphrase another leader who had rather lost the support of his front bench, what an artist dies with him”

Filed under: Britain, Education, Greece, History, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Outgoing (in several senses) British PM Boris Johnson was a political throwback in many ways:

Prime Minister Boris Johnson at his first Cabinet meeting in Downing Street, 25 July 2019.
Official photograph via Wikimedia Commons.

Johnson was the most amusing prime minister in living memory, but also the most historically aware. The first British political leader since Harold Macmillan to read classics, he was hugely influenced by the ideas of the ancient world, in particular Fortuna. And as Tom Holland reflected in last Friday’s The Rest is History, this obsession with the classics guided his career.

Classics, Holland said, had once been a “how to do politics” course, from the time of Machiavelli to the aristocrats of the 18th and 19th centuries, seen as a guide to “how to behave morally and politically”. This became especially important as elites in Europe and America came to consciously imitate the ancients — five Victorian and Edwardian prime ministers read classics — but “that has not been the case for many, many years”.

Johnson in that way “is a throwback. He is someone for whom classics is central to his education, but I think the thing that is intriguing about it is that he studied it as an example of how to get ahead. He had a properly Greek/Roman understanding of Fortuna, Tyche, chance, this great goddess who has her favourites. He genuinely, in an inchoate sense but in a sense that does seem to be authentic, saw himself as fortune’s favourite, but of course it’s the essence of tragedy, the cruelty and humour of Fortuna, that she raises her favourites up only to hurl them down. The joke that fate has played on Johnson is a particularly cruel one.”

It’s hardly surprising that Boris believed in Fortuna, considering just how much she smiled on him. A little over a year ago I wrote about how incredibly fortunate Boris was to become leader in the middle of a seismic demographic shift that would make life very difficult for the Tories in just a few years.

It was all the more incredible because, just 12 months earlier, it appeared that Boris’s luck had finally run out. Having done everything to climb the greasy pole, Johnson had achieved his goal only for his dreams of power to turn sour. Apollo had fired his arrow at Britain and Boris was left with a country overrun by disease and necessitating authoritarian measures that repulsed him; soon he was sick himself, and it looked like he might follow his idol Pericles a bit too much by dying of the plague.

July 7, 2022

“Boris was the latest incarnation of the slippery mountebank in politics”

Filed under: Britain, History, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

As I’m writing this, Boris Johnson seems to be losing a cabinet minister every couple of hours, and there’s a finite number of them so at some point soon he’s likely to resign — or in Tory tradition, be knifed by a former trusted colleague. Ed West gets in an early political obituary for Boris:

However bad Boris Johnson’s career ends, it will surely be a better finale than that of his great-grandfather, the Turkish journalist, editor and liberal politician Ali Kemal. Almost exactly a century ago, following the trauma of defeat and the end of the Ottoman Empire, Kemal was attacked by a mob of soldiers, hanged from a tree, his head smashed in with cudgels before being beaten to death. I can’t imagine that the Tory backbenchers will go that far.

There is something charming and colourful about Johnson’s background, the mixture of Turkish, Russian, Jewish and even a Circassian slave just a few generations back (according to Boris himself, and if you can’t trust his version of events, who can you trust?). Just like David Cameron, he is also descended (via a mistress) from George II, the last king of England to fight in battle.

As Rod Liddle once put it, Boris is “the esoteric product of millennia of Eurasian toff miscegenation”, and that’s part of the attraction. It explains his ease with people of different backgrounds, and his liberal persona as London Mayor, which felt like the real him, more than his later populist act. It’s why the charges of racism never stuck; he has his faults, but racial prejudice isn’t one of them.

It’s often been noted that Boris was the latest incarnation of the slippery mountebank in politics while his opponents, both Keir Starmer and Jeremy Corbyn, came from that other British political archetype, the do-gooding Puritan. Disraeli and Gladstone were the Platonic examples of these contrast, but the division dates back further to the Civil War, and there could be no doubt which side Boris would have fought for at Marston Moor.

In fact he is almost more like an oriental potentate, a benevolent and cosmopolitan sultan, hampered by court intrigue and presiding over a crumbling empire. At the time of his ascension to Downing Street, Wikipedia listed Johnson’s de jure and de facto spouses, making Boris the first polygamous ruler of England since King Canute. Since coming to power his rule has been marked by unprecedented court drama, with quite obvious parallels to the reign of Henry VIII, with Carrie Symonds as Anne Boleyn and Dominic Cummings playing Thomas Cromwell.

And on his political legacy, such as it might be:

There’s a whole new generation out there who hate progressivism, who don’t want social norms dictated by dysfunctional, miserable people, and yet the Tories have nothing to offer them. Everywhere there is a sense of overwhelming gloom about the state of the country and its lack of future. Boris Johnson, one of the funniest men to inhabit Number 10, has left his audience with a feeling of dread and sadness, a lesson perhaps in allowing newspaper columnists too much of a say.

As Johnson’s rule nears it end, it feels like everything is collapsing, from the health service to the police, even a shared faith in institutions — and as a Conservative voter I’ve got no “buts” to give in response, except perhaps that Corbyn would have been worse.

In clear expectation of the smash, Mark Steyn reposted what he wrote when Boris took possession of Number 10 Downing Street:

Boris Johnson, it seems, is determined to hang on. Tonight I chanced to see, on the one hand, his father, apparently breezy and unperturbed. On the other hand, a senior Tory backbencher told me that, were another confidence vote to be held, Boris would win the support of fewer than sixty Conservative MPs, with over three hundred voting against him.

I don’t really have anything new to say about this failed prime minister because, in the third of a century since I first met him, he has been, in the turbulence of a constantly changing world, eternally unchanging. Here is what I wrote about him upon the occasion of him taking office as PM:

Is he a nice person? Well, he’s left an awful lot of human wreckage in his wake. Some of the women he’s used and discarded seem to me, without naming names, to be sad and profoundly damaged from their brief intersection with his wandering zipper. His latest squeeze seems likely to be moving into Number Ten without benefit of clergy — a first for the Tories and a sign of how desperate they are after years of letting all the sober, serious, earnest types turn their party into a laughingstock.

What does he believe in? Other than himself, not terribly much. About a decade ago, I was in London for a couple of days and had lunch with him and Stuart Reid at a favorite Italian restaurant. Stuart was the deputy editor who did all the hard grind at the Speccie, while Boris was the great fizzing impresario fronting the operation — a business model he transferred successfully into his mayoral regime, and will no doubt be trying again in Downing Street. He was going on the BBC’s Question Time that night and was worried that he didn’t have anything sufficiently arresting to say, so asked if I had any tips. I gave him a few thoughts on the passing scene, and he considered them not in terms of his own public-policy positions (if any) but in terms of attitudinal cachet. Finally, I said, “Why don’t you really stir them up and put in a word for social conservatism?”

“You mean abortion and all that? Oh, God …” he sighed, and ordered dessert.

If that seems to be (for self-interested reasons) his most firmly drawn red line, don’t nevertheless overstate his ideological flexibility. Like Boris, Theresa May schemed and maneuvered for decades to reach the top spot … and, by the time she pulled it off, she’d spent so much time and effort on the scheming and maneuvering that she had no idea of what to do once she got there. Boris is likewise invested in himself, but, having reached the finial of Disraeli’s greasy pole, he doesn’t intend to be just the latest seat-filler. Mrs May wanted to be prime minister; Johnson wants to be a great and consequential prime minister.

So much for that. That was July 2019. Six weeks later came the first of what would become an avalanche of ministerial resignations …

April 26, 2022

QotD: “Boris Lloyd George”

Filed under: Britain, History, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Since Lloyd George’s admirers are usually found at the liberal end of the spectrum, I imagine many of them will be displeased by the comparison. It’s true that Lloyd George — born in 1863, brought up speaking Welsh, steeped in the Baptist faith of his native land — came from a relatively humble background, never went to Eton, was a brilliantly fluent speaker and had an extraordinary appetite for hard work. And in his early days he exhibited an admirable commitment to all kinds of unfashionable causes — that is, until he sold out.

But more than any other twentieth-century PM, the last Liberal premier embodied the ambition, promiscuity and shameless indifference to rules and conventions that have driven Boris Johnson’s critics mad. Boris might be a mountebank, but Lloyd George was the mountebank’s mountebank.

Had he been prime minister during the Covid pandemic, would he have held parties at Number 10? The answer is obvious. He wouldn’t just have invited you to a party, he’d have sold you a peerage and made a move on your wife while you were still hanging up your coat.

Lloyd George was brilliantly funny. He was patriotic. He had the common touch. He was also, to quote Max Hastings on his modern-day successor, a “cavorting charlatan”, a “bully”, a “rogue” and a “scoundrel”, who “would not recognise truth, whether about his private or political life, if confronted by it in an identity parade”. And like Boris, he never hid it; quite the reverse. “My supreme idea is to get on,” he wrote to his future wife, Maggie Owen, during their courtship. “I am prepared to thrust even love itself under the wheels of my Juggernaut if it obstructs the way.” He meant every word.

According to one of his own aides, Lloyd George was “mental on matters of sex. In his view, a man and a woman could not possibly be friends without sexual intercourse.” That sounds familiar. Like Boris, he could never be entirely sure how many children he had. Within months of his marriage to the stolid and long-suffering Maggie, he had already strayed, impregnating a Liberal activist known only as Mrs J.

Not content with also impregnating his wife’s cousin Kitty, he also had affairs with “Mrs Tim” who was married to his friend Timothy Davies, as well as Julia Henry, another Liberal MP’s wife. He also carried on for decades with his secretary, Frances Stevenson, whom he forced to have at least two abortions. And there were many more — so many that nobody has ever produced a definitive count.

At the time, people joked that Lloyd George had a child in every town in Britain. The story goes that one day his son Dick went into a pub and fell into conversation with a stranger who looked just like him. The stranger eventually confessed that Lloyd George was indeed his father, and was secretly paying him £400 a year. To cap it all, some biographers suggest that Lloyd George also slept with Dick’s troubled wife, Roberta — and this when he was well into his sixties! By these standards, even Boris seems a paragon of fidelity.

Dominic Sandbrook, “How to bring down a Prime Minister”, UnHerd, 2022-01-14.

January 18, 2022

A Labour Party attempt to count coup against Boris Johnson may have backfired by showing the NHS in a terrible light

Filed under: Britain, Health, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Brendan O’Neill explains why he found the Labour social media post to be a very bad idea:

Not actually the official symbol of Britain’s National Health Services … probably.

This week, in response to the latest drinks-during-lockdown scandal engulfing Downing Street, the Labour Party tweeted something so extraordinary, so tone deaf, so inhumane, that it managed to make Boris and his coterie of rule-breaking hypocrites look almost principled in comparison.

It was a comment from an NHS nurse named only as Jenny (thank God for the absence of Jenny’s surname, for I shudder to think of the abuse she would receive if her full identity were revealed). This is what Jenny, according to Labour, had to say about the government’s boozy get-togethers on 20 May 2020 and other occasions when the rest of us were locked down:

    I remember 20 May 2020 vividly, I spent hours on the phone to a man who was in the hospital car park, utterly desperate to see his wife. He begged, wept, shouted to be let in, but we said no – for the greater good of everyone else. She died unexpectedly and alone, as the government had a party.

This is a genuinely extraordinary statement. It is astonishing that no one in the Labour social-media team thought twice about posting it. The aim of this tweet is clearly to make us shake our heads and say “I can’t believe the government had a party while the NHS was making such tough decisions”, but in truth it has the exact opposite effect. It made me, at least, think to myself: “I can’t believe we let people die alone. I can’t believe the howling grief of a desperate man was ignored. I can’t believe there was such a complete and catastrophic collapse in everyday humanity during the lockdown.”

Labour clearly wants us to sympathise with “Jenny” against the government. But I find myself far more disgusted, far more outraged, by Jenny’s behaviour than by Boris Johnson’s. To have a sneaky party during lockdown is one thing. To ignore the pleas of a begging, weeping man and to watch as his wife subsequently died alone is something else entirely. It is in an utterly different moral ballpark. It is an unconscionable act. It is an obscenity against the human family that makes Boris and Carrie’s 25-minute visit to a garden party look saintly in comparison.

December 8, 2021

What if the refugee flow was crossing the Channel the opposite way?

Filed under: Britain, Europe, France, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Critic, Joel Rodrigues considers what the media narrative would say if the constant stream of migrants from the EU to Britain was reversed, as all the major media outlets predicted would happen if Brexit went through:

This map shows the location of the Strait of Dover between England and France, and part of the English Channel and the North Sea. It also shows nearby towns such as Dover, Calais, and Dunkirk.
Image created by NormanEinstein via Wikimedia Commons.

Imagine “tent” cities on the Kent coast, similar to “the Jungle” that existed in Calais up until 2016. These camps are the type of camps that the Remain campaign (wrongly) warned would spring up if Britain voted to leave the EU, as part of their Project Fear campaign. The tent cities are full of migrants, hoping to reach the French coast and the “sunlit uplands” of the European Union.

The camps are filthy, riddled with violent crime, and it is here that people traffickers sell spaces on dinghies to cross the channel for thousands of pounds a ticket. The British police and immigration services are aware of undocumented people living in squalor in the camps, but largely do nothing.

Occasionally a camp is cleared to placate the locals, but it quickly springs up somewhere else. The British government make no effort to document, accommodate or process the migrants living in appalling conditions on its territory. Instead, it blames the “pull factor of the EU’s single market”, saying that many of these migrants have family in France and want to live in a French or German speaking society. A junior British minister suggests that the black market economies in the EU are also a pull factor, and that there are a “lack of safe asylum routes” into the EU.

People smugglers continue operating from the British coast, and the migrant camps expand. Dinghies are now launched daily from the UK towards the continent. Police are aware of the launches, but do nothing. The RNLI and Royal Navy escort these flimsy boats until they are in EU waters, despite their not being seaworthy. Thousands succeed in making the crossing.

Then, tragedy strikes when a boat sinks. Statements are released from the British and French governments lamenting the loss of life. Trying to find a solution, Emmanuel Macron writes a letter to Boris Johnson urging increased collaboration, with joint patrols if necessary, to prevent a repeat of the tragedy.

The British government issue a response claiming that the perfectly conciliatory letter is in fact unacceptable, a “threat to British sovereignty”, and that France is uninvited from crisis talks. British media later reports that in a meeting with some of his advisors, Boris Johnson branded Emmanuel Macron as “a clown in charge of a circus”.

Imagine the media commentary and narrative in the UK surrounding such a situation, especially post-Brexit.

“Migrants die fleeing racist, Brexit-ridden, plague island,” says an op-ed in the Guardian. The comments are largely agreed that Boris Johnson is personally responsible for each of their deaths.

“UK condemned as using migrants to destabilise the EU’s single market,” reports the BBC. Parallels are also drawn in The Times between Boris Johnson and Belarus’ Lukashenko. There are mass demonstrations outside Parliament as the crisis worsens.
One can imagine the EU Commission swiftly and publicly denouncing the UK and drawing up sanctions. The Labour party would likely call it a national scandal, and demand resignations, as well as accusing the government of taking a hardline stance as cynical electioneering.

I searched for public domain or Creative Commons images of the English Channel migrant crisis, but came up surprisingly empty, hence the generic map to illustrate this post. I had expected to be inundated with lots of heart-rending images of desperate refugees, but not this time…

November 13, 2021

QotD: Boris Johnson as Billy Bunter, the “Fat Owl of the Remove”

Filed under: Books, Britain, Humour, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

One can only suspect some insidious intent – or trolling, if one wishes to call it by its proper name – when the Scottish police force had to rename the operation designed to protect Boris Johnson in his current visit to the country. It now rejoices in the unexceptional title of “Operation Aeration”, but until it attracted adverse publicity, its original name was “Operation Bunter”.

Although a spokesman for the Scottish police said, with tongue so far in cheek that it was astonishing they could speak, “Operational names are auto-generated by computer and can be changed if they are deemed to be inappropriate”, the comparison between the Prime Minister and Frank Richards’ legendary creation Billy Bunter, the “Fat Owl of the Remove” is a far from flattering one.

In Richards’ stories, Bunter is a gluttonous, lazy, dishonest and academically negligible student at Greyfriars School in Kent, forever attempting to obtain loans from his fellow schoolboys on the promise that a non-existent postal order is going to arrive from his wealthy relatives at “Bunter Court”. It is made clear that, for all his fantasies of wealth and success, Bunter’s home is in fact the considerably more modest “Bunter Villa”, which possesses merely one maid and one cook. Richards therefore invites his readers to condemn Bunter as an arriviste to the English public school system, amongst his many other sins. He is repulsive in appearance, significantly overweight, perpetually dirty and often given to thoughtless instances of racism and xenophobia. And his famous catchphrases – “I say, you fellows!” and, when he is being beaten, kicked or otherwise abused, “yarooh!” – are irritating, rather than witty or charming.

Needless to say, the books that featured him as their lead character were hugely successful for decades, but now, in our more censorious and self-aware image, have fallen into obscurity. None of them are currently in print, and the last time that any of the novels were reissued was in the early Nineties. When the news story about Operation Bunter broke, many papers had to explain exactly who the character was, and why the allusion was apposite. While the milder likes of Jennings and William continue to be much loved by parents and grandparents of a certain generation, Bunter and his fellow denizens of Greyfriars have found themselves condemned to a kind of literary Siberia, and show few signs of coming in from this particular cold. Is there any hope that some literary-minded minister will intervene and aid the Fat Owl’s rehabilitation? Or are the books simply too outrageous and un-PC for our contemporary tastes?

Alexander Larman, “Boris Bunter”, The Critic, 2021-08-09.

October 4, 2021

QotD: Theresa May is to Boris as Neville Chamberlain was to Winston

Filed under: Britain, History, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Whisper it gently, but there’s a mysterious woman in Boris Johnson’s life. Someone very special to him. Though she gets none of the credit, she’s the secret of his success, so it’s time she emerged from the shadows and received the recognition she deserves. Step forward … Theresa May.

Exactly two years ago, our second female Prime Minister was bowing out. After a torrid time in office it was finally over, and it ended with characteristic grace. In her resignation statement, she blamed no one for her fall, expressing only gratitude for the chance she’d had to serve the country she loved.

Her critics were not so generous. Ranked against other Prime Ministers […] she fares poorly. In particular, she suffers by comparison to her successor. He delivered Brexit; she didn’t. He won a majority; she lost one. But that’s not the whole story. Two years on from the end of her premiership, we need to tell the truth: which is that Boris owes it all to Theresa.

It wouldn’t be the first time that a successful PM is found to be in debt to a predecessor. Winston Churchill, for instance, owed a great deal to the much-maligned Neville Chamberlain. The reason why Britain was able to hold out against Hitler was that, before the war, Chamberlain had rearmed the country. In particular, he built up the fighter capacity of the RAF, which proved so crucial in the Battle of Britain.

As for Chamberlain’s infamous failures, these too were foundational to Churchill’s success. It’s unlikely that the great man would have become Prime Minister had Chamberlain not exhausted the credibility of appeasement. Indeed she did more than Chamberlain to ensure ultimate triumph of her successor, and looking beyond the obvious low points of her premiership a very different picture emerges. Indeed, she provided the key ingredients for the victories that followed.

Peter Franklin, “Boris owes it all to Theresa May”, UnHerd, 2021-05-23.

August 20, 2021

“They were there to debate Afghanistan, a far-away country of which it turns out that we know even less than we thought”

Filed under: Asia, Britain, Government, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The British government recalls Parliament to debate the situation in Afghanistan (not that there’s much to be done at this late stage, but formalities are at least being observed in a perfunctory manner):

The House of Commons was full, for the first time since last March. Members of Parliament had been brought back from their holidays, from West Country campsites and from Greek resorts, in a repatriation operation that puts the Foreign Office to shame.

They were there to debate Afghanistan, a far-away country of which it turns out that we know even less than we thought. It was only last month that Boris Johnson was assuring MPs that “there is no military path to victory for the Taliban”, although we now know that path was straight along the road to Kabul, as fast as their trucks could carry them.

Now Johnson was back to explain that things had turned out to be a bit more complicated than he thought. Or perhaps a bit simpler: we’ve gone, they’re back. Parliament was getting eight hours to discuss this, although it was too late to do very much about it. It wasn’t so much shutting the stable door after the horse had bolted as holding a long discussion about the history of equine care as the stallion in question disappeared over the horizon.

Still, the atmosphere was jolly. Many of these MPs haven’t seen each other in over a year. There was a first-day-of-term feel to things. With Parliament’s Covid restrictions lapsed, the Conservatives were wedged in together in the small, windowless chamber, barely a facemask in sight. The government’s instructions are still to wear masks in crowded places, but the Conservatives view Covid as some sort of socialist conspiracy that will go away if they ignore it. Or maybe they just feel that rules are for the little people.

Labour MPs had at least nodded to social distancing, sitting about 18 inches apart from each other. This is, admittedly, easier when there aren’t very many of you. The opposition benches were a sea of masks. Only the Democratic Unionists, who like the Tories see illness as a sign of moral failure, were a lone island of uncovered faces.

Johnson’s statement was, as ever, a masterpiece of bare adequacy. It eloquently just about dealt with the matter in question, magisterially pretty much covering the bases. The speechwriters, one sensed, must have been working on the words late into the previous afternoon. They had gone through as many as one draft as they tried to come up with something that, if it didn’t deal with every complex nuance of the Afghan tragedy, at least asked the question that Johnson lives by: “Will this do?”

The situation in Afghanistan was a “concern”, the prime minister explained, with what might, in another context, have been a brilliantly comic understatement. Over the past 20 years, the British had worked for a better future for the people of Afghanistan. “Some of this progress,” the prime minister said, “is fragile”, which is certainly one way of putting it.

What had gone wrong with our intelligence services, several people asked, that they had so comprehensively failed to see this coming? Be fair, replied Johnson, even the Taliban had been surprised by the speed of their own advance.

On the US Naval Institute Blog, CDRSalamander notes the only speech in the House of Commons during that debate that grabbed and held the attention of the entire body:

Let’s back away from the problem at hand a bit … and then back up further. I mentioned it earlier, but let’s bring it up again; national humiliation. There are different aspects of this growing humiliation that are already manifesting itself, the first of which is how others look at us.

Let’s start with our closest friend and take a moment to listen to a speech earlier today in the British House of Commons by Tom Tugendhat, MP.

    The mission in Afghanistan wasn’t a British mission, it was a Nato mission. … And so it is with great sadness that I now criticise one of them. … To see their commander-in-chief call into question the courage of men I fought with — to claim that they ran. It is shameful. … this is a harsh lesson for all of us and if we are not careful it could be a very, very difficult lesson for our allies. … to make sure we are not dependent on a single ally, on the decision of a single leader, but that we can work together with Japan and Australia, with France and Germany, with partners large and small, and make sure we hold the line together.

That is our closest friend outlining a loss of confidence. That is just one datapoint from a friend, but it is safe to say that it is probably somewhere in the center of opinion.

What are those nations who are not our friends thinking? I don’t think I need to spend all that much time on discussing how emboldened they are. It is self-evident to anyone who reads USNIBlog.

On the ground, troops of 2nd Battalion, The Parachute Regiment are actively involved in escorting British and Afghani civilians from safe houses to Kabul airport for evacuation:

At least one NATO country hasn’t forgotten the civilians who have been left behind during the precipitate withdrawal by US troops.

July 24, 2021

Boris Johnson as a character-brought-to-life from Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop

Filed under: Books, Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Critic, Robert Hutton explains why so many members of the British press find Waugh’s satire of their trade so compelling:

Boris Johnson, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs at an informal meeting of the Foreign Affairs Council on 15 February 2018.
Photo by Velislav Nikolov via Wikimedia Commons.

For a British reporter, Scoop is the holy text of the job. One of the enduring mysteries of journalism is that a trade which employs large numbers of skilled writers, and puts them into interesting situations every day, has been the subject of so few really good novels. Scoop was written as satire, but eight decades after it was published, and after the industry has gone through two technological revolutions, it remains the best description of UK journalistic life.

While parts of the job have changed — copy is no longer filed in an abbreviated telegramese to reduce transmission costs — much remains the same. Anxious newspaper executives still live in terror of capricious proprietors. Reporters still enjoy a strange fellowship of simultaneous competition and cooperation. Entertaining readers remains as important as informing them.

So how does the current British PM fit into all of this? Well, Boris had been a journalist:

Which brings us to Boris Johnson. As well as being Britain’s most successful politician, the prime minister has long been one of the country’s highest-paid journalists, a job he did entirely in the Scoop mould. His sympathetic biographer, Andrew Gimson, describes how, posted to Brussels, Johnson delighted in producing stories that were more entertaining than accurate. It was not that he was opposed to writing accurate stories, but he didn’t see it as in any way essential.

The Scoop character Johnson most resembles isn’t the hero — Boot is too naïve, his reports too close to reality. Nor is the press corps regulars, Corker, Shumble, Whelper and Pigge, who huddle in the same hotel, lest they will be beaten on a story. Johnson, both as journalist and politician, has generally preferred to hunt alone. We must look to the man Boot replaced at the Beast, foreign correspondent Sir Jocelyn Hitchcock.

Like Johnson, who was hazy on the outcome of the Battle of Stalingrad, Sir Jocelyn is more confident than he should be about history (“He was wrong about the Battle of Hastings,” says Lord Copper. “It was 1066. I looked it up”). He hides in his hotel room before filing an entirely imaginary interview — something else for which Johnson has form. Sir Jocelyn was, pleasingly, modelled on Sir Percival Phillips, a correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, which would later employ Johnson.

Sir Jocelyn’s fabrications didn’t hold him back, and Johnson’s propelled him to the front rank of journalism, then into politics, where he exhibits the same behaviour: the pursuit of a higher “truth” unburdened by facts, the deadline mentality, the reluctance to correct mistakes, the assumption that someone else should pick up the bill. Johnson was neither the kind of journalist nor a prime minister who would read a study on, say, pandemic preparedness. A leaked document from his first months in the job showed him describing Cameron as a “girly swot” for wanting to show that MPs were hard at work.

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