Not many people would look back at the 50s and early 60s in the UK and describe them as a period of touching innocence, especially politically. But compared with Conservative politics in 2021?
To a pre-teenager like myself, the major political memory of the early 60s was The Profumo Affair, not quite in the way that I know the details now, but sifting through the things said and left unsaid at the time, even for a ten-year-old it was a time when you could tell Something Big Was Going On.
A Conservative government minister, a Russian attaché, nobility, Great Houses, politicians frothing at the mouth and at the centre of it all Christine Keeler,
the most memorable image of her a photograph by Lewis Morley in 1963 where she is naked, sitting the wrong way round in a Habitat chair. Heady stuff!
But the key component in this story is the concept of consequences and responsibility. The disgraced Conservative minister John Profumo resigned because he lied about his relationship with Christine Keeler in a statement to the House of Commons. People went to jail, there was a suicide, reputations were destroyed, questions were asked which brought into question the foundation of the sort of society that we assumed we were living in.
One commentator, Richard Davenport-Hines in his 2013 book An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo said that what was destroyed by the scandal was the sense of deference to the governing institutions, “Authority, however disinterested, well-qualified and experienced, was [after June 1963] increasingly greeted with suspicion rather than trust.”
How well the Conservative government has learned that lesson!
In 2016 as Gove was lying his way through the Brexit campaign, he was asked to cite economists who were actually in favour of leaving the EU. He named no one, and instead said, “I think the people in this country have had enough of experts.” He was appealing to populism rather than facts and demonstrating that he could build on the catastrophic lack of trust that the 51-64 Conservative government left as a legacy.
From Education, the NHS, Covid, Social Care, Immigration to every other aspect of government the ruling ethos is that of post-Trumpian false news. The Doublespeak of Orwell’s 1984 is now the common language of right-wing politics, inconvenient facts are redefined: illegality, bullying, theft, lying, are all given a make-over so that the Conservatives can speak “the thing which was not” as Swift had a Houyhnhnm (a rational talking horse) describe the lies that Yahoos (Humans) tell in the Fourth Voyage of Gulliver.
If lying to The House were a resigning matter, then Johnson would not have been the PM for a considerable period of time as he has done little else, especially during the farcical PMQs that he signally fails to answer with anything approaching truth.
The previous paragraphs were written in the morning. Now in the evening, it is time to look back over the past few hours in Parliament and consider what the Conservatives have done.
Owen Paterson,
the former Conservative minister, who was to be suspended for repeatedly breaking the rules banning paid lobbying, found himself the recipient of the “Get out of Jail free” card, handed to him by a vote of Tory MPs in the commons who basically decided to let him off. Despite a cross party report of painstakingly detailed damning evidence for his wrongdoing, 250 Conservative MPs voted to shelve Paterson’s punishment, including 22 Conservative MPs who have been investigated by the parliamentary commissioner for standards and 19 of whom have had complaints against them upheld. The vote to “overhaul the parliamentary process” was passed by 18 votes, obviously the guilty 19 made sure that this travesty happened!
Link this sickening piece of partisan favouritism towards an egregiously guilty man with the Conservative party’s willingness to welcome back into the party a man, ex-Conservative MP Rob Roberts,
who abused his position by sexually harassing one of his staffers and you have a picture of a party rejoicing in its own corruption and putting up two fingers to the rest of the country as a gesture of contempt towards the electorate.
I feel literally sickened, or at least disturbingly queasy about what these latest scandals say about the state of politics and the country. Perhaps post-Trump it is impossible to feel the disgusted shock that blatant self-seeking aggrandisement, not only in terms of wealth, but also in terms of power, should actually provoke.
I am tempted to believe that Johnson has barely considered the feelings of the electorate when it comes to looking after his own. He has always acted as an entitled egoist and, as with his support (until it wasn’t) of the absurdity of Cummings, or the rapacity of Jenrick, the incompetence of Williamson, the viciousness of Patel, the languorous idiocy of Rees-Mogg and the rest of his dysfunctional crew, he clearly doesn’t give a fig for the optics of any situation because he knows that he will wriggle out, deflect, lie, or blame someone else for whatever fresh disaster his form of “government” brings.
What is truly worrying is that some of the people in Johnson’s ambit might have encouraged the exoneration of trash like Paterson precisely because his favourable treatment by his mates, re-writing rules to suit themselves, brings MPs and Parliament into contempt. The more contempt is felt for our ruling classes, the more scope there is for a charismatic leader to emerge and led the gullible to a bright new Jerusalem.
The fact that the leader has created the morass out of which he can emerge will be lost on most, because populism does not rely on logic or reason or facts – it relies on the exact opposite of those.
Johnson is a chancer. He is not guided by ethos or ethics, only by his own narrow self-interest. He is prepared to sacrifice anyone and everyone, as long as he survives.
Covid and Corruption should have been the downfall of this viciously incompetent and deadly prime minister. The fact that he has survived so far with his breath-taking disregard for those for whom he should have had a duty of care, is chilling.
American presidents usually end their television chats to the nation by saying “God bless America!” I feel like ending this piece by saying, “God help Britain!”
