That archetypal “good Tory”, Rory Stewart, was brandishing his emotional intelligence again last week. In the Financial Times, he unveiled the bombshell that Boris Johnson is “a terrible prime minister and a worse human being”. But, he stressed, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson’s awfulness is no aberration. He is the “product of a system that will continue to produce terrible politicians long after he is gone”.
Before we start celebrating any epiphanies, note the absurd narrowness of Stewart’s definition of ‘the system’. In the liberal Tory imagination he personifies the system comprises the first past the post electoral system, unserious and partisan politicians, a lack of critical thinking and an obsession with winning elections. Naturally Europe is presented as the alternative. “Germany had Angela Merkel” says Stewart. That’s the same Angela Merkel who inflicted a regime of economic sadism on Greece and allied with the antisemite Viktor Orban in the European Parliament, using his party’s votes to help elect failed politician and Merkel protégée, Ursula von der Leyen, as European Commission President. Lucky old Germany.
We must also brush over the fact that the policies Stewart advocates – and has implemented as minister under Cameron and May – are cruel, irrelevant or weird. He opposes “cuts to the army” little more than a year after Johnson announced a £16 billion increase in defence spending. And he repeats Tony Blair’s lament that there are no “new ideas” in British politics. And they say satire is dead.
It’s strange but I seem to remember some new ideas – and critical thinking – emanating from the official opposition from 2015 to 2019. I’ve also got this odd sense that a Labour leader from that period displayed some actual empathy in contrast to Johnson whose only capacity for empathy is for himself.
But the real problem with Stewart is total obviousness to the fact that a couple of years ago the entire system – finance and business, politics, the media, the armed forces, religious leaders, the higher civil service and so on – chose Johnson, either explicitly or effectively, and united to obliterate the anti-Johnson, Jeremy Corbyn.
Rather than spending a week or so going over the whole tragic saga, let’s just concentrate on the role played by the fearless fourth estate, the media. Lest we forget, Johnson was elevated to the status bumbling, self-deprecating, national chum by regular appearances on the BBC’s Have I Got News for You. A journalist himself, after resigning as Foreign Secretary he returned to the Daily Telegraph on a stipend of around £23,000 a month. During the 2019 election campaign, when they weren’t eviscerating the Labour leader as mortal threat to the nation’s soul and security, the media were urging voters to give Johnson a chance even though they – of all people – knew what he was really like.
Conservative but independent-minded journalist Peter Oborne says he was told by senior BBC executives that they didn’t want to expose Boris Johnson’s lies because, to do so, would undermine trust in politics.
But it’s in the current furore over Johnson’s lockdown partying that the role of the media is really laid bare. For obviously these parties did not happen last week. They occurred more than a year ago but remained a secret to the public – who are suitably outraged – until now. Why? Dominic Cummings alleges that “lobby hacks” didn’t say anything because they were at some of the parties. Whether that’s true or not, we do know that one party was a leaving do for the future deputy editor of the Sun.
It beggars belief that the higher echelons of the media were in the dark until leaks about – up to now – 17 parties.
In the words of writer Dan Hind, “The antics in Downing Street have been transformed into matters of political consequence deliberately and with considerable skill, skill that could have been used against Johnson at any time. This is not ‘news’, this is a redistribution of knowledge, from the tight circuits of elite complicity into the wider world.”
It is sobering to realise just how much of our ‘national conversation’ consists of matters the elite chooses to talk about and deem important. Johnson’s soaring popularity, underpinned by the support of most of the press, survived revelations over corrupt PPE contracts, damning official reports into thousands of avoidable pandemic deaths and a proven recourse to lying when under pressure. None of it had any discernible effect until last autumn when a section of the press mysteriously found the lucrative lobbying jobs taken by MPs a step too far and started talking about it incessantly. It’s revealing, by the way, that Stewart’s indictment of ‘the system’ does not include the fact that nearly half of Britain’s top 50 corporations have “connections” with a sitting MP.
Now in the aftermath of the ‘bring your own booze’ scandal, Boris’s approval ratings have sunk to Jeremy Corbyn levels. That’s power.
For nearly four years, the opposition was scrutinised to within an inch of its life. But now a member of the Trilateral Commission is in charge that scrutiny has simply vanished. Sir Keir can purge Labour party membership of left-wingers, exile his predecessor for telling the truth, impose ‘normal’ candidates on local parties, and replace a social democratic policy programme he promised to uphold with a blanket reassurance that he won’t do anything to even mildly inconvenience the elite – all without fear that virtually anyone in the mainstream media will deign to pay attention. And if they do, they’ll approve anyway.
“We pretend”, says Stewart, “that the politician can wear a deceitful mask before the voters and then take it off in the cabinet room”.
You pretend. We stopped engaging in this farce ages ago.
