Draining the swamp

“Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.”

With these words the lawyer Joseph N. Welch punctured the brutal self-importance of Senator Joseph McCarthy, at a committee hearing McCarthy chaired on 9 June 1954. 

“Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” Welch would add, a devastating blow to the brutal campaign of persecution that was McCarthyism. One from which it would never recover.

Decency. That’s a far more important notion than the word perhaps suggests. It means dealing with people, even adversaries, in a way that respects their humanity, their dignity and their rights. It seems a key ingredient in democracy, ignored by the autocrats of this world, such as Putin or Xi Jinping, and the would-be autocrats, such as Donald Trump or Boris Johnson.

Trump and Johnson. What price decency?

There’s one issue on which I agree entirely with Donald Trump. His call to ‘drain the swamp’ was, I felt, entirely right. Of course, the agreement went no further than that, since to me he was himself the biggest inhabitant of that US swamp, a view he certainly didn’t share, preferring to see himself as the drainage-engineer-in-chief, and the swamp as the habitat of his critics.

That makes it all the more ironic that the principal focus of his attack at the time was Hillary Clinton, in particular for having dealt with confidential information insecurely (by using a personal email account). The accusation would be greeted by his adoring worshippers chanting ‘Lock her up!’. 

Now, of course, he stands accused – indicted, even – for his irresponsible handling of confidential information, by storing top secret documents in an insecure location (his Mar-a-Lago golf club). Indeed, his offending went far further than hers. It seems he showed secret military documents to unauthorised people. He also refused to hand back the secret documents when the authorities demanded their return.

It is, on the other hand, no surprise that his behaviour has led to no chants of ‘lock him up’ from his worshippers.

Still, at least this kind of behaviour is so indecent that it might well repel the independent and undecided voters any candidate needs to win the presidency. Nor is he going to be helped by his other kind of indecency, his appalling behaviour towards women, in one case at least now fully established in a court of law.

Suburban Americans, whose support he needs to get back to the White House, take a dim view of that kind of behaviour.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, Britain had its own champion of indecency in the form of Boris Johnson. This was a man brimming over with charisma, itself living proof of just how dangerous a quality that can be, who would deploy all his charm and good cheer when telling the public that he had always followed the Covid confinement regulations that he’d introduced himself, when there were photos of him breaking them brazenly. I’ve even seen it plausibly argued that he has become so dissociated from reality that he can genuinely convince himself that he’s telling the truth when he’s blatantly lying. He’s not actually peddling a lie because he genuinely believes it to be true, even though he knows how overwhelmingly the evidence proves it false.

That may explain why he’s so upset that the parliamentary committee investigating him didn’t accept his arguments. “I believe myself,” I imagine he assures himself, “so how can anyone else disbelieve me?”

He’s resigned from parliament before the committee could submit its report to the House of Commons, with its recommendation of suspension. That spares him the humiliation of having a House with a Conservative majority voting against a former Conservative leader that won a landslide majority for the Conservative party.

Just like Trump, he blames everyone else for his misfortunes. The Committee was a kangaroo court. Its chairman, the Labour MP Harriet Harman, was biased against him. He attacks the committee for having decided in advance that he was guilty, ignoring the fact that it has a Conservative majority, including MPs who previously backed him.

Attacking his opponents is exactly what we could expect from him. “Well, he would, wouldn’t he?” we might reply, just like Mandy Rice-Davies did back in 1963, when told William Astor had denied having an affair with her.

The scandal in which Rice-Davies was caught up spelled the end of the career of another leading Conservative, John Profumo. He hadn’t become leader of the party or Prime Minister, which Johnson did, and which Profumo was widely tipped to do. But like Johnson, he lied to parliament and, in a time when most people found such an offence against decency unacceptable, he had to go.

Well, few but the members of the Johnson cult, as blinkered as the Trump cult in America, can be in any doubt that their boy lied to parliament too. 

Like Profumo, he’s gone. That, along with the indictment of Trump, suggests to me that maybe, just maybe, decency is making a bit of a comeback at last. What a huge advance that would be for us all. Mandy Rice-Davis and Joseph Welch, such different people with such diverse histories, might both be delighted.

As should anyone who believes that respect for institutions and for other people, as well the upholding of some basic standards, matter in politics. Anyone, indeed, who really believes the swamp needs draining. Anyone who realises that top candidates for flushing down that drain are precisely the Trumps and the Johnsons.

Maybe then we can move on, to see what can be done about the likes of Putin and Xi Jinping around the world.