BoJo: a sight probably best left unseen

A statement generally attributed to the outstanding German Chancellor of the nineteenth century, Otto von Bismarck, declares that “Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made”.

The same is true of democratic decisions. Or perhaps I should say semi-democratic, or even partially democratic, decisions, since I’m thinking of the ‘election’ of the UK’s new Prime Minister, Britain’s buffoon Boris Johnson, or BoJo as we like to think of him, without affection.

Would you buy a used car from this man?
(with apologies to the campaign against Richard Nixon)

He was elected leader of the Conservative Party, and therefore Prime Minister, by 92,153 members of his party. Rather fewer than 100,000 people, mostly male, mostly elderly, mostly white inhabitants of South-East England, chose the man to fill the most powerful post in a nation of 67 million. Over half of them women. Mostly far younger than the Tory Party average. Many of them non-white. The vast majority living outside South-East England.

There was a time when I shared the view that many of my fellow Labour Party members still hold, that a party’s leader should be elected by its members. I’ve begun seriously to doubt that idea.

Jeremy Corbyn was elected by 303,209 Labourites. Some of them were councillors, representing around 5500 people. Most of them were simply individuals, representing no one but themselves. Unknown, self-selected, not subject to any kind of public scrutiny, they chose the leader of the Labour Party.

Just as 90,000 odd Conservatives have just chosen our Prime Minister.

Each Member of Parliament represents around 70,000 voters, since it is the duty of MPs to represent all their constituents, whether they voted for or against them, or didn’t vote at all. We know our MPs. They’ve been through a public vetting process.

It’s beginning to feel to me as though we’d be serving democracy better if we let them take the decision on who should lead their party or the country.

Especially as we live in what we like to think of as a parliamentary democracy.

Still, I have to admit that my view may be coloured by the choices party members have made in recent years. There was a time when the British system could point to a couple of virtues alongside its many faults. One was that it tended to produce stable governments. The other was that it produced able leaders.

Well, stability is a fading memory. In this decade, only Theresa May held a parliamentary majority for her own party, until she threw it away in an unnecessary and disastrously-run election. Apart from 2015-2017, government has been a cobbled-together business since 2010, made of coalitions or inter-party agreements.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. Plenty of countries are run all the time by coalitions. It’s just that Britain seems not to cope with them well, and the governments we’ve had over the last ten years have seemed to be always on the brink of tearing themselves apart.

So much for stability. What about the ability of the leaders? In the past, this came from people serving years in parliament, then for a while as hangers-on of government, then junior ministers, then in Cabinet. The process turned them from neophytes into experts, able to get the most from the system because they knew how it worked.

From time to time, there’d be people who shortcut this process. William Pitt the Younger, in the eighteenth century, Prime Minister at 24. Or Tony Blair, who became Prime Minister without previous ministerial experience, but then Labour had been out of office for 18 years and had precious few experienced people of the right kind of age to call on.

Pitt and Blair were exceptionally talented, think what you like of their policies. They rose to the challenge. But look who we have now.

In the red corner, we have Jeremy Corbyn. 32 years as a backbench MP, never having to deliver anything. A man who could limit himself purely to words, since no one with a sense of responsibility would let him anywhere near the authority to take action. He talked long and eloquently about a range of worthy causes which fascinated Islington dinner tables or Luton pub bars, but touched no one in the mass of the electorate. The results were predictable: unable to take a position on Brexit, he has put off voters from both camps; incapable of taking an intelligent position on antisemitism until just a few days ago, and then only under huge pressure, he has lost the trust of all but the shrinking band of his true believers.

In the blue corner, we have BoJo, who’s worse. Why, he has actually been through the experience mill. He was Mayor of London, with a tenure probably best summed up by his purchase, against expert advice, of second-hand water cannon from the Germans, no doubt with the intention of quelling resistance to his high-handed rule; they were never used and were finally sold for scrap at a massive loss, covered by taxpayers.

His most recent government experience, as Foreign Secretary, was even more deplorable. His ignorance of his briefs meant that officials were constantly having to correct his errors (“cleaning after him was quite a full-time activity,”, according to a Foreign Office colleague); he was rude to his hosts in a number of countries; he imperilled the life of a British subject imprisoned by the Iranians, and certainly extended her captivity, by his mishandling of negotiations with the Tehran regime.

In other words, he’s been tested. But far from making him any better, it just found him wanting. That, however, hasn’t stopped him being elected Prime Minister.

By 92,153 people.

Not an edifying sight. In fact, like the making of sausages, probably best left unseen.

Quinquiremes and Coasters, Accountants and Officials, Riches and Horrors

There’s something haunting about John Masefield’s poem Cargoes.

Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir,
Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine,
With a cargo of ivory,
And apes and peacocks,
Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine.

Stately Spanish galleon coming from the Isthmus,
Dipping through the Tropics by the palm-green shores,
With a cargo of diamonds,
Emeralds, amethysts,
Topazes, and cinnamon, and gold moidores.

Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack,
Butting through the Channel in the mad March days,
With a cargo of Tyne coal,
Road-rails, pig-lead,
Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays.

A galley, like the quinquireme: elegant, graceful
Just don't think about the slaves who drove the oars

The contrast between the grubby coaster and the graceful quinquireme and galleon is particularly keen, because the coaster was involved in a trade worth many hundreds, or thousands, of times more than either of the other two. And that trade even brought comfort into the homes of modest people, for whom a cheap tin tray would have been a great deal more useful, and affordable, than amethysts or ivory (God knows what they’d have done with apes or peacocks.) 

Spanish Galleon
Stately, majestic, and temptingly full of treasure

But there’s something else in the poem: its movement. 

The quinquireme is carrying sweet-smelling woods, wine, ivory. Precious things.

The galleon is carrying goods of colossal worth. Treasure.

And the coaster is carrying goods that earn a lot. Commodities.

Dirty British Coaster
A romance of its own despite its grubbiness

In 1494, something rather crucial happened in the Italian city of Florence. Luca Pacioli wrote a manual for double-entry bookkeeping. The system had been around a while, but his book is still regarded by many as the true starting point of modern accounting. 

What’s special about double entry?

It reduces commerce, one of the main areas of human endeavour, to nothing more than numbers. Indeed, and this is the special genius of double entry, it reduces it to a single number: zero. If the books have been correctly kept (or alternatively, skilfully cooked), all the sums come to zero: all the credits cancel all the debits, leaving nothing.

In other words, double-entry pierces the magic of commerce – apes and ivory – or even its mysterious riches – topazes and amethysts – and makes it a simple matter of balancing income against expenditure – cheap tin trays.

This evolution took place in parallel with another summed up by the history of the state of Prussia. It has been described as a “state of raw reason”. Why?

Because it had none of the things that your basic patriot seems to feel are crucial for building a nation: no single language, though German dominated; no single religion, with Lutherans and Calvinists alongside Catholics and a good sprinkling of Jews; not even territorial integrity, with bits of land added in scattered, separated places, depending on who the ruler married or inherited from.

What could hold such an artificial nation together?

The two things in which Prussia had mastery: a powerful army and a huge, underpaid, utterly incorruptible and highly effective civil service. They, through pure reason, bound the unseen sinews and bones of the state together and turned it into one of the most powerful in Europe.

Eventually it built, and took the leading role in, the Empire of Germany. And just to underline the weirdness of that event, the Empire wasn’t proclaimed in Germany, as anyone would expect, but in France – in humiliated, defeated France. Not just anywhere in France, either: it was in the Hall of Mirrors at the former Royal Palace at Versailles.

William I of Prussia proclaimed Emperor of Germany at Versailles
With the help of the Prussian Army and the government of Bismarck

A competent and painfully honest civil service has to be a huge advantage for a nation. But it has its downside too. It’s impersonal. It’s cold. It’s passionless. 

It also has no moral judgement. Set it to do a job, and it does it without asking what the job is for. It turns out, ultimately, men like Adolf Eichmann. During World War 2, he was the SS functionary who was responsible for organising the trains to take Jews to the extermination camps.

Adolf Eichmann,the thorough civil servant
At his trial in Israel; inset, in his SS uniform

He did the job with complete dedication. And it wasn’t easy: organising train transport in wartime for up to 12 million people? No simple matter.

What he didn’t do, and this came out at his trial in Tel Aviv, was think about what he was doing. He didn’t ask himself “is it right to send all these people to their deaths?” He did the job, in an entirely dispassionate and efficient way, without wondering about the consequences.

Which is rather like double-entry book-keeping. Brilliant. Simple. Effective.

Soulless.

We have built machines that have turned magic into mechanics, and Masefield’s poem charts that progress. We’ve reaped the benefits. But we’ve also suffered the devastation.

Fascinating ideas, aren’t they? I wish I’d had them. I’ve just embroidered on some thoughts of Max Weber’s, built on with characteristic genius by Hannah Arendt.

See? I’ve stood on the shoulders of giants, like Newton, proving that even ordinary people can do it and not just extraordinary men like him. And it still helps you see a lot further.