Boris Coup: Day 19

Nineteen days into the Boris coup. It struck me that this was the time for a tribute to that seminal experience that made BoJo the man he is today. Him and one of his successor, David Cameron.

Boris ‘The Law's for You’ Johnson and 
David ‘It's not my fault’ Cameron

I speak, of course, of the Bullingdon Club in Oxford. This, for anyone not familiar with that fine institution, is a club for the wealthiest students of the university. They engage in activities as charming as they are entertaining, such as trashing the rooms of new members, booking whole restaurants where they get uproariously drunk over an expensive meal and then wreck everything, or throwing potted plants through the windows of an Indian restaurant on their way home.

Ah, boys will be boys, won’t they? Of course, if their parents didn’t rally round and settle all the damages, if indeed they were from deprived backgrounds, respectable Tory voters would be up in arms. 

“To jail with them, and throw away the key,” they’d say.

But when it’s the sons of the wealthy causing criminal damage, Tories don’t want them chucked in jail, they want them to lead their Party. And, indeed, become Prime Minister. Which both Cameron and Johnson have done.

You have to have some sympathy with the poor lads. Well, poor rich lads. With that kind of background, how could they possibly be anything other than what they are? Taught from the earliest age that they are entitled to anything they want, and then having it proved to them by being given it, how can they possibly think themselves subject to the same standards as the rest of us?

David Cameron has been giving interviews to try to boost the sales of his newly published memoirs, which by all accounts they badly need. He’s happy to denounce Boris and his sidekick Michael Gove for the lying campaign they ran for the referendum, and the way they’re trashing the UK Constitution and undermining its democracy today.

But what is beyond him is to admit that he was in any way responsible for this mess. And yet there was no need to call the referendum. Once called, an intelligent cross-party campaign could have been run to prevent a vote for Brexit. He, instead, called it to try to mollify his far right (and look how that’s worked out for him) and then ran a dismal campaign, which was defeated.

According to him, none of that is his fault. How could it be? He lives in a world in which you can trash a restaurant and not be held to account for it. Taking responsibility for things that go wrong just isn’t something he’s been trained to do.

BoJo’s gone still further. He knows that the law simply doesn’t apply to him.

He started his coup by flouting convention and suspending Parliament for an inordinately long time, so that he wouldn’t be subject to any kind of scrutiny or opposition as he prepared for a hard Brexit. We’re now into that period of suspension when he’s working in the shadows where we can’t see him.

Anyone who’s been a parent will remember calling to kids they couldn’t see, “whatever you’re up to, stop it”.

That would be the thing to say to BoJo right now. Except that he’d ignore us. We’re in the extraordinary position of having to ask whether the Prime Minister will obey the law. This may seem odd, since he’s promising us a new law and order initiative in the near future. It seems that’s law and order for us, but not for him.

Look at where we stand these days. Just before it was suspended, Parliament passed legislation obliging the Prime Minister to extend the Brexit process if he didn’t have a deal in place by 19 October, and couldn’t get Parliamentary support for a hard Brexit.

He’s repeatedly said he won’t ask for an extension.

So is he going to break the law?

No one knows. All that we know is that, as another unfortunate whose life was blighted by the Bullingdon Club, all his training tells him that he’s above all that kind of thing. Breaking the law? He makes it, he doesn’t have to follow it. He knows what’s best, and if that means acting illegally, so be it. That makes him a champion of the people, not a common criminal.

After all, at Oxford no one held him to account for failing to respect the law. Why should he now?

So sad. Poor Cameron and Johnson. Ruined by their upbringing. Although, it won’t be them that pays the price, it’ll be us.

Just as in the Bullingdon Club, someone else always pays.

Little Britain

At last! The Brexiteers have an achievement to their name. Not before time. Something real. Concrete. Tangible.

Britain is going back to old-style blue passports.

New old-style passport to the left
Old new-style passport to the right

Well, actually, not exactly. The blue isn’t quite so dark. A bit like the roar of the British lion, it’s going to be a tad more subdued.

That’s not where the parallel stops either. Unlike the old passport – indeed, unlike any British passport up until Brexit day in 2019 – it isn’t going to be quite as good for crossing borders. Currently, the passport allows us free passage to thirty or so states in Europe. But that, in the great foot-shooting exercise that we know as Brexit, the citizens of this sceptred isle have decided in their wisdom to give up.

So the new passport is both deep-hued and de-valued.

But then, that’s the way of Britain on the world stage these days. The US has already issued instructions to Britain as to what the country needs to do to get a trade deal (basically, lower standards). Bullying by the EU itself has only just started, as the brave government of Theresa May keeps finding as it tries to insist on the fulfilment of its demands.

To see the extent of the nation’s decline, we have only to look at the nature of our Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson.

He’s a former member of the notorious Bullingdon Club, of wealthy young men at Oxford University who would inflict criminal damage on the places they visited. They did so in complete impunity, shielded by parents with the status to protect them and the means to cover any repairs required. It made them intensely indolent, as entitled men inevitably are: if everything comes to them because of what they are rather than for what they do, why would they make an effort to do anything much?

A fellow Bullingdonian, David Cameron, used to be probably the laziest Prime Minister the country has seen. He would go unbriefed into meetings, notably with the EU, relying, I suppose, on his charm and wit to carry him through. That led to his coming out with the most ridiculous inanities. A fine example was his veto on the nations of the Eurozone using EU premises to discuss closer ties. He soon discovered he had no authority to top them, leading to his being forced to back down with bad grace when they met anyway.

It’s no surprise, then, that Boris Johnson also likes winging things. His specialism is playing the buffoon. So when he showed up in Moscow for discussions with his Russian opposite number, Sergei Lavrov, he talked about the rapid rise in exports of Kettle Chips from Britain to Russia. Lavrov looked on unsmiling, allowing Johnson his attempt at humour, but unmoved by it.

Palmerston used guboats
BoJo has Kettle Chips as a key tool of his diplomacy

To show his commitment to democracy, Johnson also met some human rights activists. Their comment? He “could clearly benefit from learning more and following the situation more closely”. 

Uninformed? Well, of course he was uninformed. Being properly informed would have required him to read something. That takes time and, if you’re to learn anything from the process, effort as well.

Some of the things Foreign Secretaries have done in the past have been shameful or at least reprehensible. But many holders of the post have been giants. Palmerston using gunboat diplomacy to ensure that Britain’s voice was truly heard around the world. Anthony Eden resigning in disgust at Neville Chamberlain’s craven behaviour towards Hitler. Ernest Bevin swallowing his pride to negotiate a humiliating but vital loan from the US. David Miliband representing Britain at the adoption of the EU Lisbon Treaty.

Well, now we have a midget in the post. A diminished role for a diminishing country. With a diminished passport.

But at least it’s blue. Hardly a major assertion of sovereignty, but perhaps we shouldn’t begrudge the Brexiteers their celebration. They are going to find precious few opportunities for cheer when Breixt really begins to bite. 

Crime and Vice, Tragedy and Farce, Privilege and Rights

My sermon today draws on two readings. 

The first is from an outstanding figure of British, indeed World, Conservatism, Benjamin Disraeli. In his novel Tancred he wrote “what is a crime among the multitude is only a vice among the few.”

By way of contrast, the second reading is from one the founding fathers of modern Communism, Karl Marx. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, he pointed out that “history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”

I found the Disraeli quotation in Hannah Arendt’s excellent The Origins of Totalitarianism. She uses it to illustrate the curious phenomenon of the acceptance of certain, exceptional Jews in aristocratic and wealthy nineteenth-century circles. In such an anti-Semitic environment, being Jewish was a ‘crime’ in the masses, but in rare, privileged individuals such as Disraeli, it was merely a vice – something that added piquancy, a touch of the exotic, and was consequently more to be indulged than reproved.

Benjamin Disraeli: made his way into society
by stressing his status as an outsider

Disraeli seems to have understood this phenomenon, and although baptised, he affected an appearance to emphasise his Jewish origins, his status as an outsider, not least in his style of hair and beard. 

It worked. Doors opened to him which would have been closed to most people, let alone Jews. He became an MP, the power behind one figurehead Prime Minister, and then Prime Minister himself. And he was the friend of the Queen, his fairytale princess to whom he offered the fantasy title of “Empress of India.”

In passing, he became one of the dominant figures of world politics of his period. Not always for good, it has to be said: he was a key figure in what became the scramble for Africa, which did little for the wellbeing of the inhabitants of that stricken continent.

Now roll forward a century and more. It may not be as serious a crime as Jewishness among anti-Semites, but it’s still reprehensible to smash a shop window deliberately. The law rightly takes a dim view of such criminal damage, as a great many young people in England discovered after the riots of August 2011. 

A slightly different attitude was taken towards similar antics one Oxford night quarter of a century earlier. A flowerpot was flung though the window of a restaurant in the city. However, the young men responsible were not poor, unemployed or coloured. They were members of the famous – or notorious – Bullingdon Club, an organisation that brings together the wealthiest students of the university so that they can enjoy glorious evenings of drunkenness, sometimes capped by trashing the restaurant where they take place.

Who was in the group that particular night? One was Boris Johnson, now Mayor of London. Another, though it’s possible he went home before the restaurant window was smashed, was David Cameron, now Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

But these are members of the few. The happy few. What’s a crime among the masses is but a vice for them. Youthful indiscretion that shouldn’t lead to long-term consequences. As it clearly hasn’t for Cameron, current leader of the Conservative Party, or Johnson, his leading rival, or indeed George Osborne, another former member of the Club, current Chancellor of the Exchequer and also a contender for Cameron’s crown.

Which brings me to Marx. 

With Disraeli, the crime to be converted into mere vice, was Jewishness. And the man whose privileges allowed him to do it was a political giant.

Sadly, as Arendt points out, making Jewishness a vice rather than a crime has its dangers, however well it worked for Disraeli. A crime is an action requiring punishment, but vice is inherent in personality and, when it loses its charm, it can only be eradicated. The sense that Jewishness is innate was the grounds for the Nazi programme of extermination in the century following Disraeli’s.

A harrowing tragedy.

Boris Johnson, George Osborne and David Cameron also enjoyed the privilege of having a crime treated as a vice. They’ve inflicted terrible suffering on the most vulnerable among the masses. But not one of them has yet achieved anything more memorable than their buffoonery in the Bullingdon Club.

A grim farce.

The common thread is privilege. Privilege is a gift to the few which, as Arendt explains, denies the rights of the many.

Which makes me wonder why those of us who lack privilege and depend on rights, persist in voting for any of the farcical lot of them.

Zero tolerance from the barely tolerable

You can imagine my relief at seeing how our leaders are reacting to last week’s terrible disturbances in England.

David Cameron, and we all know how much lustre he has added to the office of British Prime Minister, made it clear to Parliament that he was far from pleased with the dilatory response of the police to the troubles. Far too slow, far too little, far too timid.

Presumably those guys under the bricks and facing the petrol bombs should have been modelling their behaviour on Cameron’s own: he stayed on holiday in Tuscany until it became really impossible for him to put off coming home any longer.

Personally, I'd have no problem with David Cameron remaining out of the country quite a lot longer. Perhaps until all the current crises are over. Don't hurry back, I'd say, stay away as long as you like. But he came home last week, and I have to admit that since then he's made up for his earlier absence by throwing himself with real passion into the huge task of claiming credit for quelling the disturbances.

Inexplicably, the police seem less than happy with the politicians’ comments. Sir Hugh Orde, president of the Association of Chief Police Officers, is one of many who are a little miffed. He thinks that the plans to flood London with 16,000 police had been taken rather before David Cameron, or indeed  Teresa May, the Home Secretary, had even got back to the country.

Oh, well. That’s torn Orde’s chances of getting the vacant position as Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in London, Britain’s top police job. Indeed, Cameron has taken on the services of Bill Bratton, formerly of the Police Departments of New York and then Los Angeles to advise him on controlling gang violence, and certainly those are cities which have a great deal to teach the world about such violence.

It looks as though Bratton may even have a chance of being appointed Metropolitan Police Commissioner himself. After all, he’s so much better qualified than Orde, whose only previous top police job was in the provincial backwater of Northern Ireland.

Cameron, and his Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, have meanwhile made it clear that they still intend to slash police budgets, presumably on the basis that you can do more with less.

Now Cameron’s hitting out again. ‘Zero tolerance’ towards crime, he’s saying. I’ve never really gone with that idea. I mean, are we saying that the police have been easy-going on crime in the past? You know, saying ‘oh, well, young people will be young people. You’ve got to see the funny side.’

Strnagely enough, a couple of years ago ‘zero tolerance’ of crime was the slogan of Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, though these days he’s treading a little more carefully and has even expressed reservations about certain government policies. In particular, he’s not keen the police budget cuts.

Anyway, in taking their uncompromising stance on crime, both Cameron and Johnson reflect the anger of so many over the levels of violence in society. People smashing shop windows and looting the stock. Why, somebody even put a flower pot through the window of an Oxford restaurant – it’s just unbearable.

No, hang on a moment. The flower pot event wasn’t last week. That was back in 1987. And it wasn’t London looters – it was the Bullingdon Club made up of thirty of the wealthiest students in Oxford University. How wealthy, you ask? Well, their smart uniform of royal blue tail coat and trimmings costs £3500 a head. That’s two months gross earnings of a Brit on median earnings.

The club’s members have a reputation for going out to dinner, drinking themselves into party mood and then trashing the restaurant, after which they pay for the damage in cash. The flowerpot through the window was just another burst of high spirits from these charming revellers on their way home.

And who had been out with the Bullingdon Club on that historic night in 1987? Well, since you ask, both David Cameron and Boris Johnson. A couple of years later, it would be George Osborne’s turn to grace the club with his edifying presence.

Don't they look smart? That's Cameron, second from left standing,
and Johnson, third from left sitting in the front

Some might say, ‘ah, well, youthful exuberance isn’t to be confused with looting; if you have the money to pay for the damage, having a riot isn’t rioting.’ But I don’t go along with that. Instead I salute Messrs Cameron, Johnson and Osborne.

Only they had it in them to make the policy of zero tolerance seem appealing to me.