Boris Coup: Day 9

Day 9 of BoJo’s coup, and the wheels have really come off the Borismobile.

His first three parliamentary votes as Prime Minister all went against him. His first Prime Minister’s Questions were a disaster where even Jeremy Corbyn, generally pretty wooden, came across as not just more honest but a lot quicker than Boris. Even though arguably he’s neither.

It looks as though the combative style Boris chose to adopt turned out to be thoroughly counter-productive. Threatening to expel Conservative Members of Parliament (members of his own party) if they presumed to vote against his wishes worked entirely against him. It seems to have strengthened their will to resist his rule. Certainly, without that band joining the Opposition, he would not have lost his three votes.

Nor has carrying out his threat and sacking those recalcitrant members done him any favours. Nick Soames had been a Conservative MP for 36 years, as well as being Winston Churchill’s grandson. Ken Clarke sat in Parliament as a Tory for even longer, 49 years. Phil Hammond was Chancellor of the Exchequer until a few weeks ago, when Theresa May’s government fell.

Sacking figures of such stature from the Conservative Party has excited a great deal of criticism and protest from those who remain.

Phillip Lee literally crossing the House, while Boris is speaking,
to join the Lib Dems and wipe out the Tory majority of one

It also means that his voting strength in the House of Commons is reduced still further. He had, indeed, already lost his tiny majority – of one – when Philip Lee decided to cross the House, voluntarily leaving the Conservative Party to join the Liberal Democrats, choosing a moment of maximum drama and harm to make the gesture: in the middle of BoJo’s report to Parliament on the G7 meeting.

No. Boris’s strongest moves all seem to have backfired. One wonders how long Dominic Cummings, the shadowy figure who seems to be controlling all the doings of Downing Street, will survive. After all, this highly combative, not to say confrontational style, is very much his. BoJo may just have to throw him to the wolves to try to win back some sympathy from his fellow MPs.

If nothing else, the behaviour of those MPs makes clear, if anyone needed it clarifying, just why Boris launched his coup. Parliament is a major annoyance to him. It acts to block the arbitrary decisions of a man who feels his will should be sufficient to set national policy.

For those of us who believe that Britain should be a democracy, that is exactly what we believe its role should be: to prevent arbitrary rule, to stop anyone else setting himself up as some kind of latter-day satrap ruling with virtually monarchical power.

Unfortunately, a great many others take a wholly different view. They mouth the word democracy, but it’s rather like a child denouncing an action as unfair: children don’t usually find it unfair to be given a sweet denied to a sibling, and these pseudo-democrats only complain about undemocratic behaviour when it fails to yield them what they want.

Sadly, there are a lot of people like that. And they weren’t defeated in those parliamentary votes. Indeed, they will certainly resent them, as the papers which reflect their views already do. Indeed, many of them are particularly incensed because one of the votes Boris lost was to call a General Election. Labour abstained and so the motion fell short of the two-thirds majority needed.

Corbyn, say the right-wing papers, chickened out.

The Tory Press whipping up fury over BoJo's defeats

He was entirely right. Because for once he looked at political reality with a clear eye, instead of believing it to be as he might wish it. Labour would lose an election called now. And, if anything, the three defeats suffered by Boris only make that more likely. Those who back him will regard them as instances of Parliament denying them their entitlement, and doing so for self-serving or even corrupt reasons.

Astonishingly, given that no one belongs so entirely to the Establishment as BoJo, they will see him even more than ever as their champion against the established parties in Parliament. They will rally to his cause.

Labour needs to wait. Boris is on a rapid downward slope. The sheen is coming off his premiership. In time, even his supporters will begin to see that.

Corbyn still talks of agreeing to an election soon. That may just be spin, to try to cover his change of position, from forever calling for a vote. If he has any sense, he certainly won’t agree to one in the next few weeks.

A few months from now would be a far more favourable moment. Although I doubt BoJo, or whoever takes over from him, will be half as enthusiastic about holding an election then than they are now. 

Who then will the Conservative press call chicken?

The tale of the Fox and the Cat

We seem to be living a bit of a fairy tale in England at the moment. The last week has all been about the Fox and the Cat.

Now you may need to adjust the image you have just brought to mind. Are you thinking of something straight out of Disney or Pixar? Perhaps a charming red ruffian with a bushy tail and a pointy snout alongside an equally charming but cunning grey-backed, white-bellied, wide-whiskered slick feline, both equipped with winsome smiles, possibly thigh boots, floppy hats and twirled rapiers?

If so, think again.

The Fox in this story is Dr Liam of that ilk. He set out on his career modestly enough as a mere GP (actually, since I have friends who are or were GPs, perhaps I should say his career started out in a blaze of distinction in the prestigious profession of GP). From there he rose through merit to the dizzying position of former (as of yesterday) Minister of Defence.

Why did he provoke so much debate? For bombing Libya? For not bombing Syria? No, it’s human interest that has grabbed our attention. And he’s been paying a lot too much interest to one human in particular, a certain Adam Werritty, a former flatmate, the best man at his wedding, who got into the habit of treating the Defence Ministry and the House of Commons as merely extensions to his own office, into which he could wander more or less at will. He even had visiting cards run up with the House of Commons logo on them and describing him as an adviser to the Minister.

Now I love references to men as ‘former flatmates’.  Just what are we being told here? Is it really a key aspect of their lives that they once shared accommodation? If it is that crucial, it feels rather like those so-called news articles we get from time to time to tell us that two politicians shared a hotel room, which somehow don’t leave me with the impression that I’m being asked to admire their thriftiness and the consequent savings for the taxpayer.

If Fox and Werritty had anything to hide along these lines, and I really can’t be bothered to try to find out, then all I can say is that having the latter acting as best man at the former’s wedding strikes me as going to extraordinary lengths to camouflage it.

The only interesting aspect of the whole story is Werritty’s completely unmerited access to a Cabinet minister, his inclusion in missions to foreign governments, and his apparent inability to distinguish between government business and the needs of an ideological organisation he set up with his flatmate.  This smacks of just the kind of sleaze that submerged the previous Conservative government, John Major’s, in its last years. Since I’ve been praying for the fin of our current régime from the day it was first formed, anything that has a fin de régime feel to it is more than welcome to me.

The political versions weren't quite that endearing

What about the cat?

He was produced, metaphorically, for our delectation by another Cabinet Minister, Teresa May, the Home Secretary. At the Conservative Party Conference, she launched an attack on the Human Rights Act. Amazing, isn’t it? You’d think everyone was in favour of human rights, but the Conservatives never cease to astonish. You can’t even count on their being keen on motherhood (particularly among the unmarried) and I suspect they don’t like apple pie either. Perhaps they’re afraid the undeserving poor might develop a taste for it.

As part of her denunciation of the pernicious workings of the act, May pointed to the case of an illegal immigrant who a court ruled could not be deported – because he had a cat. ‘And I’m not making this up,’ she assured her adoring audience.

Turns out she was, actually. The application to deport this man was indeed rejected, but on the grounds that he’d established a long-term partnership in this country (partnership, yes, yes, it was another case of flat-matery). The judge in reaching his decision relied on the acceptance of the defendant by the partner’s friends and relatives, with all the usual signs of family life such as visits, shared meals and so on. Oh, and by the way, the defendant and the partner had bought a cat together, a small piece of additional evidence that they were in their relationship for the (relatively) long haul.

Ken Clarke, the Justice Minister, is my favourite Conservative, as I’ve remarked before. He immediately hit back at May. ‘Laughable and childish’ he called his Cabinet colleague’s comments (soon to be ex-colleague, one suspects, though not because May will go).

The ever admirable David Cameron intervened and naturally came down on the side of right and justice, so Clarke had to apologise. 

‘I do rather regret the colourful language I used,’ he announced, which is pure, vintage Clarke – it sounds like an apology but retracts absolutely nothing.

Oh, well. It’s been a fun week. Nice to have politics focused on cats and foxes instead of the usual rats and snakes. And as usual when I hear about Clarke up to something, I’m left wondering yet again just how much longer he’ll survive among this particularly loathsome variety of serpent.

And, more to the point, why on Earth he wandered into the snake pit in the first place.

A gleam of niceness in the nasty darkness

It’s desperately unfair to suggest that the top echelons of the British Conservative Party are inhabited exclusively by figures who make Dr No look like a model of magnanimity and charm.

On the contrary, once in every generation, there appears among leading Tories someone for whom it’s possible to feel admiration and goodwill. Sometimes it even happens twice.

Back in 1988 or 1989, Britain was in the grips of one of the great natural disasters that afflict mankind from time to time. In this particular case, it was the high tide of the Thatcher government. Like every government in this country, it was tinkering with the health service. This is something that happens in country after country, but it feels rather more often here than elsewhere.

Driving such so-called ‘reforms’ is a quest as enduring and as ultimately hopeless as the pursuit of the Holy Grail. Every now and then the government decides that it’s going to improve the quality of healthcare while reducing its costs. This is generally a fond desire of a new government, whatever its party make-up, but even when they’ve been around a while their naturally naivety sometimes re-emerges and they have another go.

The big problem with healthcare is that we are constantly finding new ways of treating all sorts of diseases, usually at colossal new costs. The internet makes sure we all know about them and when we get sick, we naturally insist on them. This means hospitals can treat lots of things much better than in the past, but at much higher cost.

So when governments start getting keen on an exciting new initiative to improve care and control costs, what they really mean is control costs. They never succeed, of course. What happens is that they try to find ‘efficiency savings’ by reducing the numbers of managers, and they achieve that reduction by introducing new structures to run the service. Those structures need managers, and mostly they’re exactly the same managers who just lost their previous jobs.

While the government is making the latest futile effort to control the uncontrollable, it becomes pretty massively unpopular with the National Health Service. The managers who are about to lose staff, or even worse their own jobs, get terribly upset about it, particularly as it’s not always immediately clear that they’re going to get new jobs shortly.

Back then, the Thatcher government was in the throes of another of its periodic health service reforms. The man in charge of seeing them through, the Secretary of State for Health, was as popular among healthcare managers as a paedophile in a primary school. So I was amused to see that he was going to be speaking at a conference of the Institute of Health Services Managers which I was also going to attend.

‘Daniel in a den of lions,’ I thought, ‘this I have to see.’

He was extraordinary. He turned up in his trademark get-up: a crumpled, ill-fitting suit; a shirt that straining to hold in his capacious belly; suede shoes, a particular indulgence of his at the time. Everything about him declared him to be exactly what his reputation suggested: a pleasant, amusing man, more at home with a pint of beer in his hand swapping jokes with his friends in a pub than in any other context. He was clearly likeable and what in Britain we call ‘blokey’.

What wasn’t immediately apparent was the quality of the brain behind his cheerful countenance. And his capacity for intellectual honesty. After his speech, he called for questions from the floor, and took them as they came, free and unfiltered. He even called on the president of the Institute, though she was bound to launch a ferocious attack on his policies. There were many questions to which he didn’t know the answer, but he didn’t reply with bluster or evasion – he simply said he didn’t know, outlined what he thought the answer might be if he had a tentative idea and said he’d get the information.

It was a masterful performance. It completely disarmed the opposition to him – by the end the audience wasn’t exactly eating out of his hand, but it was quietened, listening, prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt. Quite remarkable.

Who was he? Ken Clarke. Since then, he has been beaten twice in contests for the leadership of the Tory Party – the Nasty Party certainly wasn’t going to have anyone as emollient as Ken as its leader. Even so, they’ve had to learn to live with him, and even the present unappetising bunch had to make him Justice Minister. In which role, he has recently announced that no, he would not be honouring a manifesto commitment to lock up anyone involved in knife crime, on the grounds that there are already more than enough people in our gaols and we should actually be getting a few out rather than adding more to them (only the US imprisons more people than Britain, in that part of the world that likes to think of itself as free). And he’s even dared to speak the truth from which all other politicians slide away, that prison doesn’t, actually, work – if by working we mean reducing the overall level of crime.

Ken Clarke: endearing exception to prove the rule for the Nasty Party

Extraordinary. He impressed me twenty odd years ago, he impresses me still. He’s standing up inside the Conservative Party for values which ultimately can only be described as Liberal. Indeed, within the so-called Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition we have today, he strikes me as the only genuine Liberal in the whole sorry crowd.

You can sometimes find gems hidden in the manure heap. It may be a pretty big heap but, hey, it's encouraging when you occasionally find that gem.