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.

The sequel to Frost/Nixon could be far more chilling

It’s been fun watching the film Frost/Nixon again. Not just because it’s a gripping film with fine actors, above all the extraordinary Michael Sheen as Frost, but also because it’s a valuable reminder of some significant if deeply unedifying events. A reminder that’s particularly timely today.

Frost (Michael Sheen) interviewing Nixon (Frank Langella)

The film tells the story of what remains one of the more significant interviews ever shown on TV. That was the interview of Richard Nixon by David Frost. At the time, Frost was a man who’d made a strong though not first-rate reputation first as a comedian, second as a talk show host. It was extraordinary that, with such a background, he should have decided to interview the former US President three years after he had been forced to resign from the White House. Nixon went as a result of the Watergate scandal, once it became clear that his denials of involvement in the attempted cover up of the burglary of the Democratic National Committee were simply mendacious.

The film shows how Nixon initially ran circles around Frost but, eventually, the interviewer was able to turn the tables on him and extract the only public admission of guilt that Nixon ever made and the closest he came to an apology.

The most telling line of the film comes at the end. Sam Rockwell, playing journalist James Reston, points out that thanks to Watergate, Nixon’s “most lasting legacy is that today, any political wrongdoing is immediately given the suffix… ‘gate’”.

There has, however, been a move in recent years to try to rehabilitate the memory of Nixon. Apologists for him point to his construction of better relations with the Soviet Union, to his opening up of China, and most powerfully to his working through the Paris peace talks to end the Vietnam War. These are, it is true, major achievements, but I can’t help wondering whether other Presidents might not have been able to pull them off too, given the changing atmosphere both domestically within the United States and across the world. More to the point, while ending the Vietnam War was certainly a huge success, it’s worth remembering that Nixon had earlier extended it into Cambodia, inflicting terrifying numbers of casualties and, more important still, precipitating the seizure of power there by the Khmer Rouge. These instituted the most violent regime the world has seen, wiping out more people, proportionately to their population, than even the Nazi Holocaust.

All this adds up to my watching the revision of Nixon’s reputation with considerable scepticism. He may have had some achievements but I feel that his contribution was only to see, and seize, opportunities he had little role in creating.

Meanwhile, as the Watergate Scandal unfolded, we watched him retreating from position to position, admitting one offence when he could deny it no longer, while still denying others, throwing colleagues, often long-term friends, to the dogs rather than resign himself. Eventually, though, the options ran out. With the House of Representatives about to vote for impeachment, and the Senate almost certainly to convict him, he resigned. Soon after, his successor Gerald Ford pardoned him, ensuring that he was never brought to account for his misdeeds.

The damage has been long lasting. Nixon believed, as he claimed to Frost, that whatever a President did was, by that simple fact, not illegal. This is a claim worthy of a monarch, not the President of a republican form of government: a king by divine right might feel that nothing he does can be regarded as a crime or be sanctioned by law. But the nature of a republic is that it has at its core the notion of rule of law, making it impossible for any citizen, however powerful to be above it.

Nixon, like every President, had sworn to uphold the Constitution. By his behaviour, he had broken that oath. It was a fundamental betrayal, and it set a precedent.

That precedent is being cheerfully followed today. Trump’s Nixon, in spades. Charmless and dishonest just like the 37th president, he only lacks his predecessor’s competence and effectiveness. Sadly, we have to be grateful that he does. If he were to chalk up any achievements, they would be far more those of war than of peace – Nixon bombing Cambodia rather than Nixon talking peace in Paris.

They have in common their indifference to the law and their contempt for the Constitution they swore to uphold. But here too there is a major contrast. Nixon may have lied and cheated and obstructed, but he didn’t commit high treason by collaborating with a foreign power hostile to the United States.

It’s worth watching Frost/Nixon even if you’ve seen it before. It’s entertaining as well as insightful. Just remember that, relevant though it is, the President of that time was merely loathsome and criminal.

This one is profoundly toxic too.

Dreading the half century

The date comes inexorably closer: in just over a week, on 22 November, we’ll be marking the half century since John F. Kennedy’s assassination.

It’s going to be agonisingly painful. The worst is going to be watching so many people mouthing platitudinous tributes, though we know that they wouldn’t vote for him in a month of Sundays, if they had the chance.

Not of course that they’d have that chance today. No one with Kennedy’s track record with women would even get a look in for a run for the White House, let alone winning. Kennedy’s behaviour in this respect would leave Bill Clinton looking like a shrinking teenager at a school dance but, with a complacent press, JFK sailed right on through all of that whereas poor old Bill got impeached for his pains (well, Hillary’s pains, not to mention Monica’s).

Of course, Bill wasn’t just paying the price for a quasi-JFK-ish inability to keep his flies zipped. He was also paying for Richard Nixon’s opponents who had the gall to impeach him. The guys on Nixon’s side of the aisle had never forgiven the way Tricky Dicky was treated, and were chomping at the bit for a chance to get their own back.

Jimmy Carter was far too decent to give them the pretext, so they had to wait for Bill. And did he give them the opportunity they wanted. In spades. You could almost see them mouthing the words ‘we’re going to get us a piece of Democrat President.’

None of them see the irony that the action against Nixon was for a major offence: abuse of power, betrayal of his oath to uphold the constitution, a breach of a 200-year old principle that no one, not even the highest office-holder in the land, is above the law.

Clinton’s offence was serious, but essentially domestic.

These characters clearly can’t see the implications of equating the actions of a man who subverted the very nature of US government with those of a philanderer. Sad. I wonder if anyone could explain to them what it says about their own side?

The heirs of those guys are in the Tea Party now, and I dread to hear them praising another, murdered Democrat. Perhaps they won’t. Perhaps they’ll have the decency to keep their traps shut.

On the other hand, they are the Tea Party, so they probably won’t.

There’s nothing new about all of this. Right and left of the US likes to speak highly of many other dead presidents. Jefferson, for instance, or Lincoln.

You think anyone in the Tea Party would vote for either of them if they came back and ran for office today? Free thinkers? Committed to Liberal principles? Jefferson completed the Louisiana Purchase, for Pete’s sake. Can you imagine the shutdown there’d have been if the Tea Party had been around when that particular bit of big government was going through?

I at least will be commemorating the anniversary on Friday week with sorrow. Losing JFK, above all to such a despicable act, left the world a sadder place. But I have to confess that he isn’t the Kennedy I miss most. That honour goes to the man I fear is the best president the US never had, his brother Bobby.

Three Kennedy brothers.
Was the greatest the smallest?

We’ll never know how he would have performed as president. But I still feel he deserves that accolade, if only for one event in his tragically short life. 

On the day Martin Luther King was murdered, Bobby Kennedy was campaigning for the Presidency in Indianapolis. He learned of the death as he was travelling to a rally deep in an African-American district; many of his aides felt it would be too dangerous to proceed with the plan, but he insisted.

He gave no campaign speech but informed his audience, many of whom hadn’t heard the news, of what had happened, to its howling dismay. He didn’t flinch but went on to make a brief call for peace which included the words:

What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness, but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice towards those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.

There were riots that night in over a hundred US cities, but not in Indianapolis.

Now there’s a man whose absence we should still be regretting.

A great anniversary, and so many more to come

So here we are at the tenth anniversary of the start of the Iraq invasion. It’s an action still vehemently justified by Tony Blair, who beats Tricky Dicky Nixon in the honest politician stakes only because he looks straighter (I never understood how anyone could look at Nixon’s jowly face and shifty eyes and expect anything even remotely resembling the truth from him).

Tricky Dicky: the caption says it all

Blair has a powerful argument that he deploys with increasingly tedious frequency against any critic: ‘surely you can’t disagree that the world’s a better place without Saddam Hussein’. 

I always want to answer him, ‘it surely is. As it would be a better place without car bombs going off daily around Baghdad, without the one hundred to several hundred thousand Iraqi civilian deaths the war caused, without powerful nations trampling on international law, and without countries going to war on the whim of policy-makers instead of solid evidence.’

Come to think of it, perhaps the big question to put to Blair (and Dubya, and their supporters) is what’s happening in Iran. Way back in the days of the Iran-Iraq war, the West’s darling was Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, because anyone who was against Iran had to be democracy’s friend. In fact, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, he always claimed that he’d been given the nod by none other than the United States, and it certainly seems that at the very least the Americans had sent him some pretty mixed messages.

Today, the bogey man’s Iran again. Our good friend Israel keeps threatening military action to prevent Iran becoming a nuclear power. The West rattles its sabres, deploys its battleships, ratchets up its sanctions.

In between, the West had a couple of wars with Iraq. And where’s Iraq now? Run by a Shiite government that’s turned it into a client state of Iran. For instance, Iran is actively backing the Assad regime in Syria, and channeling a lot of its support through Iraq.

So Iran was the enemy of the West and is its enemy again. In between the West helped make a regional superpower of Iran by installing a friendly regime in Iraq.

Is it just me or does that seem – how shall I put this – a trifle incoherent?

But an anniversary isn’t it just a time to look backward. It’s a time to learn the lessons of the past and prepare for the future. So let’s see what lesson we can learn from the ten years in Iraq.

Again, it’s Tony Blair who gives us the clue. What was he telling the BBC tonight, apart from the fact that he has no regrets about what he did in 2003? That the price of not intervening in Syria might be higher than the price of intervening.

In other words, things went so well in Iraq, he can’t wait to repeat the experience in Syria.

Straight-speaking Blair, in a role he can't wait to reprise

So what’s the lesson? When you’re in the kind of place Blair inhabits, you never learn any lessons from history.

And, sadly, most of the people in power today are the worthy successors of Blair, Dubya and their mates.

On this glorious anniversary, look forward to celebrating a lot more of them in the future.

Nixon and his successors: rememberance of things past, anticipation of things to come

Little incidents can bring buried memories flooding back, so that a distant moment is suddenly with you again as though you were living it now.

For Proust, it was the taste of a Madeleine cake conjuring up his childhood.

For me, this weekend, it was seeing the latest releases of extracts from the Nixon tapes. Suddenly, I was back in a New York street, in fine rain, the street lights glistening on the wet pavements, in front of a shop window with a poster whose evocative message had stopped me in mid-stride.

Tricky Dicky: man of confidence or confidence man?

Oh, for those long-lost days when the United States had a President who was clearly not a man forced into politics only because he couldn’t make a success of any other career. With his wits and ethics, Tricky Dicky Nixon could have flourished in many other walks of life. Say, as a market trader.

Doesn’t it warm the cockles of the heart to remember those glorious aphorisms of his such as ‘When the president does it, that means that it’s not illegal’?

What’s been coming out now? It seems that ‘…the Irish can’t drink … Virtually every Irish I’ve known gets mean when he drinks. Particularly the real Irish.’ The Italians: ‘those people … don’t have their heads screwed on tight.’ And as for the Jews, they ‘are just a very aggressive and abrasive and obnoxious personality.’ Don’t limit your amazement to the sentiment, let yourself go in wonder at his command of the English language too.

As for Blacks, he commented on the view expressed by a colleague that ‘they are coming along, and that after all they are going to strengthen our country in the end because they are strong physically and some of them are smart’. ‘Some of them are smart’ and ‘they are coming along’ were, it seems, judgements that were just a little too generous. ‘My own view is I think he’s right if you’re talking in terms of 500 years. I think it’s wrong if you’re talking in terms of 50 years. What has to happen is they have be, frankly, inbred.’ Ah, yes, a little breeding is what these people need. Presumably to turn them into shining examples of humanity such as the Nixon product itself. And don’t you just admire the prescience? I mean, he was speaking over three decades before the election of Obama.

I noticed that USA Today reacted with something less than enthusiasm to one of Nixon’s utterances. Talking about the prospects of Ronald Reagan occupying the Oval Office, he had said ‘Good God, can you imagine – can you really imagine – him sitting here?’ And he added ‘I can imagine anyone ... but Reagan.’

The paper seemed to feel that Nixon had revealed a character flaw (even the finest have them) in misjudging this great man who would indeed eventually follow him into the White House.

Reagan had his own magnificent quotations. Faced with student unrest at Berkeley, he showed his resolution: ‘If it's to be a bloodbath, let it be now. Appeasement is not the answer.’ Later, he denied that he had called for a bloodbath. He’d probably forgotten he’d said it. His was another of those times that conjure up feelings of nostalgia, in his case for a President with the gifts that come from incipient Alzheimer’s.

Since then the same Grand Old Party has thrown up two George Bushes to teach us to rate Reagan more highly.

But it isn’t nostalgia that is my main emotion today, it’s that delightful tingle that anticipation of the future gives. Could the Republicans be about to serve us up another White House occupant to make even Dubya look good?

Remind yourself of gems such as:

“Refudiate,” “misunderestimate,” “wee-wee’d up.” English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!’

Isn’t that worthy of Nixon at his best?

And what about:

... obviously, we've got to stand with our North Korean allies.

The command of foreign policy and sensitivity to its nuances is deeply reminiscent of Reagan, isn’t it? For instance, in his famous statement into a live mike:

My fellow Americans, I am pleased to tell you I just signed legislation which outlaws Russia forever. The bombing begins in five minutes.

Who’d have thought anyone could make us look back on Reagan and Dubya as men to miss? And to feel that Tricky Dicky, deceitful, racist and convinced he was above the law, represented something of a golden age?

Yep. Get ready to enjoy the Sarah Palin show.