Boris and the damning letter

Our character is set young and isn’t likely to change much as we grow older.

Rory Stewart speaking at the ‘Letters Live’ event

Rory Stewart is an MP who, in the recent contest to become leader of the Conservative Party, showed himself to be surprisingly civilised. For a Tory. A problem, of course, since it was quite impossible for a man with any kind of pretension at being civilised to remain inside the Tory Party, once Boris Johnson became leader.

Johnson kicked him out for the capital offence of opposition to the boss. It’s curious that both parties are now run by men, and by factions, for which loyalty to the leader is now the only test of political reliability: anti-Semites are allowed to remain inside the Labour Party, as long as they demonstrate slavish deference to Jeremy Corbyn. Why, Corbyn even tried to drive Tom Watson, his deputy, out of that position, even though he had been elected to it by the membership, for having had the temerity to oppose his views on Brexit.

Personally, I think it shows real courage to oppose Corbyn’s Brexit views. Indeed, it requires acute powers of observation to discover what they even are, he goes to such lengths to hide them.

Fortunately, Corbyn’s attempts failed, but then he’s not particularly effective. Indeed, the full extent of his achievement in politics, as his supporters never tire of pointing out, is that he did a lot better than expected in the 2017 general election. He didn’t do anything drastic like actually winning, but he lost relatively honourably. A loser who doesn’t do too badly? Yes, that’s probably as high as he can aspire.

Boris, on the other hand, is just as nasty but a lot more effective. So he kicked out 21 Conservative MPs who had the gall to vote against him on 3 September 2019, including Stewart. The 21 have therefore been sitting as Independents in Parliament since then.

Stewart has, however, now gone a step further. He has chosen to leave the Conservative Party altogether and announced he would not stand in the next General Election, ending his Parliamentary career.

He seems reasonably likeable, and I wish him a long and happy retirement, or indeed some new and rewarding career. He has, however, announced that he would not be leaving politics, but would run for Mayor of London. That’s not something in which I can wish him any joy, however, since I think London’s Mayor, Sadiq Khan, is the best politician Labour has and the only way I’d like to see him stop being Mayor is if he returned to Parliament to take over the party leadership.

It will certainly need a figure of his ability to rebuild the party after the Corbynists have finished wrecking it.

No good wishes, then, for Stewart’s run for Mayor. But congratulations, on the other hand, for the way he announced his resignation. He was taking part in an event at the Albert Hall on 3 October. Called ‘Letters Live’, it involves various celebrities reading out letters of historical or other importance. Stewart chose to read out two from Martin Hammond, a housemaster at Eton, the super deluxe public (i.e. private) school both Stewart and Boris Johnson attended. They were addressed to Stanley Johnson, Boris’s father. One pointed out:

Boris sometimes seems affronted when criticised for what amounts to a gross failure of responsibility (and surprised at the same time that he was not appointed Captain of the School for next half). I think he honestly believes that it is churlish of us not to regard him as an exception, one who should be free of the network of obligation which binds everyone else.

The letter about Boris Johnson,
first made public by a Letters of Note tweet

Boris was not yet 18 when these words were written. But we’ve seen, in the way he simply fired his colleagues for resisting him, and prorogued (suspended) Parliament when it seemed disinclined to comply with his wishes, that he really doesn’t believe he should be held to the same standards as others.

Indeed, that prorogation has been found to be illegal, so it’s clear he feels the law itself needn’t constrain him.

Nothing has changed. He felt entitled to whatever he desired back in 1982, he feels the same entitlement today. His character was fixed then. All that has changed since is that he now has far more power to inflict his wishes on others.

It’s another point on which Johnson and Corbyn resemble each other. The Labour leader, too, is convinced that entry to 10 Downing Street is now his entitlement, and (so far) refuses to stand aside for anyone else, even if that’s the only way of getting Boris out. To our sorrow, it seems Britain is going through an era of entitled leaders.

But, again, Boris is a lot more effective. And therefore a great deal more dangerous.

Boris Coup: Day 28

Isn’t it great? 

Today, on day 28 of his coup, we have official confirmation, from the highest court in the land, that Boris Johnson broke the law. Which means trying to avoid scrutiny by proroguing parliament wasn’t just a naked power grab, it was illegal.

The UK Supreme Court on its way to the ruling that
outlaws Boris and his coup

To those who’ve claimed that my use of the word ‘coup’ is over the top for what Boris has done, let me just say that an illegal power grab seems to be the textbook definition of a coup. No tanks on the streets, sure, but a coup all the same.

For the moment, the UK remains, however, a state ruled by law. This decision ought therefore to be obeyed. Johnson says he will respect it, but who knows? He broke the law with the prorogation itself, so no one can say with any certainty that he won’t try to break it again. One can only hope, but watch him carefully.

If Parliament holds its nerve, it can even bring him down now. If enough Tories, or more to the point ex-Tories kicked out by Boris, join with enough Opposition MPs, they can pass a no-confidence vote.

Then things would get really interesting. There would be an opportunity to form what many are calling for, a government of national unity. That’s when we’d come up against another hitch. Jeremy Corbyn, leader in name of the Labour Party, has said he would not support anyone other than himself to lead such a government. Few MPs – indeed few voters – would have any more confidence in him than in BoJo.

After all, why should they? Who led the fight back against BoJo’s coup, the one that led to today’s Supreme Court Decision against him? The Scottish and Welsh governments, and a series of individuals, most notably Gina Miller who has now won two major decisions against the government (the other one was to force a parliamentary vote on Brexit at all).

But where was Corbyn?

Why, he was plotting against his Deputy Tom Watson. He confirmed as much to Andrew Marr on BBC TV on Sunday, when he said that, while he knew there were conversations “about the role of deputy leader”, he “did not know that that particular motion was going to be put at that time.”

A non-denial denial. In other words, he knew about the plot. And to all those who say that Owen Smith mounted a coup against Corbyn when he ran for leader, I would reply that it was a legitimate political action, respecting the Labour Party Constitution, open, transparent, followed by debate, and with a result accepted by the loser.

What happened in the move against Watson was that a motion to abolish his position was brought in, without notice, at the end of a meeting, to try to nod it through with minimal debate. Now that’s a coup attempt.

So Corbyn played a minimal role in the fight against the Boris coup. And he showed himself capable of being as nasty and underhand as any machine politician. Indeed, rather like Boris himself.

So why would anyone want him to take over?

If a unity government is to be formed, therefore, there will be a lot of obstacles to overcome. We’d need both Labour and Tory MPs to rebel. In short, we’d need MPs to stand up to the deplorable leaders both main parties have inflicted on themselves.

Of course, we shouldn’t write off BoJo yet. There’s a chance he may just brave his opponents, even in defiance of the law. Or then again he may play on Corbyn’s obsessive ambition to get to Downing Street: Jeremy may not be able to resist the temptation of an election, even though he’s fifteen points behind in the polls.

Then Boris might get back with a Parliamentary majority. Which would mean he could exercise personal rule even within the law. Giving us hard Brexit, subservience to the US and an assault on basic rights.

Then we’ll really know what “taking back control” means.

Boris Coup: Day 15

Day 15 of the coup and, it has to be said, it still isn’t all going Boris’s way.

At least, he’s finally got his prorogation of Parliament in place. On Monday evening. Just as soon as he possibly could. On the way, in the small hours of Tuesday morning, he did have to lose one more vote – maintaining his 100% record of six votes lost out of six votes held – when the House of Commons failed to agree his second demand for a snap general election.

But at any he’s got those irritating parliamentarians out of his hair for the next few weeks. Just like Charles I did when he got fed up with them. Though, to be fair, that didn’t work out all that well for Charles, the only king literally to have lost his head.

In any case, day 15 saw the announcement that the highest court in Scotland decided that the prorogation was illegal and declared it null and void. They didn’t actually order that Parliament be recalled, leaving it to the Supreme Court in London to confirm or deny its judgement and decide whether to issue the order.

Still, however the Supreme Court decides, it was good to see one set of judges saying that it was unconstitutional to suspend Parliament, just because it was annoying the Prime Minister. Most of us would feel the same. Well, most of us who think that Parliamentary Democracy isn’t just an empty phrase.

Tom Watson: only Deputy Leader of Labour
But showing a lot more leadership than his nominal boss

Meanwhile, on the other side of the now-suspended House of Commons, Tom Watson, Deputy Leader of the Labour Party is due to speak out for a clear decision by the Party that it demands a new referendum even before an election – Watson reckons that an election can’t decide the Brexit issue – and that it explicitly backs remaining in the EU in that referendum.

An excellent plan. We’ve had three years of trying to find a Brexit formula that will please a majority of the people, and have been unable to come up with one. Doesn’t rather suggest that the problem isn’t about one deal rather than another, but about Brexit itself? There simply is no Brexit deal that will leave us better off.

So why not oppose Brexit altogether?

And Labour, committed as it is to protecting the interests of the many, should surely be opposing a measure that would leave the many less well of than today.

It’s good to see leadership from the Labour Party. Though disheartening that it has, once more, to come from someone other than the nominal leader.

That leader, Jeremy Corbyn himself, is sticking firmly on the fence on Brexit, and keeps insisting that he wants to see a general election soon. Though not quite as soon as he was demanding a while back. It must suit him to have the excuse of wanting to get a no-deal Brexit firmly off the table first, since he must have worked out that with the polls as bad for Labour as they now are, he would be unlikely to win a majority just now.

The interesting thing is that the Tories, too, are doing badly. Theresa May must be getting some consolation for having been driven out of office by the ghastly BoJo when she sees what a mess he’s in. She must be splitting her sides.

In fact, one of the eye-openers of the first 15 days of the coup is what it has revealed about Boris. Yes, he’s just as unpleasant, narcissistic and authoritarian as most of us imagined. But, and this has certainly come as a surprise to me, he’s proved himself a far less effective politician than I thought.

My fear has been that all his car crashes of the last few days might just make his supporters stronger in their backing, seeing him as the victim of the vile tricks of those wicked Parliamentarians. But the last two polls have his lead down in the low single figures, from the low double figures. Still a lead – no good news for Corbyn there – but far less than before the coup.

So it looks like he may be a significantly less redoubtable figure than I had feared.

For that relief, at least, let’s be profoundly grateful…

Boris Coup: Day 11

Day 11 of the Boris coup and Brexiters are in a terrible flap. 

They’re shocked. Appalled. Flabbergasted.

It seems that before voting to block a hard Brexit, the cross-party group of MPs opposing no-deal – the people I like to think of as the resistance – spoke to EU officials to check whether a request for a further delay would be granted if Britain requested one. The Brexiters are horrified. David Jones, a Tory MP, and one of BoJo’s accomplices – apologies, supporters – said that this:

... confirms the level of EU interference in our internal affairs and makes the need for Brexit all the more pressing.

I changed the word ‘accomplices’ back there because I’ve been warned about the importance of words. But more of that later.

It’s interesting that British MPs approaching EU officials amounts to unwarranted interference by the EU in our internal affairs. Does that mean that when Boris chatted to Trump at the Biarritz G7 meeting, that was similar interference by the US? Is it now a political sin to talk to our foreign partners before deciding how we should approach our partnership with them? Or is it simply that David Jones wants us only to consult and be guided by Boris?

Meanwhile, the bill to force BoJo to ask for a Brexit delay is due to receive royal assent on Monday. All eyes are on what Boris does next. Will he refuse to send the bill for assent? Will he refuse to abide by it when it becomes law? Is someone who suspended Parliament because he couldn’t get his way prepared to respect the law?

That we have to ask the question at all shows just how far we have sunk in this febrile coup atmosphere in which we live.

Tom Watson.
So annoying that his political antennae are better than his leader’s

It’s an atmosphere that affects Labour as well as the Tories. Mark Serwotka, President of the Trades Union Congress, was insisting on Thursday – or, as I like to think of it, on day 9 of the coup – that “the actions of some of the parliamentary Labour party such as Tom Watson and others have been really unacceptable”. 

Watson, deputy leader of the Labour Party, should it seems now get in line and stop acting against the will of his leader, Jeremy Corbyn. Whose will, according to Corbynists like Serwotka, should be religiously followed in all circumstances. Just like Boris feels all Conservatives should jump to his every whim.

Tom Watson is annoying to people like Serwotka because he has political instincts. Right at the start of the coup, Corbyn rushed off to Glasgow to do some election campaigning. Business as usual, for him. Tom Watson, on the other hand, got stuck in with the resistance, working immediately with the ‘Stop the Coup’ campaign in London. Corbyn only woke up to the importance of what was happening at the end of the week, when he also belatedly joined the movement.

No wonder Serwotka wants Watson silenced. Who’d want a deputy leader who so eloquently demonstrates how far off the pace his leader is? Especially when he shows it in practice and not just words.

Which takes me back to the subject of words.

I’ve had complaints about my use of the word ‘coup’. What Boris has done, my critics claim, is not a coup. It’s true that if a coup means tanks on the streets, military occupation of the TV stations and political opponents arrested, then it wasn’t a coup.

But there are far more insidious ways of seizing power illegitimately. What Boris did was even legal, as several judges have confirmed, but that only makes it more difficult to obstruct his power grab. The only defence we have in Britain to abusive executive power is Parliamentary oversight, an annoyance to would-be autocrats anywhere, so Boris decided to do away with it.

He would have established a precedent, and precedent is everything in a system governed by an unwritten constitution. It would have allowed the executive illicitly to take whatever power it wished, if it couldn’t bend Parliament to its will.

That is a coup.

It has to be resisted, as any coup should be resisted. Parliament deserves congratulations, and thanks, for having so resisted BoJo, so far with success.

While we’re on the subject of words, let’s look at this one too: conservative.

Generally, it means someone who wants to conserve things. In particular, that would include our conventions and political processes. It’s clear that BoJo has no intention of doing so. That makes him a radical, seeking to change Britain radically, though from the right rather than the left. A radical, not a conservative, with a small c, even though he leads the Conservative Party, with a capital C.

David Gauke
Expelled for opposing his leader’s attack on democratic values

That’s why David Gauke, former Justice Minister but one of the 21 Conservative rebels BoJo expelled from his Party for voting against him, says that Boris, to placate Brexiters, has “had to rebadge the Conservative party as the Brexit party”.

That’s the party of Nigel Farage. BoJo’s behaviour is turning him, in Gauke’s words, into “Farage-lite”.

Powerful words. As words can be when you deploy them to maximise their impact. Gauke did it, and I apologise to no one for attempting to do the same.

Failure: nothing to fear in it. As long as you don’t deny it

When I was a teenager, I read some books about playing chess, in the mistaken hope that I had it in me to learn to be a good player. Only one lesson from that time sticks in my mind: the advice never to play out a losing game. If your position is hopeless, the book told me, concede and start a new game, since that will give you more useful practice.

I never got any good at chess but the lesson stayed with me forever: if you’re getting nowhere at what you’re doing, stop and try something else. That way you’ll have learned something from a failure and, far from being a blow, it will have become a precious lesson.

Probably one of the most frequently quoted sayings about failure comes from the American basketball star, Michael Jordan.

I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career.
I’ve lost almost 300 games.
26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot, and missed.
I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life.
And that is why I succeed.

My view is that there are two principles in what Michael Jordan’s saying: the first is the same as mine with chess, that there are lessons to be given by failure, maybe indeed lessons that can only be learned from failure; the second, that fear of failure makes success impossible – if you’re not prepared to run the risk of failure, you can never win.

What is essential, though, is to be prepared to recognise your failure. Otherwise, there’s no chance of learning from it.

I played the piano for thirty years. At the end of that time, I realised that my two sons were taking three weeks to learn to play pieces more competently than I had in three decades. It finally came home to me that my talents, such as they were, lay in a different direction – and I embarked on that direction.

These are issues of burning importance in Britain today.

Theresa May once pulled a parliamentary vote on the deal she had negotiated with the EU to cover Britain’s departure, because she feared she would lose. How justified her fear was became clear when she finally did put it to the vote, and lost by the biggest majority ever inflicted on a government in a British parliament.

Even then, though, she didn’t recognise that she’d got nowhere and submitted the same deal to parliament again. This time she lost by a majority not quite as huge as the first time, but still a crushing one.

She seems completely fixated on her deal. Nothing will deter her from it. Indeed, she’s talking about submitting it for a third vote, not apparently prepared to admit that doing the same thing over and over again and hoping for a different result is the definition of insanity. I sometimes think of May as a visionary, if that term can be used for a tunnel-visionary: someone who simply can’t see out of the sides of the extremely narrow blinkers she’s wearing.

She clearly hasn’t the self-awareness to recognise her own failure. But others in her Conservative Party clearly have. It’s up to them to remove her from office as quickly as possible before she does much more damage.

Still, it’s not the Conservative Party that’s my concern. I’ve never voted Conservative in my life and have no intention of changing my mind now. A much more serious worry to me is what’s happening in the Labour Party.

The dismal faces of British politics
Their failure would matter less if their followers recognised it and acted on it

In Jeremy Corbyn, we have a man whose whole life has been about mobilising mass movements to achieve political ends. And, boy, does he have the opportunity to do that now. The petition to revoke article 50 – to cancel Brexit – has now attracted more signatures than any previous petition on Parliament’s site. A million turned out in London for the latest anti-Brexit march, but as usual Jeremy wasn’t there. Indeed, as usual on these marches, one of the chants was “Jeremy Corbyn, where are you?”

Even his deputy, Tom Watson, who apparently can recognise a mass movement when he sees one, was there and showing he could both walk the walk and talk the talk. Among other intelligent suggestions, he offered Labour backing for May’s plan on condition it was made subject to a new referendum with Remain as an option. Jeremy, meanwhile, was canvassing for local elections in Morecambe Bay, about as far from the march as he could get without leaving England.

It’s true, as Corbyn recently said, that problems such as poverty and climate change are more urgent than Brexit. What he doesn’t seem to recognise is that both of those problems will be made worse by Brexit. And, most important of all, Brexit is the question that faces any British politician now. 

Clement Attlee, who had the task of rebuilding the Labour Party as leader in the 1930s would, I’m sure, far rather have been dealing with creating a National Health Service or nationalising some key industries (as he did in the government he led after 1945), but right then, the key issue was the rise of Hitlerite Germany and how Britain would address it.

Attlee rose magnificently to the challenge.

Corbyn, faced with his challenge, ran away to Morecambe Bay.

Like May, he’ll never recognise his failures. But it’s time that Labour members did. And drew the glaringly obvious conclusion that Corbyn just isn’t up to the job.

Never play out a losing game. Call a halt and make the necessary changes. The most necessary of all? Part company with both Corbyn and Corbynism.

And time’s short, so do it fast.

Britain needs Labour to unleash attack dogs

Depending on how you measure it, the UK is about eighth or ninth in the world in income per person per year. So it’s quite an indictment that 500,000 people are now dependent on food banks. Over two and a half million people are unemployed, but a million more are on ‘zero-hour’ contracts: they have to be available for work but with no guarantee that they will have anything to do or receive any pay. Not unemployed, perhaps, but barely employed.

One in six children lives in poverty, a figure that is climbing rapidly after the decline that occurred under the last government. And some of the poorest people in the country, dependent on benefits, many disabled, are seeing the amount they receive cut because they have a spare room in their homes – but 96% of them have no alternative accommodation to which they could move.

A state of affairs so shameful should spell disaster for the government presiding over it. It’s true that those suffering most are also the groups least likely to vote, but there is a huge layer of people not quite as vulnerable but who are finding their living standards squeezed, the ‘squeezed middle’ as the Labour leadership calls it. There are even others who are financially more secure but ashamed at what is being done, in their name, to the most vulnerable.

So it’s galling that the Labour opposition, after over a year with an opinion poll lead of around 11% – by no means outstanding for an opposition half way through a parliament but a reasonable platform – has failed to build on it and instead sunk back to around a 6% lead. Given the tendency of the electorate to swing back towards the incumbents as an election approaches, that’s perilously close to defeat levels.

What’s going wrong?

It isn’t that the Labour leadership, of Ed Miliband and Ed Balls, are preaching some kind of wild radicalism that would put off middle-ground voters. On the contrary, they’re even committing to respecting the budget cuts being made by the present government, and only to spending more for the purposes of investment.

Their message overall is that the vast majority of people are paying over the odds for economic policies which don’t guarantee economic health, but will massively benefit the wealthiest. It’s a perfectly sensible position and one that should be generating increasing support.

Ed Miliband
Probably a nice guy, possibly a great Prime Minister
But he needs to be less of the former to become the latter

No, what seems to be the problem is that they’re simply not displaying the kind of strength voters appreciate. Ed Miliband gave a disastrous interview in April in which he came across as unbriefed about his own policies on VAT, and since then has had trouble taking the initiative on economic matters. Then it emerged that the Unite union, one of Labour’s most important, and above all most generous, contributors might have been trying to influence the selection of a parliamentary candidate in Falkirk by devious means. Miliband decided to take on the union, which might seem resolute, except that it’s rather a matter of sawing off the branch on which you’re sitting.

What’s more, it led to Miliband having to part company with his campaign manager, the feisty and effective Tom Watson.

Meanwhile, the Tories have wasted no time signing up and unleashing their attack dogs.

First they appointed Lynton Crosby as their campaign manager. He won an enviable reputation as a highly effective political operator in his native Austrialia. There has been a major scandal about his possible conflict of interests (he is also a consultant to tobacco companies and the government has gone notably soft on them recently), but somehow the Party is weathering the storm. Meanwhile, one can see his hand behind some recent hard-hitting campaigns, for instance to use the Falkirk miseries to present Labour as divided and in hock to the unions.

Now they’ve also recruited Jim Messina from the States, who’s responsible for what has come to be thought of as the most homophobic campaign advert in US history.

Crosby and Messina aren’t going to be pulling their punches.

And what has Labour’s response been? Over a month after Tom Watson’s departure, the Party hasn’t yet appointed a new campaign manager. It’s as if the two Eds think that being sensible, moderate and reasonable is enough to win elections.

They need to think again. This is no time for Mr Nice Guy. Those qualities may make for a great government, but they don’t help you get into a position to form one. They need to expose the present administration as what it is: without either competence or compassion. They need to show again and again, on issue after issue, how they fail and how they damage everything we hold dear. That’s what a Crosby or a Messina would be doing if Labour had them. It’s what the Eds need to learn to do.

What the country needs is another Labour government like the one Clement Attlee led in 1945. One of the great reforming governments of the twentieth century. That’s the kind of government that can tackle the rising child poverty, the assault on the disabled, the relegation of millions into unemployment or precarious employment.

But that will only be possible if Labour’s leaders can find the relentless drive and focus that marked a Tony Blair or, in the sixties and 70s, a Harold Wilson.

Leaders with the vision and the principle of an Attlee, but the election-winning capabilities of a Blair or a Wilson? An elusive combination. Can the Eds rise to the challenge.

Maybe. But sadly the jury’s still firmly out.