Jonathan Freedland: This scandal reveals a Conservative party corrupted by Boris Johnson – and by Brexit / Rory Stewart: Britain needs a new era of serious leaders
The origin of all this – a Conservative party happily trampling on the union, the monarchy and the cultural organisation that binds these islands together like no other – is not hard to fathom, though it has become impolite to mention it. It’s Brexit that transformed the Conservative party. Where once Tories revered tradition, Brexit filled them with revolutionary zeal. Suddenly, and in a reversal of the teaching of the conservative theorist Michael Oakeshott, they preferred the unknown to the familiar, the untried to the tried, the possible to the actual, utopian bliss to present laughter.
Brexit saw the Tories
succumb to the lure of abstract nouns – Freedom! Sovereignty! – and supposedly
creative destruction. One minister can’t shake the image of Dominic Cummings,
minutes after the referendum result came through, leaping on a table at Vote
Leave headquarters, giving a speech and then punching
a hole in the ceiling: “Destructive fervour in his moment of triumph.”
Vandalism became a
Brexit habit – hardly surprising for a project dedicated to uprooting a tangle
of connections with our continental neighbours that had grown dense and thick
over half a century – and this is the Brexit government. Like all revolutionary
endeavours, it believes that the end justifies all means, no matter the damage
to those things conservatives once cherished. This, remember, was the movement
that promised to restore parliamentary sovereignty – only to suspend
parliament illegally to get its way….
Boris Johnson is a terrible prime minister and a worse human being. But he is not a monster newly sprung from a rent between this world and the next. Twenty years have passed since the Conservative party first selected him as a candidate. Michael Howard and David Cameron made him a shadow minister, and Theresa May gave him the Foreign Office. Thirty years of celebrity made him famous for his mendacity, indifference to detail, poor administration, and inveterate betrayal of every personal commitment. Yet, knowing this, the majority of Conservative MPs, and party members, still voted for him to be prime minister. He is not, therefore, an aberration, but a product of a system that will continue to produce terrible politicians long after he is gone.
MPs selected him because they would not risk the possibility of a smaller
majority under a better leader. Winning mattered more than governing well. And
the public often seems to share this indifference. Dominic Cummings’ seven-hour
testimony last year on exactly how bad Johnson had been at exercising power had
little effect on his popularity. And his current collapse is not because of his
gross mishandling of the Brexit negotiations, or one of the worst combinations
of Covid death-rates and economic damage anywhere in the world, but because he
went to a party.
Which is why — although British politics is undermined by Johnson’s brutal
indifference to constitutional structures or expert judgment — his very
presence reveals a more fundamental problem: the narrowness and partisanship of
our political parties, and their focus on the permanent campaign. By focusing
more on gossip and games against the opposition, than on the detail of running
the country, parliament has long turned previously dignified MPs into
humiliated automatons.
Even under Cameron, or Gordon Brown, able MPs were regularly overlooked, and
some of the most arrogant, unreliable, and poorly informed were promoted. As a
minister I was frequently placed in roles for which I had no expertise. When I
took responsibility for the air pollution killing tens of thousands, or
overcrowded prisons consumed by ever-increasing violence, I found a system that
responded not with solutions but with press lines. As soon as I developed an
understanding of my brief, I was reshuffled. And I was promoted because of
loyalty, not performance. No civil service can compensate for such ineptitude.
We do, of course, need new policies. I am proud to be part of The Britain
Project, a cross-party collaboration, making arguments for the independence of
the judiciary; for a better and closer relationship with the EU; for respecting
the Good Friday Agreement in spirit and letter; and for a Britain confidently
and proudly participating in multilateral structures abroad. As Tony Blair
observed this week, “there is a gaping hole in the governing of Britain where
new ideas should be”.
But to get rid of Johnson and promote new policies is not enough. Existing
parties already make many attractive policy claims. But in almost every case
what purports to be a solution is simply a restatement of the problem — a
description of what we lack, and do not have the resources to do. For instance,
aspirations to foster “an open and resilient international order” coincide with
cuts to the army, the Foreign Office and international development aid.
A better British politics will require politicians who take their vocation
seriously and govern responsibly and well. This is not impossible: Germany had
Angela Merkel. Such figures would be more electable in Britain if they could
also be self-aware, irreverent, and comfortable with social media — seriousness
should not mean pomposity. But the real barrier they face is the system itself.
We are more likely to get better politicians under a different electoral
system, which would allow new parties, with different cultures, to establish
themselves; and with elected mayors with real revenue-raising powers and
responsibilities (which would put the focus on local delivery).
Meanwhile, our culture remains trapped by the idea that politics is a game. We
pretend that the politician can wear a deceitful mask before the voters, and
then take it off in the cabinet room. But the mask is infected with a virus,
which corrodes their minds, souls, and capacity to govern well. Setting a
higher standard — of seriousness, respect, critical thought, and concern for
detail in governing — requires the rejection of much of our existing political
culture. It entails not supporting a figure such as Johnson, simply because he
can win. And it means not simply replacing him with someone who appears able to
fool another group at the next election. We don’t just deserve better than
Johnson; we deserve better than the culture and system that produced him.
