By Mert Kul, Politics Editor at the London Financial
When Dominic Cummings first referred to the Prime Minister of this country – at least publicly – as a ‘shopping trolley,’ it seemed at odds with the mood of optimism among the public and within government at the time. Only weeks before, the Tories had delivered another crushing blow to Labour’s ‘red wall’, capturing the Parliamentary seat in Hartlepool which had been Labour since its creation in 1974. The UK was roaring ahead with one of the world’s fastest COVID vaccine rollouts and, with over a year of devastating restrictions now seemingly history, the government was seeking a relaunch aimed at refocusing on its core mission to ‘level up.’ Johnson only recently told colleagues that he aimed to outlast Margaret Thatcher’s eleven and a half years in No10 and become the longest serving Prime Minister since Lord Salisbury. For now, he will be happy to survive the next few weeks in the midst of a farcical array of scandals that have convulsed his government, destroying any remaining shred of credibility it possessed. The loss of the safe North Shropshire seat, solidly tory for almost two centuries, has revealed in the eyes of a growing number of backbench Tory MPs the transformation of Johnson from electoral asset to liability. And if there is any political institution which needed no encouragement to engage in its habitual regicidal machinations, it is the modern Conservative Party – a party so obsessed with power and so lacking in moral principle that Conservative author and columnist Peter Hitchens has often joked it ‘would guillotine the Queen in Trafalgar Square’ were it to retain them office.
The issue of the alleged ‘gatherings’ (pick a number between 1 and 20) at Downing Street and other government premises during severe social restrictions last winter have been chief in occupying the ire and online derision of the public, where many hundreds of thousands lost loved ones at a time when a last in person goodbye was made illegal and ruinous fines of up to £10,000 were imposed on those who dared to party like Johnson’s aides are alleged to have done. This hypocrisy has only been compounded by the repeated lies put out by Johnson and his press team (many of whom were alleged to have been at the parties) that nothing had actually happened, a falsehood finally shattered by the cringe inducing video of the PM’s now former Spokesperson Allegra Stratton joking with her team about the party and how best they could mislead the public over it were it to become known. The slow debilitating drip of this saga has been drawn out further by the release of images of further alleged gatherings, including another photograph yesterday showing the PM and his wife lounging in the Downing Street Garden accompanied by 17 other aides (with more cheese and wine of course) during the first lockdown in May 2020. Dominic Raab’s rather astonishing defence of the photo, that “sometimes after a busy working day people have a drink – that was not against the regulations,” seems to forget that millions of people were in fact unable to leave their homes without ‘a reasonable excuse’ – of which after-work drinking was not one. In fact, at the exact time this photo was taken, the then Health Secretary Matt Hancock was telling the public at the usual 5pm Covid news conference not to do precisely what his superiors were doing round the back. It also directly contradicts No10’s arguably more problematic explanation that the gathering was simply one of many work specific meetings held outdoors during the warm weather, quite obviously leaving open the possibility that the people in the driving seat were quite literally drunk at the wheel during the summer months of a major global pandemic. It also demonstrates that this brazen elitist hypocrisy of ‘one rule for them’ had been present from the very beginnings of the Covid Crisis, undermining the government’s narrative of all being in it together in the eyes of the public. Snap polling conducted in the immediate aftermath of the Christmas Party revelations showed that over half of those asked believed Johnson should have resigned over the issue, including a third of Conservative voting participants. This has now allowed Labour into the lead across three different polls.
The official lying over the parties has undermined once and for all any trust that what the government says bares any relation to the truth and has thus undermined the credibility of latest rebuttals about the now resurgent ‘Wallpaper-gate’ scandal. While this issue doesn’t provoke the visceral public reaction of the former, it does contain potentially fatal consequences for Johnson in Parliament. He had only initially escaped being found guilty for secretly allowing Tory donors to pay for his flat renovations – a plan described by Cummings as ‘unethical, foolish and possibly illegal’ – by telling his newly appointed Advisor on Minister’s Interests Lord Geidt that he only found out about who funded the renovations prior to media reports in February of 2021. This has now been contradicted by evidence published by the Electoral Commission’s investigation into the matter which details WhatsApp messages sent by Johnson to Lord Brownlow, the peer who ultimately funded the works, requesting additional money be injected into the trust fund designated for the renovation. Unsurprisingly, it is now believed that Lord Geidt will consider his position unless Johnson is able to provide a sufficient explanation about whether he knew who was funding the works. If the PM is found to have misled Geidt, he risks suspension from the House of Commons and almost certainly the tipping point for some Conservative MPs to seek to remove him from the leadership, already restless over the return of stronger Covid restrictions which some believe were only announced to desperately try to divert attention from last year’s Christmas parties. ‘Concerns about the current direction of travel’ has already led to the resignation of former Chief Brexit Negotiator Lord Frost, with points of contention also including tax rises to pay for increased health and social care spending as well as the astronomical future costs of the ‘Net Zero’ agenda. The level of bitterness towards Johnson within Conservative ranks has also now been exposed by leaks from a Tory WhatsApp group from which Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries was sensationally removed by prominent backbencher Steve Baker for offering the group a mere defence of the PM in the midst of their volley of stinging criticism.
Perhaps most concerningly of all, the sheer volume of scandals surrounding the personal conduct of those in charge have distracted attention from the very real impacts of both the government’s incompetence and the callousness of their current legislative agenda. The scandal of Britain’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, where the Foreign Office leadership were busy taking annual leave while fewer than 5% of emails from desperate Afghans requesting evacuation were even read by civil servants – let alone acted on – has now been largely forgotten. Meanwhile, the newly amended Nationality and Borders Bill, which would authorise the Home Secretary to remove a person’s citizenship without notice if it wasn’t ‘reasonably practicable’ to warn them whilst effectively denying them the power to appeal, is proceeding with comparatively unnoticed by the public. It continues a decade and a half long erosion of basic civil liberties which have usually discriminated against Muslims, asylum seekers and non-white Britons – the Windrush scandal being a case in point. The impact of these proposals have perhaps best been summarised by Frances Webber, vice-chair of the Institute of Race Relations, saying: ‘This amendment sends the message that certain citizens, despite being born and brought up in the UK and having no other home, remain migrants in this country. Their citizenship, and therefore all their rights, are precarious and contingent.”
Johnson’s allies have routinely sought to deflect away from his own responsibility for both his current and previous mishaps – from his bizarre veneration of Peppa Pig in front of business leaders to his attempt to protect his friend Owen Paterson from punishment for breaking already flimsy rules on paid political lobbying – by waffling about the supposed inadequacies of his inner circle. It resembles the charade of dissidents absolving ancient rulers from criticism when the divine right of kings used to prevail. The obvious answer is that – as he picks the team – he is responsible for their performance. In fact, a great many of Johnson’s aides have been hired and later fired or simply resigned of their own accord, exasperated by his incompetence and dishonesty – and it keeps delivering the same outcome.
In one of his many online diatribes against Johnson, Cummings revealed why it is that he prefers such chaos over order. ‘It’s because they always come to me to look for direction.’ It seems that may no longer be the case.
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