Voices

It was, in its way, a sensible strategy for a royal court that accidentally put its jester on the throne.Covid-19 infection rates are soaring. The public needs to understand that this is serious. And how better to make it clear just how serious it is, than for Boris Johnson to not be there?The message outlined by the chief medical officer and the chief scientific adviser, Professor Chris Whitty and Sir Patrick Vallance, was clear. We have turned a corner. There are difficult days ahead. We must take action now.That message has always been the case. In halting the spread of an infectious disease, the best time to take action is always “right now”, a reality which, back in February, the government’s “behavioural science unit” imagined itself to be too clever for, and for which we have all paid a very high price indeed.It’s never been the time for a joker, and definitely not now. In the early days of the pandemic, who can now forget Boris Johnson bragging about shaking hands with coronavirus patients then turning toward Sir Patrick Vallance for confirmation that this was definitely fine, wasn’t it? To view the footage again, it may in fact be possible to see Sir Patrick’s heart visibly sinking inside his chest, as he sighs, contorts his face in desperate resignation, and mutters only to “wash your hands”.      Read moreThis time, the scientists had one thing they wanted to make clear. Everyone must be responsible. Everyone must do their bit. We are all in this together. It’s not up to you, the amount of risk you’re prepared to take.“If I as an individual increase my risk, you are taking a risk on behalf of everybody else,” said Professor Whitty.Perhaps, who knows, that when they had the script meeting for all this, someone pointed out that, well, you can’t really have Boris Johnson coming out with that, because his chief of staff drove a car full of coronavirus to Durham then lied about it on live TV, which the entire cabinet was compelled to humiliate themselves to defend, and still comes into 10 Downing Street deliberately getting photographed holding papers about ballistic missile defence.We are led to believe this was the “rolling of the pitch” for stricter measures that could well be announced by the prime minister tomorrow. In the meantime, let the scientists explain how bad it is. If you send them in on their own, then you can legitimately not have them answer any questions. They’re not politicians after all. It wouldn’t be fair.Maybe, who knows, the public might decide to blame them for all this. Matt Hancock has spent the last week trying to convince the public to blame themselves but that’s not really worked, so perhaps it’s Whitty and Vallance’s turn?Still, it was, in its way, the absentee prime minister at his most prime ministerial. How better for Boris Johnson to calm the nerves of the people at this critical hour than to say: “Look, see. I’m not even here. I don’t do anything at all.”And best of all, perhaps for the first time in his life, it’s actually true. More

Fat-tongued, slack-jawed, wide-eyed and wobbling, Boris Johnson sat on the front bench of the House of Commons and faced down his inevitable humiliation with the kind of dignity only he can.As Ed Miliband calmly filleted and laid out before him one by one, each of the many lies that had led him here, he could do nothing but shake his head and force short, breathy, performative grunts from his nose. As he did so his jowls became tremulous like the wattle on a magnificent frigatebird.Maybe he knew that it was his life’s work that had led him here. Lying about the European Union was how a young Boris Johnson made his name, 35 years ago, as Brussels Correspondent for the Daily Telegraph. And lying about the European Union will shortly be how he loses it.  It almost doesn’t matter that, moments before, he’d been standing there, prime minister of his country, jabbing his finger forward, claiming that, “the European union seriously believe they have the power to break up our country”.They don’t have that power. Indeed, the only person with such a power would appear to be Boris Johnson, though he appears to have discharged it by accident.Watch moreFew people take this guff seriously anymore. Indeed, the whole point of this, the most execrable of all the execrable Brexit nights in the House of Commons in five long, miserable years, was for Boris Johnson to introduce actual legislation to ensure that nobody could ever possibly take him seriously ever again.The bare reality hardly demands a simile. Nine months ago, Boris Johnson brokered the withdrawal agreement with the European Union, purged his party of anyone who didn’t support it, called a general election to ensure it could be passed and won by miles.Now he is compelling those same MPs not merely to break the law, but break the promise he compelled them to make to their voters, because he has decided he no longer likes the terms of his own agreement.If a simile must be deployed, very few are available. All I can think of is a tale from a stag do I happened to attend 15 years ago, in which the stag had become very drunk and was blaming his own “boring” friends for the fact he was back in the hotel by 10.30pm. It is still not entirely known from where a roll of duct tape was procured, but what is not disputed is that said stag wound himself up in it in protest and went to bed.In the morning, on waking taped, and by this point with the curtains somehow also involved, naturally the rest of the party would be blamed for “taking things too far”.This, inevitably, is where we are with Brexit, with the exception that this time it is the world that is watching, and not merely the night manager of the Portsmouth Premier Inn.Ed Miliband was hardly even required to point out the absurdity of the occasion, but he did so anyway, patiently explaining how each of the various defences that had been offered in the past week for the government’s intention to legislate to break the law were all equally ridiculous.In the past week, Johnson has written an article for the Telegraph, other cabinet ministers have given press interviews, seeking to explain how the withdrawal agreement is, in fact, not merely a threat to break up the UK, but also a threat to the Good Friday Agreement.What is unfortunate is that this week of bullsh*t is set against an entire election campaign, which was strategically whittled down to a single issue, to the towering virtues of this great, “oven-ready deal”. Whatever is said about Northern Ireland now, is not what was said about Northern Ireland nine months ago. Nine months ago it was “a great deal for Northern Ireland”. Now it is the EU threatening Northern Ireland with food shortages.Read moreDid he understand it? Had he even read it? In answer to all these questions, Johnson could only manage to drop his shoulders and let out a hammy huff, as if somehow trying to spit his own tongue out on to floor of the commons like a spent wodge of chewing tobacco.Trailing in Johnson’s execrable wake came the usual execrable suspects. Bill Cash was on his feet, never more furiously angry, though this time with himself. The withdrawal agreement he campaigned for, signed for was in fact the EU’s attempt to turn us into “a neutered trivial Lilliput, an enslaved economic satellite”.Oh that transformation is very much complete, and it is not the EU’s doing. Watching a parliamentarian of five decades howl into the stuffy air about the absolutely direct, eminently foreseeable and permanently forewarned consequences of his actions is as Lilliputian as it gets. The smallest man of his political generation, shrinking all the way to the bitter end.Bernard Jenkin was there too, breezily explaining how, “the UK made a mistake in signing the withdrawal agreement”. That it would only be through tearing it up now that other nations would come to respect us.Of course, Brexit was always moving toward this kind of ending, though perhaps none of us foresaw it being quite this surreal. The Brexiteers, standing in the House of Commons, their victory complete, their sovereignty restored, transposing their own crushing stupidity on to the European Union then shouting at it in anger.As it happens, it took that stag more than 10 years to complete his climb down, to fully admit to 100 per cent of the blame.That’ll never happen with Brexit of course. Even 10 years needs an ounce of shame to get it going. But it is increasingly hard to see the public being as slow to work it out. More

One of Boris Johnson’s strengths as a prime minister is that he is odd. He is not bound by convention; he is unpredictable, inconsistent and a bit unknowable. He is as constrained by law, institutions and politics as any leader, but he sometimes acts as if he isn’t, which makes him a difficult person to negotiate with. That is why he was able to break the Brexit logjam. This time last year, the House of Commons had just passed Hilary Benn’s bill to prevent Britain from leaving the EU without a withdrawal agreement. It was a fundamental challenge to the government’s right to govern, and yet the same parliament refused to allow Johnson to hold an election. I said at the time that he had been prime minister for six weeks and was staring disaster in the face: he couldn’t have an election; he would be forced, by law, to ask to postpone Brexit; and even his brother had abandoned him, resigning from the government. Yet he negotiated a new withdrawal agreement with Leo Varadkar and threatened all sorts of unconstitutional things, confusing his opponents so much that they eventually allowed him to have the election he wanted. He succeeded where the sane, dutiful and predictable Theresa May had failed. Watch moreSo let us pause and wonder, as the world throws up its hands in shock and disbelief at the very idea that a Conservative government – a Conservative government – would destroy an EU trade deal because it wanted the right to subsidise exports. Has Johnson converted to Jeremy Corbyn’s policy of limitless state intervention just as the Labour Party is trying to forget it? Or does he want Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron to think he is irrational enough to walk away without a deal, in order to persuade them to instruct Michel Barnier, the EU negotiator, to offer a better one? Everyone knows that state aid is a sticking point in the EU trade talks. In the conventional world, the issue is simple. No country will readily tolerate another country’s government subsidising their exports in order to gain an unfair advantage. That is pretty much what the whole history of trade agreements has been about. The EU has laws to limit state aid, and it wants those principles to apply to Britain when the transition period ends in December – although it accepts that they would be enforced by a new arbitration body, and not by the European Court of Justice. Johnson’s view, as expressed this week by “one figure with intimate knowledge of the negotiations” to James Forsyth, the political editor of The Spectator, is, well, unconventional. It is that “state aid is critical if you are going to try and shape markets in technology”. It is that the US and China use state power to promote tech innovation, and that we should too. It is an update of Harold Wilson’s white heat of the technological revolution, and appears to be based on the belief that the gentleman in Whitehall – in this case, presumably, one of Dominic Cummings’s weirdos and misfits – really does know best which moonshot technology to back. This is so important to the prime minister, apparently, that he insists he would rather have no deal than compromise. He sometimes says that “only three people in government agree with me” on the question of, as Forsyth puts it, “how ambitious – or purist – to be on Brexit”, but he is “convinced” of his position.Read moreWell, I have my doubts. However, I cannot be sure that this is not what Johnson thinks. He has so few ideological moorings that he could quite easily be a believer in free trade and free markets, and also a kind of souped-up Michael Heseltine wanting the state to intervene before breakfast, lunch and dinner. Maybe he does want to flood the EU market with subsidised versions of whatever the next craze is after TikTok. Perhaps he does think unfair competition is good, as long as we are the ones who are doing it. And it could be that this uncertainty is enough to disrupt and unsettle the EU side in the negotiations. It doesn’t seem likely, but then it didn’t seem likely that Johnson would ever be able to get Britain out of the EU this time last year. In the end, the state aid issue comes down to this: if a British government ever wanted to go against conventional economic wisdom and subsidise exports, the EU would retaliate by imposing tariffs. That can either be written down in a trade deal or not, but it would be the reality either way. That is why I predict that the unpredictable Boris Johnson and the boring, pragmatic and predictable EU leaders will do a deal. More

Gavin Williamson can only apologise. He can only apologise for the week of A-Level results meltdown he was warned about months in advance but chose to ignore until it was far too late. He can only apologise for, or rather to, the thousands of BTec students who are yet to receive their qualifications.For everything that is Williamson’s fault and for which other people have been sacked, all Williamson can do is come off the despatch box of the House of Commons and say “I can only apologise.”Does it matter that it’s not true? When Williamson says “I can only apologise”, he is, of course, entirely wrong. An apology is far from the only course of action open to him. The traditional one is to resign. What he means when he says, “I can only apologise” is “I am only prepared to apologise.”It was, in a way, the performance of his life. The occasion was entirely unremarkable but arguably nevertheless represented the high watermark of the new politics of which we are all the victim.The despatch box of the House of Commons is, in theory, where ministers come to be held to account because their actions have been liberated from their consequences.Watch moreDonald Trump once boasted that he could shoot someone dead in Fifth Avenue and wouldn’t cost him any votes. Williamson could be filmed with his top off on the dancefloor at an illegal warehouse rave and then, when called to the House of Commons to explain himself, perform the introductory rap to ‘I’m The Scatman’ by Scatman John then walk off and go about his day.He has already been sacked for endangering national security by leaking information from the National Security Council (at this point, we must point out for legal reasons that Williamson denies those allegations, but also that those denials were not believed by anybody. If they had been, he wouldn’t have been sacked.)He has now overseen the single greatest fiasco of modern times, one so big it has created a new kind of political microclimate. The A Level results farce was so bad that both the head of the exam regulator, Ofqual, and the most senior civil servant in the Department for Education have lost their jobs over it, but Williamson hasn’t. A-level results: Students protest outside Downing Street amid growing pressure for Gavin Williamson to resignSo the evidence that errors of unforgivable, jaw-dropping magnitude took place are not contested by anybody, not even by Williamson. But the person ultimately responsible for them, Williamson, bears no responsibility at all.What was said or not said at the despatch box of the House of Commons no longer matters. We live not so much in an era of post-truth as of post-responsibility. It is now so clearly established that as there is nothing that Williamson can do, no problem that is not too complex for him, no nanoscopically small part of governing that is not infinitely beyond him, that there is also nothing he can’t do.To expect Williamson to take responsibility for his actions is no different from expecting a two-year-old to take responsibility for wetting their trousers.Why should they? It’s not their fault. It’s yours for expecting any different.Williamson can only apologise. You should take it as literally as it’s meant. Saying sorry is absolutely all that the man can do. More