Many politicians pursue a career based on sound, honestly-held views, and should be accepted as fundamentally good people, even if you don’t always agree with them. But politics can be a dirty business… A successful career often involves extensive, sometimes hypocritical compromises to obtain and maintain power, and progress up the ‘greasy pole’ is driven by deeply competitive instincts. Power can also corrupt.
So, what keeps governments and individual politicians on the straight and narrow and why is this current administration failing the test?
It is the checks and balances of colleagues, the Opposition, the media, voters, and the principles of individual politicians involved which hold governments and the overall political process to account. What happens if some of these influences are missing?
Boris Johnson has been caught telling blatant untruths throughout his career either as a journalist or as an MP, particularly when leading the Brexit campaign. To date, as Prime Minister, Johnson has continued to avoid the checks and balances applied to other politicians, which has led to this vacuum at the heart of his government.
In the face of the hopeless Opposition leader, Corbyn, voters, devoid of a competitive choice, forgave his untruths and gave him a free hand to ‘get Brexit done’ even though the courts and the rights of parliament had been undermined in the process. The size of his majority led him to hand pick mostly weak and dependent cabinet ministers with their advisers, in turn, overseen by his senior special adviser, Cummings. It has been excruciating listening to them defend the PM and Cummings’ alleged breaking of lockdown rules in the past few days, repeatedly reading out identical messages like a widely distributed bot.
Then there is the media. Johnson is undoubtedly a polarising figure and some media are short on objectivity, but their role as scrutineers has been ignored and even denigrated, with the BBC publicly threatened. Johnson and his ministers boycott programmes they dislike and view many journalists simply as ‘enemies’.
Lastly, Johnson, himself, has very few personal, well documented principles to hold him back. Strong Prime Ministers and senior ministers in the past had some sort of moral compass and knew there was a line not to cross; had powerful colleagues, viewed the Opposition warily, feared the press (sometimes too obsessively), and, heaven forbid, even resigned on matters of principle. Not now.
A Johnson premiership was always going to be a high wire act and the Cummings affair has uncovered its weaknesses. Johnson appears to have little understanding of why he is in politics, except as a competition to reach the top, which is why he is so reliant on his bullying key adviser to give him his lines and framework for policy priorities. Huge amounts of political capital have been expended simply to save Cummings’ skin in recent days. Crucially, the whole affair risks undermining social distancing and maintaining control over the future trajectory of this damn virus and it is scandalous that announcements of measures to ease the lockdown are partly timed to drown out condemnation of the government’s response to the ‘architect of lockdown’ breaking his own rules.
But things will, and are, changing. Voters are waking up to the seemingly unacceptable levels of hypocrisy and incompetence in managing this pandemic to date. Cabinet Ministers will be more emboldened to challenge Johnson after this recent debacle. We finally have a decent Opposition leader beginning to offer a genuine, alternative choice and even normally sympathetic journalists are angry and determined to hold this government to account.
The last blog called for more humility from the government. Clearly wishful thinking. Democratic processes, however, have a way of correcting imbalances of power and, if you believe the polls, this appears to be underway quicker than Johnson would have expected. What is also certain is that vacuums get filled, even moral ones…
Inside Right Politics 