Big spender Boris knows the value of nothing

Organic meals: £27,000. Union flags: £163,000. Two Downing Street paintings: £100,000.

The numbers seem large but let’s not dwell on what amounts to mere chump change, the fiscal lubricant that keeps the wheels of government turning. After all, in the last year of Tony Blair’s premiership, Downing Street advertised for a butler on £50,000 a year, not to forget a certain “Blair Force One” proposed for a mere £12 million a year…

Or isn’t that how political decadence usually gets spun?

Is it too obvious to point out that conspicuous excess at a time of budget constraints is the oldest and highest form of government hypocrisy? Defenders of the current Prime Minister may point out that much of the aforementioned cash came from non-government coffers (as if that would be so benign), but distraction doesn’t diminish the criticism. Politics isn’t just about perceived competence when it comes to managing the abstract billions in the state purse. It’s about how the smaller sums are treated. It’s why the billions lost during the panic buying of the early pandemic will be remembered less quickly than the duck houses, Jaffa cakes, and pizza cutters of past expenses scandals. The human brain can all too easily tally pennies. Pennies do matter.

They matter because how someone treats money speaks volumes about the person spending it. It becomes a matter of personal responsibility, edging us closer to the current prohibition that deems the private lives of politicians to be off-limits to the public. If only that were possible with Boris Johnson, in whom the personal speaks volumes about the political.

A climate report issued last week delivered a bleak warning and the Prime Minister responded with serious tones. Yet it was only 2007 when, writing for The Telegraph, Johnson downplayed the climate threat, saying: “All the evidence shows that we can help reduce population growth, and world poverty, by promoting literacy and female emancipation and access to birth control. Isn’t it time politicians stopped being so timid, and started talking about the real number one issue?” 

Wise word buts sadly ignored by the author who is quick to see in others the vices by which he is himself chiefly burdened. 

After a career spent lecturing birth control to a nation where most families have 0.4 children, Johnson recently announced the imminent birth of his seventh child. This is the man who wrote in The Spectator in 1995 about the punishment for infidelity. “You can call, if you like, for the odious and unfair humiliation of bastard children, in the hope that it will cause of pang of regret in their parents and deter potential single mothers […] but these prescriptions, thought-provoking though they may be, are unlikely to be widely read in the estates of Liverpool or Hackney.”

Why should the man who made moral judgements about single mothers on Merseyside be rendered inviolate because of some faddish probity around private life? Because, with Johnson, it’s noticeably always about Liverpool or Hackney or, at the very start of his journalistic career, Peckham, where he visited a social security office for his very first piece written for The Times. The piece is worth revisiting, baiting his audience, as it does, with crude caricatures of the working class, emphasising the “phalanx of pregnant women” and “the small children who ran through the legs of those that could stand”. A woman “in a pork pie hat” shouts “come here now and give me some money […] Give me my hardship payment”. (Even the dialogue doesn’t ring true. Did anybody ever refer to benefits as “hardship payment”?)

But this is habitual with Johnson – the way he devolves problems to some simplistic other, distinct both economically and socially from the well-connected self. It’s the same crudity found in his recent remarks about mining in Scotland. Anybody growing up in a mining community in the 1980s will have known too many men with white finger or black lung. There was nothing romantic about a life spent down the pit and Margaret Thatcher might well have inadvertently saved many communities from the fates of their fathers, but that does not excuse the glibness with which this Prime Minister appeared to dismiss the pain endured during those years. 

It would seem we have in Downing Street a man who fails the “price of a pint of milk test” that leaves too many politicians scratching their heads. Incapable of understanding the value of the pound in the pocket of the poor, they fail to appreciate why £20 a week means so much to the vulnerable people coming to terms with the latest cuts to their benefits.

That £20 a week taken from 26 people for an entire year could have paid for all those organic meals.

A year of additional struggle for 157 disabled men and women might have paid for the flags. 

The loss suffered by 96 vulnerable people would pay for those two paintings. 

And 192 people went without for a year to pay for the flat refurbishment.

The arguments about the scale of the social care bill in this country are never easy and £500,000 would do little to change the reality of the £212 billion it cost the country in 20/21, being just 0.0002 per cent of the total. Yet, even if it was “only” 471 people having their benefits restored to their previous level had they the money that the Johnsons wasted on yuppie food and furnishings, that still matters if you are one of those 471. Whether it’s 20 per cent, 2 per cent, or 0.002 per cent, the principle still stands.

Not that principals seem to matter. There is a stench of casual immorality about this government as well as a complete disregard for the natural logic of democracy. Ministers seem to believe that a non-functioning opposition means they should never be held to account. They might believe that six weeks of intensive media bombardment at the next election will be enough to guarantee them another four years. And who knows? Such cynicism might well be justified, but that should not excuse the excesses that are now a daily occurrence in Downing Street.

Boris Johnson continues to exhibit the behaviour of a man not fully in control. Dominic Cummings calls him “The Trolley” because of his inability to steer a straight path, though that’s not entirely fair. He always seems to steer a straight path toward imbecility. Every photo opportunity reveals the same shambolic performative mess, the witless double thumbs up act meant to reassure us but achieving the exact opposite. Here’s Boris in body armour and full camo. Here he is under a policeman’s helmet. Next, he’s donning the ubiquitous builder’s luminescent vest. This isn’t leadership. It’s an audition for the new Village People, swapping out the Native American costume for the white coat of a lab technician, the moustachioed biker in leather for a guy dressed for rugby.

Welcome to the YMCA. Yet More Conservative Arrogance.

Johnson won a leadership contest in which he was the least impressive candidate in a field of two. None of that mattered. The Crown Prince of the Conservative Grassroots had to be crowned. That was his destiny. This is the consequence. The Man of Personality won over a Man of Substance, and we are now led by a man forged in the public eye, the first “celebrity” in the modern sense to become prime minister. 

It’s to our continued misfortune that a proper politician doesn’t now stand in his place.