Boris must stay – we need him in the current crisis

Have you ever found yourself in the tedious situation of having to look in on boring neighbours, or employees, or dependents of some sort, out of duty, to make polite conversation and toy with a drink until, after about 25 minutes, you were able thankfully to make your excuses and leave? Would you describe such an experience as an indulgence, to be envied by anyone not present? It seems unlikely. Yet was that not the situation in which Boris Johnson found himself, in the case of the Downing Street “party” most canvassed by the media?

Civil servants with a heavy workload gathered in the Downing Street garden, on the Crown Estate where pandemic regulations are understood to not apply; then, in a classic scenario, their employer and his wife came out into the garden and mingled for 25 minutes, dispensing recognition and encouragement in an outdoor environment safer than the crowded offices indoors, before retiring, duty done.

Somehow, that classic morale-boosting exercise has been turned into a caricature in which, amid scenes of debauch worthy of the brush of Hieronymus Bosch, the Prime Minister partied the night away, courting legless oblivion. The fact that the officials present supplied their own drinks has somehow been used to add an extra sinister dimension to the event, when it clearly signalled this was not formally a “party” and taxpayers’ money was not used to supply hospitality, it was merely a restorative break in a demanding work regime.

Of the 10 or so “parties” now being investigated, the clear impression is that they were initiatives of the civil service, not the Prime Minister, who was absent from nearly all of them. Even the shock-horror-probe prime ministerial “birthday party” turns out only to have been attended for 10 minutes by the birthday boy. All the evidence suggests that, if there was a “culture” of partying, it was a civil service culture, with the Prime Minister occasionally looking in very briefly, as a courtesy, at events he had a right to assume were approved by senior officials.

It is also obvious that the Prime Minister, along with all the other denizens of Number 10 and Whitehall, took a cavalier view of pandemic restrictions, at least as strictly interpreted. The problem is that the rest of the population was subjected to the strict interpretation and that is why a great magma chamber of resentment has been building up seismically beneath British society and is now erupting. There are truly harrowing accounts – and they are not few or unrepresentative – of people being prevented from saying goodbye to dying family members and a host of other tragic situations in which official, going-by-the-book intransigence greatly aggravated the hurt.

In the first year of the pandemic, this was a very frightened country and it had every right to be so. A deadly pathogen to which no immunity existed was attacking a population for whose relief no vaccine was yet available. Even the grim scenarios of SAGE rang true in that dystopian environment. After the tactless bring-out-your-dead advocates of “herd immunity” had been shamed into silence, social distancing and lockdown became the only resort.

Whatever angry libertarians may claim now, the lockdown regime was embraced with enthusiasm by the overwhelming majority of the British public, as opinion polls consistently showed. On that issue, democracy was not overridden: it was implemented. Relief from the nightmare was only forthcoming when, thanks to the man now being pilloried for a brief foray into the Downing Street garden to encourage his staff, a world-leading vaccine roll-out transformed the situation. We have Boris Johnson to thank for that and we have a strange way of showing gratitude.

It is worth noting, too, that Johnson was not only responsible for presiding over the record vaccination programme, but for having pre-emptively purchased in bulk a variety of vaccines still in development, so that whichever of them proved effective, the British people would have immediate access to them. Contrast that with the situation in the floundering EU and the value of post-Brexit independence becomes clear. The Remainer establishment would never admit it, but Brexit – also delivered by Boris – saved an unquantifiable number of lives by freeing us from the lumbering bureaucratic drag-chains that took such a toll on EU countries.

Of course, the anger of those who suffered separation from loved ones under the constraints of lockdown is understandable, but can we afford to allow that kind of revanchism to lead to the dismantling of the British government at a time of international danger unprecedented since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis? Is now the moment to propel Liz Truss (she of the embarrassing Thatcher/tank photograph) into the seat of power? Is Rishi Sunak the ideal candidate to deal with Putin and, quite possibly, Comrade Xi getting in on the act? Would Jeremy Hunt deter what amounts to a resurgent Warsaw Pact menacing Europe?

While Germany, France and the other EU states that talk big in Brussels were prostrating themselves before Vladimir Putin, as a consequence of putting their energy supplies at his tender mercies – an act of geopolitical self-harm they were well warned against – Brexit Britain was sending significant arms supplies to Ukraine.

This independence of action did not go unnoticed in America where the establishment, dismayed by the dotard in the Oval Office licensing a “minor incursion” into Ukraine by the Russian military and proclaiming to the world the disunity within NATO, is beginning to realise that, instead of the EU furnishing an effective power bloc and Britain remaining irrelevant on the sidelines, the opposite situation is the reality. This, too, happened on Boris’s watch.

“We know no spectacle more ridiculous than the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality,” wrote Macaulay. That applies to the moral crusade by Labour, the BBC and other interested parties, not least on the Conservative front bench, to remove Boris Johnson from office. This moral rage, however, is being manipulated by the prime mover in this destructive ferment, Dominic Cummings. It beggars belief that the individual whose famous trip to Barnard Castle represented the most iconic breach of lockdown rules should now be attempting to bring down Boris Johnson for stepping out onto the lawn for a few minutes, for a quick word with his staff.

Now the plot thickens, as Plod builds his part: the Metropolitan Police is to investigate the various parties rumoured to have taken place around Whitehall. Why? The Met had already enunciated its principle of not investigating lockdown breaches after the event. Why has this changed? How can the police concern themselves with conduct that took place on the Crown Estate, over which they have no jurisdiction? It is an axiom of life that there is no catastrophe, be it the execution in a Tube carriage of an innocent Brazilian electrician, or mourners assembled in a public park in vigil for a murdered woman, that cannot be aggravated by the intervention of Dame Cressida Dick.

Boris Johnson himself has admitted he has behaved wrongly in some circumstances. One credible argument insists that a prime minister who has imposed harsh restrictions on the public has a duty to set an example; the opposing view is that of Winston Churchill during the War: he believed that those who shouldered the immense burden of the daily direction of the War should be exempt from constraints such as rationing, so that he fared well and continued to consume champagne and brandy. Who would grudge him that small indulgence?

What the British public now needs to ask itself, in all seriousness, is: can we afford to indulge our understandable resentment by bringing down the Prime Minister, at a moment of high danger, internationally? Do we really believe that any of Boris’s putative replacements would be able to handle the growing geopolitical crisis? If not, why should we cut off our nose to spite our face?

In party terms, although the Conservatives under Boris are 10 points behind Labour in the polls, Boris represents at least the possibility of recovery. Under any of the replacements being canvassed, the Conservatives would lose the next election. It is a familiar scenario: a new leader is brought in to save the situation, during the honeymoon period the new incumbent briefly soars in the polls until, exposed as a dud, said incumbent drops like a stone.

Have the Tories forgotten the wilderness years from 1997 to 2010, when the succession of leaders like musical chairs was only ended by the purely negative factor of the unelectable Gordon Brown occupying Number 10 by internal Labour manipulation, alienating the electorate?

If morality is the sole yardstick by which you assess politics, then Boris Johnson was never the man for you. Most of us have never trusted him but, in present circumstances, that is in his favour: let Britain’s enemies now eye him with distrust. It is utterly self-destructive to persist in whittling away at the power of a British prime minister while 100,000 Russian troops are massed at the Ukrainian border, Russian submarines are shadowing Royal Navy ships and menacing undersea communications cables, and while China threatens similar belligerence.

We cannot afford the self-indulgence of destabilising the Prime Minister and government at a time when the still problematic pandemic crisis is being aggravated by the threat of war in Europe; while America, our normal guarantor of security, slumbers under the Rip Van Winkle presidency of Joe Biden. There is only one argument for retaining Boris, but it is persuasive: “Always keep ahold of Nurse/For fear of finding something worse.”