I had been planning for this week’s edition of my newsletter for Reaction subscribers to be on the botched European Super League.
It was Brexit wot dun in the dastardly ESL, at the end of the day, wasn’t it? The chairman of Juventus, one of the clubs involved, said so this week as he attempted to divert the blame from his own blunders. One Italian newspaper, sceptical of the not so Super League, praised the Prime Minister’s intervention and in a headline described Boris as Godlike (I’ll return to him in a moment).
Of course, the breakaway league that collapsed was not stopped because of any legal change made possible by Britain leaving the EU. There are numerous problems apparent with Brexit, not least in the Irish Sea and in the bitterness created. But it is now possible to discern the contours of a new political economy in Britain, a promising settlement centred on pushing back a bit against the excesses of globalisation.
That’s the best of Brexit, when it’s a positive and potentially unifying state of mind that asserts the national over the supra-national, the local and particular over the heartless globalised corporation, in this case billionaire football club owners.
This post-Brexit spirit was first apparent in the success of the UK vaccine procurement taskforce, which was presumably dominated by experts in their field who voted remain in 2016. When asked to sort out vaccines and stop people dying they moved confidently and quickly, sensibly eschewing the Brussels bureaucracy. This turned out to be a right call that will, I suspect, echo down the decades as an example of what happened when Britain diverged from the EU.
The risk in all this will come if government, finding that a big state economic nationalism approach is popular in areas such as football, is tempted to apply it in every single area of economic life, dismantling free markets rather than creating the proportionate and orderly regulation that underpins enterprise and economic liberty.
On the football theme I had a good little intro set up on John Charles, the Welshman via Leeds who in 1957 was one of the first (not the first) players to sign for a foreign club. He became a favourite at Juventus, as top scorer in the top Italian league in his first season. He was signed for under £70,000. Those players who travelled to play for Italian clubs were trailblazers, part of the revolution that began to open up drab post-War Britain to the delights of continental culture. That revolution spread through cinema, fashion, food, travel and football. In the mid to late sixties it fused with the rediscovery – principally in music – of pride in English culture. In the 1990s, foreign influence transformed English football.
So that was the theme – football, Brexit, globalisation, divided loyalties, culture, and the nation state versus the arrogant company or too big corporation.
And then Dominic Cummings published that statement on Friday just before 5pm.
There is no need to go through it line by line here. You can read the whole thing on our site. It is one of the best crafted and funniest political statements I’ve ever encountered. Cummings could always write, in an anarchic rolling blog-style, chucking in historical and philosophical references, but he needed an editor to prune and cajole.
This time, not wanting to miss his target, it looks as though he has been tightly edited, and it looks too as though he has benefited from legal advice.
And that’s where the serious danger lies for Boris in all this. In the law on political donations, taxation, and benefits in kind.
So far, much of the attention is focussing on the human drama of the Prime Minister’s former guru and Number 10 supremo attacking him on the question of leaks. Quite a lot of that will fade away on the basis that it is “he said, I said, she said” territory involving people most readers (lucky readers) have never heard of. Criticisms can be dismissed by his supporters as subjective – and we’ll hear the phrase “tittle tattle” soon too from those sent out to defend Boris.
There is a comic element to it too. At one point Cummings describes Boris having realised that he has launched a leak inquiry and that it was likely to settle on a friend of his partner Carrie.
Boris: “If (Henry) Newman is confirmed as the leaker then I will have to fire him, and this will cause me very serious problems with Carrie as they’re best friends … [pause] perhaps we could get the Cabinet Secretary to stop the leak inquiry?”
I’ve seen that dialogue dismissed as too perfect. Nope, sounds bang on, exactly like Boris, right down to the pause while he plots his next move.
The real danger for the Prime Minister is not in all that.
The real danger lies in the legal, and in the particular, in relation to political donations and in the questions he has to answer on payments for the renovation of the Downing Street flat.
The suggestion is that Boris, out of cash after his divorce, and with a Shakespeare book he can’t finish – or can he? – on the go, was left without a proverbial pot to pee in.
Carrie wanted their Downing Street flat renovated, expensively and stylishly. What to do? Could the party help?
Cummings refused to help arrange it and told Johnson, he says, that it would be unethical and possibly illegal to solicit donations for this purpose.
It is unclear as yet what happened, but if any donors were asked to make donations as political donations (covered by law and regulation) and then they were siphoned off for wallpaper, then that could be serious. Someone is bound to complain to the police. The donations would have been solicited for one purpose, political activity, and then spent on a benefit in kind with tax and legal implications.
Some Tory donors are lawyering up, I understand. That’s sensible on their part. Everyone anywhere near this will need to be able to explain whether or not they were involved or asked to be involved and refused. Were they misled by someone at Tory HQ? The party can expect to be bombarded with “subject access requests” by donors, who have a legal right to know what was said in emails referring to them.
Ominously for Johnson, Labour has jumped on the donations aspect of the row, realising that’s where the story is. The party is run by a lawyer, a prosecutor, and this scandal is tailor-made for Sir Keir Starmer.
Labour’s Rachel Reeves has written a letter asking the Prime Minister to explain. This will go on for months with the media crawling all over it.
The Electoral Commission wants to know where the flat decoration money came from. Boris has now settled the bill himself, it is reported. What with?
This looks like serious trouble for usually lucky Boris. He always seems to bounce back. But then they said that about Richard Nixon. He won an extraordinary landslide, and he kept bouncing back, until he didn’t.
What should he do? The Prime Minister needs to get the services of a good lawyer and get everything out there. Total transparency, and blame Dilyn the dog if necessary and hope the punters are too busy enjoying the end of lockdown to care. Otherwise, this has the makings of a rolling legal carnival that could end very badly for Boris Johnson.
