I’ve long coveted a wine suitcase. My friend and former colleague Will Lyons, Sunday Times wine critic, has one for foreign trips. The wine suitcase, actually it comes more in hand luggage proportions, is padded with foam cut out in snug bottle shapes, enabling the wine fan to bring home safely a selection of individual bottles by the half dozen or dozen. Think about it. You’re on holiday in any of the great wine countries, such as France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Australia (if you can get a visa from the authoritarian government and avoid detention). While you are on location you buy an interesting bottle here and there, a lovely supermarket find or something picked up direct at a wine producer. Assemble these good value delights over the course of a fortnight or so, pop them in your specialist wine suitcase, and off they go with you on the plane home.
I accept the reinforced wine suitcase (cost about 300 quid) is not a priority purchase and will have to wait, possibly until never. Me not having a wine suitcase is, I also acknowledge, not high up the national pecking order when we consider the rapidly escalating cost of living crisis as inflation takes off.
Reports suggest it was not, sadly, a specially designed wine suitcase that the team at Number 10 deployed when they sent some poor soul along to a branch of the Co-op on the Strand to buy as much booze as they could carry for the latest of their numerous illegal parties. That was when they had confined the rest of us to socialise via Zoom drinks (waves a pathetic hello and in a forlorn fashion raises a glass in the direction of the webcam). Or we could walk with one person in the park. Any more than that risked police involvement and a fine.
No, the Number 10 team used an old-fashioned, conventional suitcase, with wheels I hope, to collect the drink and cart it back through security to Downing Street for their illicit and quite possibly illegal party.
As John Rentoul of The Independent put it splendidly on Twitter: “The suitcase of booze is one of those images that is instantly historic; Boris Johnson’s govt will be remembered for it.”
Indeed, when John tweeted that it lodged an instant, new image in my brain of Sir Simon Case, the cabinet secretary, the nation’s most senior civil servant. Case is a serious figure. I’ve even read his PhD thesis on intelligence, and it’s terrific. But there he is, thanks to his association with Boris Johnson, reduced to just another person sucked into the Bojo vortex, history’s shredder, and recast in my mind as Sir Simon Suitcase.
Stand back from all the jabbering about parties – who was the DJ and where there any days when there wasn’t a party in Downing Street during the pandemic? – and it isn’t difficult to work out the meaning of the events of the last few days, since Paul Brand of ITV revealed the existence of an email confirming Number 10 drinks parties took place.
What it means is that the Tory tribe has decided, in its bones, to be rid of Boris. This may not happen immediately, although it could if the pressure tips him into resignation. It may take months. But barring a miracle he is toast. Bojo, the great election winner, the maker of political history, is buggered.
Why so? One of the most significant developments of the week was the decision by the office bearers of the Sutton Coldfield Tory association to vote 10-0 calling on him to resign. Their MP Andrew Mitchell, a former chief whip not unsympathetic to Boris, tried to persuade them not to vote and to wait for the results of the ongoing official inquiry. They ignored his plea and said Boris must go. This is a unanimous vote in a safe Tory seat. This is the NCOs, and the footsoldiers, saying they have had enough of the PM. There will be more such grassroots votes as the anger spreads and Tories feel emboldened.
Political parties are, in the end, campaigning machines. They need big donors and all that, and fancy offices, but they are nothing without the good people prepared to give their time to knock on doors and hand out leaflets at local and general elections. These people aren’t in politics for the money. They do it because it matters.
The findings of the polls, disastrous this weekend for Boris’s personal standing, with hardly anyone saying he has behaved honestly in this affair, will be reflected in the conversations Tory members have with friends and family. Will many of these activists and members really want to go out and say “vote Boris, he’s the man with a plan” after this? Even before this he polled poorly among activists. Now, in the country he is toxic. Toxic toast.
For busy members of Reaction abroad, who are catching vague snippets of British political turmoil on TV or social media and wondering what at root the complex, confused madness in Britain is all about, I should explain that the people in Number 10 who made our draconian lockdown Covid rules have been caught out breaking the rules by hosting lots of parties.
It’s really that simple in this case. The rulemaker shut down society and then broke the rules he set for the rest of us. No political leader in a democracy as noisy, competitive and disputatious as Britain will survive long after that.
Safe European Home
Happy New Year, BTW. This is my first newsletter of the year for members of Reaction. I hope you managed to get a good break and that the return to normality as the Omicron surge subsides is proving to be enjoyable. It’s going to be an interesting year…
On Reaction, there is lots of exciting stuff ahead. In February we have our first live event of the year, with me interviewing the great Justin Webb, BBC R4 Today programme presenter, about his new memoir, out that week.
Next week there are invites going out to our “count me in” group of members who volunteered last year to give us feedback on the next stages of development as we build Reaction. And tickets will be on sale too. There will be drinks. I hope to see you there.
As I said, it’s going to be an exciting year, with Russia menacing Europe and trying to exploit the weakness of the West. China is in more trouble than it looks, and for that reason dangerous. Totalitarian regimes in trouble look for others to blame and start wars to divert attention from their own failures.
One of the key questions in all this will be: what is Europe and how is it to be defended?
Here’s a continent – prosperous, sophisticated, full of ingenuity, art and culture – that cannot defend itself and allows the US to conduct direct talks with the Kremlin about the future of European security. Yet Europeans are excluded from those talks and are briefed afterwards, like children, by Washington’s envoy.
Meanwhile, France, a major defence power, and Germany are hooked on Russian gas and in denial about the situation. Britain is out of the EU but a leading player in NATO, though none of us can rely on NATO beyond the short-term when we’ve no idea what or who our American friends and allies will elect next. President Joe Biden’s speech this week was a disgraceful, incoherent shambles. If the ghastly Trump had delivered anything similarly deranged the Western media would have been full of it for days.
It is an incredible situation, given our shared history. There is no space, no place, where Europeans in and outside the EU can meet to talk about defence, security, freedom, deterring Russian aggression and developing our common interests.
I say this with no specific answer in mind, other than observing that a new structure or forum is needed. Perhaps it’s something a new British Prime Minister, after the end of the Johnson turmoil, can humbly suggest as an essential component in an effort to rebuild post-Brexit relations.
What I’m Watching
Licorice Pizza. I’m not watching it right now, obviously. It’s on in cinemas and I recommend this film as an almost perfect slice of 1970s culture. Eve Webster, who works on our team producing Engelsberg Ideas – www.engelsbergideas.com – has reviewed it for Reaction Weekend. She liked director Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film, but says it shows how seedy the 1970s were. Yes, but that’s what we oldies who were there at the time, and who went to see the film last week, thought it did so well, capturing and expressing that peculiar 70s tension. It’s the decade when the elite revolution – in sex, mores, manners – really went mass mainstream. On the upside, that meant liberation, relaxation and validation for many of those hitherto excluded. On the downside it created mass cultural confusion and scope for exploitation. A young person, or even someone older, could easily pick up the dangerous idea in the 1970s from popular culture that only a prude says “no, thank you”. Forget your discomfort or unease, embrace liberation in all its forms. On that twisted basis assorted 70s sickos talked their way into grossly abusive positions and did a lot of harm.
Licorice Pizza doesn’t labour this though. It does what cinema does best. There’s no lecture. It entertains, and leaves you thinking a week later. And it’s a glorious hymn to the suburbs and the optimism of that Californian era. Endless sunshine! Cars without seatbelts! Good music! No sodding mobile phones! Compulsory smoking!
Have a good weekend.