Cabinet needs courage to strike and shouldn’t fear Boris backlash

The conflict in Ukraine is getting underway, with a series of Russian false flag operations of such ridiculousness that it would be almost comedic if the consequences for Ukrainians and the rest of us were not so serious. I’ll return to this briefly, and what it means to be moving into a war era, in a moment.

First, let’s talk about Boris Johnson’s leadership and his desperate attempts to remain in office in order that he might fight the next general election and stay there until 2028 or 2029, a decade after he snatched the premiership. Perhaps this will work, but frame it like that – just think, another six or seven years of him at the helm! – and the idea collapses through the weight of its own implausibility. We’ll get to all the short-term calculations being made about what might be survivable if there are partygate fines, and the cabinet fearing the sack if he survives and like a Roman emperor reborn has his cruel revenge. A fresh round of firings is rumoured. Behind the scenes, the low politics is even lower than usual right now.

The real reason this farce is coming to an end is that there simply isn’t a proper functioning government and at some point the vacuum will have to be filled. Even his better defenders in cabinet and the Commons struggle to make eye contact or keep a straight face when attempting to say how brilliant he is at being in government. I’ve had numerous pitches of this kind from loyalist ministers: “The PM gets the big calls right, you should see him in operation, he will fight and win the next election.” Some of them may believe it. Others I look forward to having a drink with on the other side when they’ll explain why they felt compelled to keep up the pretence for so long, and give their account of how atrocious Johnson’s attempts at running the show were.

It is not just how lousy his treatment of the cabinet is, and it is. There is also the erratic decision-making on domestic policy, the inattention to detail, the lack of interest in economics and proper energy policy, and the way he has everyone rolling around in the dirt dealing with the aftermath of his screw ups. It’s deeply dysfunctional. It’s degrading.

To counter the final attack, the operation to save Boris run by the ultra-loyal squad is well-advanced and on one level is winning. The break of parliamentary recess has been used to restore some message discipline ahead of the return this coming week. The message is that Big Dog Boris is getting on with the job, dealing with a war and being businesslike in all regards.

There has also been some strange gangsterish briefing about what the police might or might not do, with some Johnson supporters saying the cops had better watch out, as though different laws apply to Boris from the rest of us. The ground is being cleared. If he escapes a fine, they will say he is in the clear and what went went on was the fault of others who created a party culture of which he was an innocent victim, as though he is a naughty schoolboy and bigger boys did it and ran away. If he is fined, they will attempt to say, outrageously, that it doesn’t matter much that he broke his own laws, the most draconian laws in peacetime, because it’s only a FPN, Fixed Penalty Notice. Think of it as equivalent to a small speeding fine.

At that point of maximum vulnerability, with such a threadbare defence being made, we’ll find out not only if enough Tory MPs can see that this situation is an insult to the nation, a stain on their party and country. We’ll also see if anyone in the cabinet has worked out that their best option is to resign right then, either to regain some dignity and/or to give themselves a head start in a leadership contest as the brave candidate who stood up when it mattered.

As usual, the Tories don’t know who they want to replace their leader. It’s most often like that. Think 1975 and 1990, when the frontrunners don’t win.

Once again, a wild card, a non-frontrunner, could win. Johnson’s chief of staff Steve “John Major” Barclay is now tipped to run if a leadership race gets underway. The Nadhim Zahawi operation fancies its chances. Add their names to Rishi Sunak, Jeremy Hunt, Liz Truss, Jeremy Hunt, Sajid Javid, the fast-rising defence secretary Ben Wallace and Whitehall svengali Michael Gove, plus several others, and this could be the Westminster version of the Grand National.

What appears to be holding up the dirty deed is doubt. Those who suspect the bulk of the electorate has settled on the view that Johnson is a wrong ‘un, and for the scrapheap of history, also worry how hard he will fight and how dirty he’ll play if he’s removed.

I’ve heard this idea floated nervously several times now by senior Tories. Won’t Johnson be worse in the Prime Ministerial afterlife than Margaret Thatcher and Ted Heath combined if he’s evicted? Surely he will wreak terrible havoc in the pages of the Daily Telegraph and on the speaker circuit? Wouldn’t he bounce around the country and party conference, reminding Red Wall voters for ever of what they miss with his disdain for convention, unruly hair and jokes? He’ll do anything to get revenge?

This is total balls. Boris Johnson only gets to do this, he only gets away with it and is taken seriously, if everyone stands back and says nothing punchy in response when he tries it on.

Understandably, after the defenestration of Margaret Thatcher the Tory party didn’t know what to do about her distress. Her supporters felt that a great person, a winner in the Cold War with a record of domestic reforms, had been treated abominably. Those who removed her felt it had been necessary, but not to the extent they could be publicly rude when she intervened. Everything had to be coded, measured, mannered even. It was an elongated psychodrama.

Boris Johnson is no Margaret Thatcher, no titan of government. After Boris, it will all pour out, even more, the tales of maladminstration and jaw-dropping chicanery, via parliamentary committees, the press, memoirs, court cases and so on, and he won’t have the Number 10 machine and the power of patronage to protect him.

Boris Johnson won’t get treated respectfully if he hits out. Here is a lucky bloke who had his chance and was not hard done by. If he uses a flamethrower, there will be plenty of people with ammunition and weaponry on hand prepared to respond.

Of course, there may be a strand of voters activated by Boris Johnson in 2019 who remain furious if their Brexit hero is no more. Electorally, the Tory party having done its deal with Boris back then will just have to live with the criticism from those voters, do its best to work round their concerns and emphasise bluntly that good government and urgent national problems post-Brexit took precedence over continuing the Boris circus.

Oddly, I suspect that if he goes the most relieved person will after a bit bluster be Boris Johnson himself. He will no longer be confronted with boxes full of government papers he doesn’t want to read. There will be an audience for his memoirs and other books, and speeches to be made in the US. He’ll be happier, the lone wolf re-released into the wild. Out of the Commons he won’t have to declare what he’s up to. Money problems will vanish as his earning power increases times ten, and he will be able to get on his bike, outpedalling his security, free of petty bourgeois constraints, liberated once more to tootle around town visiting acquaintances.

Munich, technology and the urgent need for European rearmament

History rhymes. There’s an eerie symmetry to the Prime Minister being in Munich today delivering a speech at the Security Conference as war begins on the European continent. Munich is where Chamberlain signed his doomed agreement with Hitler in 1938. The defence secretary Ben Wallace said this week, correctly, that there was a whiff of Munich in some of the attempts by several powers to make concessions to the Russian leader. There’s no use being squeamish about it, as though we must avoid nasty historical parallels because they risk making listeners feel uncomfortable. Putin is a tyrant in the old way and there is no point tip-toeing around the implications of him wanting, as a Russian imperialist, an empire.

There is going to be a painful period of adjustment while politicians, and the rest of us, come to terms with living again in a war era on the European continent. Since the conflict that followed the break up of Yugoslavia we’ve consigned European war to the category of unimaginable horrors that could not happen here now, though it happens elsewhere, because we are by definition wiser than our naive predecessors, when of course we’re not.

As Christopher Coker – in Why War? published last year – explains, war is a biological imperative, a product of the battle for survival. What Thucydides termed “the human thing.” The question isn’t whether we want war to happen or not. It happens. That doesn’t mean it is impossible to contain conflict, or that we should eschew diplomatic structures and systems in an effort to block or outwit those who actively seek war. We can have long periods of relative peace, if there is vigilance and a realistic understanding of the importance of collective defence and security.

What’s delusional is the idea of war being replaced forever with perpetual peace, as Coker says. John Lennon sang that war is over, if you want it. Which always prompted the question: fine, you want war to be over, that’s a lovely notion. What if the other guy, the other side, doesn’t want it to be over?

Europe is getting a lesson again in these realities from Putin. It is Ukraine today. Tomorrow it may be the Baltic states.

Urgently, European must rearm to repel aggression and that rearmament must have a greater technological dimension. The US and China are engaged in an arms race on Artificial Intelligence, towards robot weaponry and autonomous machines. As Coker says, it is pointless lamenting this development and hoping it will be stopped. There is no technology humans have developed that has not been deployed. If Western civilisation – free societies, democracy, commerce, intellectual inquiry – is to be defended, Europeans must expect to do more of the innovation, spending and organisation.

Covid and the second draft of history

This week’s Reaction podcast is me and my colleague Alastair Benn discussing the end of the pandemic, or the end of the emergency phase of this crisis. We all want it over; it is human to want to forget the horrors of the last two years. We move on by suppressing or compartmentalising trauma and disaster, in order that we might get up the next day and go again. In doing so there’s always a risk of the pandemic slipping too quickly into the rear view mirror of history. On this episode we discuss the lessons that might be learned, what it’s done to our politics, and the way history is being rewritten. On the downside, it speeds up our advance into a medicalised, tech-driven, AI monitored dystopia mediated through sinister, authoritarian political communication. On the upside, the vaccines were great, it’s the weekend, and in three hours it will be time for a gin and tonic.

You can listen here.

As I said last week, we’re back doing these podcasts in the old style, that is podcasts by the team in a reflective manner of the kind we used to produce years ago. Hope it’s useful and worth a listen.

What I’m reading

Christopher Coker’s Why War? I mentioned it above in the context of Munich and Ukraine. Coker is one of the very best thinkers and writers around on international relations, warfare and technology. Always stimulating, amusing and energising. Also, an advance copy of Brian Groom’s new book – Northerners: A history, from the ice age to the present day – has just landed on the doorstep and it looks terrific based on an initial flick through. Later, once I’ve read The Times, I’ll read FT Weekend to see who has made a fool of themselves this week identifying their “personal signifier” in the style section or How to Spend it or whatever it is called. And then I’ll look at the Wine Society catalogue and order a case of something dry and German, or something French and robust from the southern Rhone, as a personal signifier.

Have a good weekend.