The return of British statecraft under Sunak is a national opportunity

This is Iain Martin’s weekly newsletter, exclusively for Reaction subscribers. 

What a difference a week makes. Before the announcement of the deal on the Northern Ireland Protocol, the pro-Johnson faction was getting ready for a run at reclaiming the Tory leadership. In typical style, he and they had not thought it through. Boris Johnson lost office because he could not hold together a government, such was the outrage over his shoddy conduct. It would be no different if the Tory tribe put him back in Number 10. Few would serve. A ragbag administration would lose votes and collapse into an early general election. But a week ago the Johnson gang were working on the basis the Northern Ireland deal with the EU would make the impossible possible. A supposed sell-out would prove so unpopular with many Tory MPs that it would begin the process by which Rishi Sunak fell, some time after the local elections in May. Another Tory PM – Major, Cameron, May – brought down by Europe.

Amusingly, quite the opposite has happened in the last week. Boris’s rackety bandwagon has suffered punctures in both the front and rear tyres. Sunak’s status is enhanced by the sensible deal he secured and the former Prime Minister’s complaints about it look ridiculous. Johnson negotiated and signed the original deal putting a border down the Irish Sea, and now he has the temerity, the sheer cheek, to attack the guy trying to fix it or reduce the deleterious effects.

Sunak secured more than expected on goods and democratic scrutiny by being reasonable and calm with the EU. There was widespread praise in the House of Commons, where there is as much keenness to move on from the psychodrama of the Brexit wars as there is in the country.

Most importantly, the Sunak deal represents a welcome return to British statecraft, sending an important economic signal to allies and investors that Britain’s leaders can be pragmatic. The economic opportunity for the country that flows from this is enormous, in terms of rebuilding confidence and trust. Britain has looked at times since the outbreak of the Brexit wars like a madhouse. Here is a deal that will enable embassies to tell their capitals Britain is back as a more reliable interlocutor, and more investors to say Britain might be worth considering again.

It appears to be having an effect already. Subscribers are familiar with my obsession with the US Inflation Reduction Act and the way its giant subsidies  threaten to deindustrialise Europe, including the UK. The EU and Britain are deeply worried, and ministers are cooperating in lobbying Washington. There are rumours of some form of outline agreement soon from the Americans, to level the trade playing field for allies such as the EU and UK. That sounds like a very tall order, but the Biden administration is in its public comments once again talking about the EU, the UK and economic cooperation in the same breath. The Northern Ireland Protocol deal helps. 

For sovereignty absolutists saying any concession is a concession too far, a sell out to Brussels, none of this will wash. Although I see the fury, and understand the impulse as someone who voted for Brexit, the more fevered opposition to the deal looks to me like the death rattle of raging Brexit impossiblism. The hardest of hardliners will continue to rage against the dying of the light, yet it had almost no power or potency this week when Nigel Farage and others tried it. 

All this pragmatism by Sunak may do the Conservatives little good in electoral terms. Perhaps it is too far gone and public opinion is settled on the need to fling one lot out and give the other side a go. Sunak started the week with a historic success, yet within a few days the Westminster village was consumed by more talk of partygate and the weird decision of the senior official Sue “ethics” Gray to join Labour as Starmer’s chief of staff. It brings back memories of the Johnson era and Tory turmoil.

Sunak has also shackled himself and the country with tax rise on business that will harm the economy. The financial system is moribund and over-regulated, when post-financial crisis the domestic banks have been turned into giant building societies and the pension funds were forced to buy low-yielding government debt rather than invest in British companies. Capital needs urgently to be unleashed to drive investment and growth.

The Prime Minister or a successor after the election will have to change all this to get growth going, while seeking to improve further the trade arrangements with the EU. None of this is easy, but at least after the last week it feels possible.

The true horror of Hancock on WhatsApp

When the story broke in the Telegraph early this week that 100,000 WhatsApp messages from Matt Hancock had become available, I must admit I was in journalistic terms a sceptic. Imagine having to look at 100,000 messages involving the former Health Secretary. The journalists tasked with reading them must wonder whether they are being punished for sins in a previous life.

The ghastly spectacle that followed publication seemed to confirm my instinct. Isabel Oakeshott was on TV and radio explaining why she had, according to Hancock, breached their agreement. There were endless threads of confusing messages about Covid and Hancock’s campaign of self-promotion, and a crowd of characters fighting and finger jabbing all over the airwaves. Are the WhatsApps a meaningful story or just a squalid example of late period Tory infighting? With the ship sinking, some of the passengers and crew are fighting on the first class deck. 

And then I started to read the stories and the key threads, and my mind changed.

What is striking is how dismissively those on the message threads talk about the rest us, by which I mean the general population and the taxpayers who pay the wages of ministers, advisers and senior officials. The tone is by turns arrogant, glib, menacing and contemptuous. Plod is going to sort us out. There is glee and amusement when people are ensnared, or trapped in quarantine hotels, or caught out by the ridiculously draconian rules imposed by ministers. It is as though we are naughty nuisances who must be punished because we create work for the supposed grown-ups, our superiors. There’s a whiff of Dickens and the 19th century orphanage about the worst of the messages. The captives are mocked while the wardens snap and cackle.

The questionable decisions to shut schools for such long periods, with an obvious impact on the mental health of the young, and the quite mad order to make children wear masks in class, are discussed by some of the participants as though they are a political game. Cabinet ministers who expressed concerns about the impact of the assorted measures are dismissed as ideologues.

Missing in these monstrous exchanges is parliament or fear of parliament, which is supposed to be our guardian. To the eternal shame of MPs, they allowed the institution to be all but shut down by the state, and replaced with performative Zoom calls. Only a few of our elected representatives objected and demanded oversight.

But then we the public, or a majority, asked for it. The creepy authoritarianism, enforced by propaganda, public information briefings and strict policing, was popular at the time and it still is. The latest polling this week from YouGov suggested only 19% of voters think the government’s handling of Covid was too strict. Some 37% think it was not strict enough and 34% about right. One shudders to imagine what a more strict and controlling regime would have looked like. China?

This is not to dismiss Covid the disease for one second. In the first half of 2020 a lot was unclear. As in all countries, the health service was under pressure and tens of thousands of patients died. The vaccines when they came provided protection. Even many of those of us who felt the side effects of those vaccines will agree.

What worries me is what happens next time, when we know there will be more diseases and another pandemic at some point. In the last twenty years there have been three such diseases that threatened to become global pandemics. Neither SARS in 2003 nor the MERS outbreak from 2012 achieved full break out. COVID-19 did. This suggests a one in three shot at another Covid-style emergency in the next twenty years.

Such is the pace of technological change, in computing, data collection and AI that the next time it happens the state will have even more power than Hancock had. During Covid a majority of the British public liked this life by QR code, mediated (we now know) by squabbling, out of control and partying politicians who cratered the economy and added hundreds of billions of pounds to the national debt pile, left to be dealt with later by future generations.

The lesson to be drawn, surely, is that MPs and concerned citizens need to organise in preparation. I’m not holding my breath, although perhaps some senior MPs and campaigners will see the need to campaign for freedom and proper parliamentary oversight of the state in the next crisis.

What I’m reading

Historian Peter Frankopan’s new epic, The Earth Transformed. It was the launch party in London on Thursday and it may have been the world’s most over-populated book launch in history. No depopulation here. They were crammed on the stairs at Hatchards on Piccadilly and queuing for a word with the author. I didn’t see Tom Holland, who was there, being carried out over the heads of the throng, but it was so squashed I could imagine it happening.

Why were so many people present? Simply, people like Peter and his books.

This was an old school pre-pandemic book launch party. Knowing the score – the vibe was leave quietly at 7.30pm or stay and go on to the pub with the author and stragglers to get in at 12.30am having eaten only crisps – I chose to head home for dinner, missing a great night but waking up the next morning with a clear head.

What I’m watching

Seven Years in Tibet, starring a young Brad Pitt, wouldn’t get made now. Studios are too keen to make money in China, and the tale of the friendship between an Austrian mountaineer and the young 14th Dalai Lama would annoy the Chinese Communist Party. Pitt’s character is imprisoned by the British in India at the outbreak of war. Spoiler alert, he escapes, becomes friends with the Tibetan spiritual leader, before infuriatingly the Chinese Communists turn up in their stupid uniforms and set about smashing the place up. We watched it on Netflix this week.

If Seven Years in Tibet did somehow get made now the concept would be sold to Netflix studios and involve seven series over seventy episodes, taking seven years to watch. In contrast, the 1997 production starring Pitt and David Thewlis, directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud, is 136 minutes long. Not a minute is wasted. John Williams and Yo-Yo Ma provide the music and the cinematography is outstanding. This film is highly recommended if you want a reminder there was a rich cultural life before the internet.