The strange death of decency in politics

The spectacle of Boris Johnson at bay has caused deep rumblings, and some soul-searching, within the Tory Party, which likes to think of itself as Britain at its best – solid, honest, dependable – providing good, no-nonsense government no matter the circumstances. While acknowledging that they sometimes got things wrong and may even on occasion have failed to pick the right leader, the Tories remain convinced that they routinely act in the nation’s best interests and are guided above all by notions of Christian morality. The party now has to confront the fact that its leader is not what used to be called a “decent” man – decent in the way that John Major, William Hague and Michael Howard were decent. Instead, he has been exposed as a compulsive liar whose priorities and agenda can be summed up in a single word: himself.

The question is, how much blame attaches to Johnson and how much to those who made him their leader knowing full well the sort of man he was? 

MPs and constituency workers who a year ago would have flung their cloaks across a puddle to keep Boris’s feet dry, are lining up to say that he is a disgrace, and always was, and that they have no idea how he came to be foisted upon them. Where they use to roar out their support for him at PMQs, now they state down at their feet. 

Across the aisle, Keir Starmer (his knighthood effectively discarded) sits at the head of a revived Labour Party that apparently is completely unconnected to the Labour Party headed by Starmer’s predecessor, the crazed and deluded Marxist Jeremy Corbyn. 

Scores of Labour MPs who after the 2017 general election thought Corbyn was their saviour and the answer to a nation’s prayer, now revile him as a dinosaur. Die-hard Corbynistas have rebranded themselves Starmerites, eager to hang on their hero’s every word. Corbyn himself has had the Labour Whip removed and may soon be expelled entirely from the party. It will be as if he, and his time in office, had never been. 

There are still good people – decent people – in politics. You only have to listen to backbenchers from both sides in the Commons asking questions and raising issues to realise that they care deeply about their constituents and their country. 

That said, cynicism is everywhere these days as the old means of doing things – with either two or two-and-a-half parties fighting it out – no longer corresponds with the way in which politics has evolved. 

Voters used to value stability and, by and large, accepted defeat in good part, knowing that it would be their turn next time or the time after. They also valued decency, even in those whose policies they rejected, so that dyed-in-the-wool Conservatives were mostly respectful of Clement Attlee, especially if Churchill was around. No one thought the Labour leader was out for himself anymore, 40 years on, than anyone thought Margaret Thatcher was in it for the money.  

Whatever traces remained of mutual respect were wiped away by Nigel Farage and his mob. Today, convinced that politics is a dirty business, full of shysters and crooks, voters have turned to single-issue parties that promise them big change in key areas, often to do with English nationalism, race and immigration. Where community and shared endeavour used to draw us together, giving us something to fight for that we could see in front of us – whether the mine, the car factory or our local high street bank – now there is only social media, zero-hours contracts and the prospect of a portfolio career. There may not be mass unemployment, but distress and frustration are everywhere. People are looking for someone or something to blame, and the result, all too often, is populism.

The same tendency is, of course, visible in the US. Joe Biden, resident in the White House for little more than a year, is already looked on by half the country as a lame duck president whose over-promising, combined with a near-total failure to deliver, has left voters frustrated and angry. During the 2020 campaign, the veteran Democrat was paraded across party lines as “decent”, in stark contrast to the manifestly unprincipled Donald Trump. Not anymore. Biden is regarded even by many on his own side as, if not exactly a liar, then as an entitled, geriatric, out-of-breath blowhard. 

Trump, meanwhile, has amassed a war-chest of more than a hundred-million dollars, which he is already spending on a series of raucous rallies round the country attended by supporters who know that he lied about winning the 2020 election and the support he gave to the 6 January insurrection that followed, and that he has lied about just about everything else in his life, professional and personal, for at least the last 50 years.

In Europe, the hard-right is on the march, as is the far-left. Politics no longer reflects competing, but overlapping, philosophies, the alternation of which in government ensures a form of graduated continuity. Rather, it is dominated by loudmouths whose appeal is directed entirely at their base. 

Broad movements have fractured, so that the French Socialist Party, which only five years ago held the presidency and enjoyed a majority in the National Assembly, could find itself overtaken by the screechy-left France Unbowed party in the upcoming parliamentary elections. 

The centre-right is little better off. Its candidate, Valérie Pécresse, well-born and wealthy, is struggling to make her voice heard above a cacophony of neo-fascist claims shouted out on a daily basis by the far-right, which itself is split into two camps, one led by the National Front veteran Marine Le Pen, the other by the anti-Muslim extremist Éric Zemmour.

Emmanuel Macron, back from his peace mission in Moscow and Kiev, is betting that he will be seen as a safe pair of hands, holding off the extremists on all sides. And he is probably right. It is worth noting that both Le Pen and Zemmour are struggling to get the 500 mayoral endorsements they need to take on Macron in the presidential race. But never doubt that if the incumbent does make it back to the Élysée, he will be on strict probation with the voters, millions of whom will be ready to take to the streets in a matter of days should it become clear that he is not going to give them everything they want.  

For now, Germany looks to be stable under its new centre-left Chancellor, Olaf Scholz. But Scholz, better suited to better times, is already being tested. If he doesn’t look to be firmly in control, the anti-immigrant far-right, in the form of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), and the high-spending, high-tax left in the form of Die Linke, stand ready to up the pressure. 

In Italy, Mario Draghi, the first grown-up to hold power in Rome for more than a decade, has successfully tamped down his country’s anarchist tendency, though for how long nobody knows. Spain has had a knife-edge Socialist-led government since January 2020, while next door, in Lisbon, the Portuguese Socialist Party unexpectedly held on to power last month with a slightly increased majority. Significantly, in both cases, it is the growing strength of the far-right rather than the fact that the left has so far managed to hold on that is attracting most media comment. 

At both ends of the political spectrum, there is the rising stench of the 1930s. Historians have written about how Communists in Germany – who started out as the sworn enemy of Fascism – ended up joining the Nazi Party in their millions. An echo of that can be seen today in the street protests in France, in which anarchists, “ultras”, trade unionists, provincial gilets-jaunes and out-and-out supporters of Le Pen and Zemmour take to the barricades together. 

We can see it, too, in contemporary America, where millions of blue collar workers on whom the Democratic Party used to rely, switched their allegiance to Trump, whose populism, they believe, is more in line with their personal aspirations. 

In the UK, Labour’s Red Wall crumbled in 2019 for the simple reason that many among the white working class in the North and the West Midlands were persuaded that the Tories, post-Brexit and deeply impacted by the populism of Nigel Farage, were now the party to Make England Great Again.   

Which brings us all the way to the era of David Cameron, Theresa May and Boris Johnson, which history will no doubt lump together as the Age of Brexit. 

Cameron was decent in the sense that he mostly meant no harm. When he stabbed you in the back, he was distressed by the pain he caused. His business dealings since leaving office have left us wondering about the extent of his personal morality, just as his presumption that Remain would walk it in the referendum caused us to doubt his political perspicacity. The best that can be said is that up to the point when everything went horribly wrong, he looked to be a decent prime minister. 

May, as the Gordon Brown of post-referendum Conservatism, was next up. Under constant attack from a majority on her own benches who believed she was allowing herself to be bullied by the European Union (instead of being the bully), she weathered the storm for three ill-starred years until, with indecent haste, she was swept away, re-emerging as the party’s Ancient Mariner, seeking to catch the Speaker’s Eye to warn of the perils ahead. 

Boris Johnson, who defenestrated May with gleeful insouciance, is himself far from unique. He just happens to be the current version of an established archetype – the lovable rogue whose time is up and can no longer depend on his friends. Decency didn’t come into it. He was always seen as a chancer. But, as the wrong man in the right place at the right time, he Got Brexit Done, and was rewarded with the keys to Number 10. 

That he should, in all likelihood, be hounded from office over the absurdities of Partygate is a proper measure of the man. He is a serial adulterer, a proven liar and both an egoist and an egotist, believing not only that he is more important than anyone else but that the world revolves around him. 

When he blurted out in the Commons that Starmer, when Director of Public Prosecutions, failed to bring charges against the serial sex offender Jimmy Saville, Johnson wasn’t so much making a serious allegation as scoring a debating point. The fact that what he said was a lie and – as we have seen – extremely damaging to Starmer, was less important than the fact that it might strip away at least one layer of his opponent’s greatest strength – his professional integrity and belief in the need for personal morality.

Those who yearn for the return of old values can draw some comfort from the fact that many Tories were distressed and taken aback by the Jimmy Saville slur. They knew that there was no basis to the claim that Starmer had allowed a sex offender to go unpunished. In some cases, it was the final straw that caused them to put pen to paper to call for Johnson’s resignation.

But for every Tory MP who demanded his head, there were four who sat on their hands. 

Who knows? Deep inside the portly body politic of Boris Johnson there may be buried some final shred of decency. He, like Cameron, probably means no harm. He surely wishes his country well and would hope to be remembered for having bettered the lot of his fellow citizens, which is, after all, his job description. But in the end, when Boris does the decent thing, it is invariably by accident. 

Thus, when Starmer – a decent man to his fingertips – and Ian Blackford, the Falstaff of decency, berate him each week in the House, calling on him to “do the decent thing” and resign, they are arguing from a mistaken premise. The Prime Minister has no intention of doing the decent thing. When he goes – and he will – it will be to the sound of police whistles and hunting horns.