Well, he’s gone – nearly. Widely regarded as a dead man walking after barely surviving last month’s vote of no confidence, in which around 40 per cent of the parliamentary Conservative party opposed him, Boris Johnson has finally bowed to the inevitable and laid out a timetable for leaving Number Ten. At the time of writing the Tories are engaged in finding a new leader. Hopefully they will choose someone who can restore some integrity to Downing Street, and some purpose to a rudderless, passive government that is squandering the most impressive Tory majority since Mrs Thatcher was in her pomp.
It makes sense for the men in grey suits to finally go to the Prime Minister’s office with the proverbial revolver and whisky bottle. Boris’s personal ratings have collapsed since the so-called partygate revelations, and the Conservatives are now well behind in the polls, with current voting intentions suggesting a hung parliament as the most likely outcome of a general election.
The soon-to-be-ex PM was once widely regarded as a “lucky general”, i.e. a politician for whom things seem to consistently go well and whose opponents tend to trip over their own shoelaces (the metaphor is based on an apocryphal remark attributed to Napoleon that he would rather have lucky generals than good ones). But the hard realities and tough choices of government, especially the Covid crisis and the subsequent economic problems, are no respecter of reputations forged in different times. The wheel of fortune always turns eventually.
Boris is now being lambasted and disowned by almost his entire party less than three years after winning the 2019 election. And the unedifying fight to succeed him behind that black door is already prompting a good deal of eyerolling about the awfulness and venality of politicians as a class.
It is not difficult to understand this attitude. Vision, honesty, wit and courage seem to be in short supply these days. All the same, I think it is worth saying a word in defence of politicians. In a previous life I spent some time working with parliamentarians, mostly from the Commons, and they struck me as hardworking, dedicated and committed. One with whom I worked closely routinely worked 14 or 16 hour days and I didn’t get the sense that she was unusual in this. Many MPs enjoy warm personal relationships with their counterparts from opposing parties – behind the scenes is a very different story to the partisan theatrics of the Chamber. In some respects the people who condemn Westminster as a “cosy club” are right; there is a collegiate atmosphere and a good deal of the most important work of Parliament, such as committee scrutiny and all-party groups, proceeds on a broadly bipartisan basis. There are stark ideological divides, as is right and proper, but there is also normal human affection and co-operation.
What people often mean when they say that politicians are untrustworthy and evasive is that members of the government, i.e. Secretaries of State in the Cabinet, or their junior Ministers – or those who aspire to be members of the government – are very wary of being straightforward and direct when asked difficult questions. I do think, however, that we need to be charitable, as our faith requires. This means taking seriously the moral trade-offs inherent in being part of a government where the doctrine of collective responsibility is taken seriously. It is not only unrealistic but unreasonable to expect members of the government to always give their unvarnished, honest personal opinion about a matter, if they may compromise their existing job and their prospects for promotion by doing so. Let’s say, for example, that a (hypothetical) Catholic junior Minster at the Department of Health who had been quietly beavering away to tilt policy in a more pro-life direction had been asked to go on the radio to defend Boris Johnson over the lockdown party scandal. If the cost of saying no was to lose that post at the DoH and with it any influence over the abortion regulations, it doesn’t seem to me remotely obvious that the only morally acceptable choice is to make your excuses and prepare for a return to the backbenches. Public life is full of similar dilemmas!
Let us, by all means, criticise politicians when they truly deserve it. But let’s also remember that they are, by and large, decent people trying to make a difference for the better, who are often faced with the demand that they defend the not-very-defensible in the service of a greater good.
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