Category Archives: politics

This is not the system we need to reform

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I am uneasy with the present clamour from all sides of the Opposition for an immediate General Election. It is based on the spurious ground that Rishi Sunak has no mandate to be Prime Minister. In fact, he has all the mandate he needs – he commands the confidence of the House. He does so because he inherits the mandate his party won at the 2019 General Election. The question that the Opposition would do better to address is how that mandate was acquired.

It is a curious but indisputable fact that Rishi Sunak’s appointment to the office of Prime Minister was more democratic than the election to the same office that he lost to Liz Truss a scant seven weeks ago, even though the electorate in Sunak’s victory was restricted to 357 people while Truss was elected by 80,000 of around 180,000 voters to Sunak’s 60,000. The difference lies in who those voters are and what authority they can claim.

Unlike ancient Athens, where the electorate was small enough to vote directly on any matter in person at the Agora, the United Kingdom is a representative democracy. Its 46.5 million voters, divided into geographical constituencies, return 650 Members of Parliament to the House of Commons. There, they pass legislation and hold the government to account. That government is formed from among their number and led by whoever commands the confidence of the House – in practical terms, whoever can muster sufficient votes to pass the budget on which any programme of legislation depends. That person is generally the leader of the party whose manifesto gained the widest support in the election – in terms of MPs returned, not votes (an important point to which we shall return).

It is neither unreasonable nor undemocratic to ask the members of the majority parliamentary party (who each have a personal mandate to represent their constituents) to decide who should lead them in a system that requires only that the person who forms the government enjoy the confidence of the House. What is both unreasonable and wholly undemocratic is to leave that choice to a secretive organisation whose sole qualification for membership is to pay one’s subscription (and there is no effective scrutiny of applications, as the news organisation Tortoise demonstrated when they successfully registered four fake identities (including the late Margaret Thatcher under her maiden name and two foreign nationals) as members for the latest leadership contest).

Had the previous leadership contest been restricted to the vote of the Conservative Parliamentary Party, Sunak would already have won, since he gained 137 votes to Truss’s 113. Instead, a powerless British public had to endure a needlessly-protracted contest (it lasted nearly a fortnight longer than Truss’s calamitous premiership), watching helplessly as she wooed the Conservative Party membership with wild-eyed policies of tax-cuts for the rich and other things designed to appeal to their particular prejudices. Truss was duly elected and with her chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng announced perhaps the single most disastrous set of policies ever advanced by any Prime Minister. The markets did not like it and neither, crucially, did the Parliamentary Party. In a short time, Kwarteng was gone, replaced by Jeremy Hunt, a choice imposed on Truss by the Parliamentary Party. He proceeded to reverse almost the entirety of the proposals that Truss and Kwarteng had put forward. That he was able to do so was because he had the support of the Parliamentary Party whereas Truss did not. Truss, reduced to a mere puppet, resigned.

What that demonstrates, I think, is that the current system actually works. Truss failed because she did not have the one mandate that a Prime Minister requires – the ability to command the confidence of the House – despite having been elected party leader. Without it, she was unable to form an effective government and had to resign. Sunak does enjoy the confidence of the House and should be able to form an effective government because he inherits the mandate that his party won at the 2019 General Election – and it was good to hear him state that the mandate was given to the party, not to any one individual (as the mendacious Jake Mogg had tried to pretend).

However, how that mandate is gained gives cause for concern. In the 2019 election, the Conservative party won 43.63% of the votes cast. Remarkably, the combined total of the traditional opposition parties, Labour (32.08%) and Liberal Democrat (11.55%) was exactly the same – 43.63%; yet the Conservatives were rewarded with 365 of 650 seats – 56.2% – while the other two won only 42.8% of the seats between them, Labour winning 202 ( 31.1%) and the Liberal Democrats a mere 11 (1.7%). In other words, for an identical share of the vote, the Conservatives gained 152 more seats than Labour and the Liberal Democrats.

That the Conservatives’ majority was reduced to 80 (still more than enough to pass any legislative programme) was largely due to the similarly disproportionate success of the SNP, whose 30.6% share of the Scottish vote was rewarded with 48 of the 59 seats they contested, a staggering 81.35%. This allows an instructive comparison with the 2021 Holyrood elections to the devolved Scottish parliament which uses a form of proportional representation. There, in the 73 first-past-the-post seats, a 47.7% share of the vote netted the SNP 84.9% of the seats, 62; however, this was tempered by the regional or ‘list’ vote, where their 40.3% share netted them only 2 of the available 56 seats, a mere 3.5%. Overall, the SNP won 64 of 129 seats, or 49.6%, with an average vote share (constituency + regional) of 44.02%. However, the more telling figure is the close approximation between the first past the post constituency vote of 47.7% and the overall number of seats won, 49.6%. Put simply, the SNP in 2021 won nearly half the vote but did not get an overall majority in parliament, whereas Boris Johnson’s conservatives in 2019 fell well short of half yet gained a majority of 80 seats. At the same time, Labour and the Liberal Democrats, with an identical percentage of the vote, won 152 fewer seats.

This points to the real reform that is needed. Instead of calling for a General Election, something they cannot achieve without the complicity of some Conservative MPs (in other words, if Sunak loses the confidence of the House) the combined opposition parties should aim for something that is within their grasp – reform of the voting system. They should each agree to make that a manifesto commitment, and to further their chances of being able to implement it, they should make an informal pact to favour tactical voting in seats where that can oust the Tories.

As I discussed in this piece Johnson has shown the vulnerability of an unwritten constitution that assumes honour and decency when confronted by a Prime Minister who has neither, especially when that Prime Minister has an unassailable majority. We have had a very narrow escape from descending into a form of oligarchic fascism. That is a risk we cannot afford to take again. The best way of avoiding any repetition is to reform the voting system.

There is a real chance that the Tories can recover some ground under Sunak. The worst possible thing would be for Labour to think that, after the disasters of Truss and Johnson, the way lies open for them to form the next government without any need to cooperate with the other progressive parties.

Trickster Johnson continues to expose the weakness of our ‘unwritten constitution’

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If the United Kingdom survives Boris Johnson’s disastrous premiership it may yet be grateful to him. No one man has done more, and in so short a time, to expose the absurdities of our archaic political system and the weakness of its ‘unwritten constitution’ in which vagueness has too long been mistaken for flexibility. Johnson’s only interest in rules is finding out what happens if he breaks them. In respect of our fabled ‘unwritten constitution’ the answer has proved to be, time and again, little or nothing. Johnson’s aide Cummings set the tone early on by refusing to attend a Parliamentary Committe when summoned to do so. That is ‘contempt of parliament’, which sounds ominous, but unlike contempt of court – for which you can be sent to jail – no actual penalty appears to attach to it – it is simply assumed that no-one would defy so august a summons.

Johnson has extended that contempt for parliament by continually announcing policy through his client press before bringing it to the House. The penalty for that? A loud bleat of reproval from the ineffectual Speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle. Johnson, with an 80 seat majority of largely supine loyalists, can and does take the support of the House for granted and pays it scant regard.

He was already well-known to be a near-pathological liar before the Tories made him their leader, so it was no surprise to find that he rapidly ran into conflict with the unwritten rule about telling lies in the House. Lying to the House of Commons, we have been assured repeatedly (as often as Johnson has done it, which is many, many times) is a resigning matter: as a case in point, people cite John Profumo who did just that, when he was found to have lied to the House about his relations with Christine Keeler; but that was nearly sixty years ago and Profumo (as his subsequent lifetime of atonement demonstrated) was an honourable man. Johnson is not.

That – his total lack of any sense of honour or shame – is what has enabled him to drive a coach and horses through parliamentary conventions that are founded on the presumption that all Members are honourable. Thus, elaborate penalties attach to anyone who accuses another Member of lying or deliberately misleading the House – they can be summarily expelled and suspended – but no penaltes whatever attach to a member who does lie or mislead the House, because it is presumed that no Honourable Member would ever do so; but if it were to happen, it is presumed that (of course) the member would resign. But what if he does not, but simply returns to repeat the same lies week in week out, even when there is a video compilation documenting the numerous instances he has done so (thanks to the admirable Peter Stefanovic), a video that has been viewed millions of times?

Well, as we have seen, nothing at all happens. There is in fact no mechanism for establishing that an MP has lied to the House even when demonstrable proof exists: the Speaker will not do anything about it, and the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, absurdly, has no power in the actual chamber (that belongs to the Speaker) [see Lying with Impunity]. A party leader might take action – by withdrawing the whip – but if the offender in question is the party leader, and the Prime minister to boot, then no-one can do anything about it. Of course, anyone with a shred of decency or honesty would resign if they were caught out in that way, but Johnson does not have a shred of either.

Likewise with breaches of the ministerial code, founded on the Nolan principles of conduct in public life, handsomely bound with an introduction by Boris Johnson himself praising their worth – the ultimate arbiter in its enforcement is the Prime Minister. So when the unspeakable Priti Patel was found by an inquiry to have bullied her staff and to be in breach of the code, Johnson simply disagreed and she remained in post; and as regards his own conduct, he is the ultimate arbiter of that, too: absurdly, it is only the Prime Minister who can decide that the Prime Minister has breached the ministerial code and should resign; because of course it is presumed that anyone with a shred of decency – well, you know the rest.

Johnson’s latest wheeze is very much in the same vein: he has resigned as party leader, but not as Prime Minister, following the unprecedented departure of more than fifty members of his government, including senior cabinet ministers, in a 48 hour period. This, too, is in complete defiance of convention. There is, in fact, one sole criterion you must meet in order to be UK Prime Minister and form a government: you do not need to have won an election, you do not need to lead or even be a member of a political party, and indeed I believe you may not even need to be an MP (Alex Douglas-Home was not, though a bye-election was swiftly arranged to enable him to sit in the Commons); certainly you do not need, nor can you get, a personal mandate from the electorate (no mechanism exists for that) – all you need is to be able to command the confidence of the House, that is to say, you must be able to muster sufficient votes to pass your programme of legislation (and crucially the budget that finances it).

When Johnson first became Prime Minister, he swiftly lost his majority in the House and consequently failed to win something like his first ten or eleven votes. There was a real possibility at that point, if parliament had been able to organise itself, that an ad hoc majority could have rallied behind an independent candidate, ousted Johnson and formed a new government – however, they lacked the political will. Whether it would have made any difference is doubtful, given that Johnson resolved the stalemate by calling a General Election which the Conservatives won with an 80 seat majority.

And that 80 seat majority is what has enabled Johnson to work this latest bit of mischief. In the previous case, Johnson could not command the confidence of the House simply because the Conservatives had lost their majority; replacing him as their leader would not have altered the basic arithmetic. In this case, however, the Conservatives still have a substantial (if depleted) majority, and can reasonably claim that they have a mandate from the elctorate to fulfil their manifesto, so there is no need to call an election (and that has been the case for the majority of Prime Ministers since the war – Eden, Macmillan, Douglas-Home, Callaghan, Major, Brown, May and Johnson all became PM without an election, although only Home, Callaghan and Brown did not win an election subsequently).

The Conservatives’ problem with Johnson is (or purports to be) personal – after a litany of scandalous revelations stretching back over several months, his inept and palpably dishonest account of the Pincher affair seemed, at the time, to be the straw that broke the camel’s back: as murmurs of discontent grew, two senior cabinet ministers – the Chancellor and the Health Secretary – resigned, rapidly followed by a slew of others in lesser positions. Close confidantes and known supporters of Johnson publicly called on him to go. A delegation from the 1922 committee – the celebrated ‘men in grey suits’ – was reported to be on its way to Downing St. to tell him that the game was up.

And what happened?

Well, he’s still Prime Minister. He has already filled a number of government vacancies, in some cases by reappointing those who had resigned. He has resigned as leader of the Conservative Party but not as Prime Minister, despite having a designated deputy in Dominc (gawd help us!) Raab – the implication is that he will go as soon as a successor is appointed, since it is presumed that he or she will command the confidence of the House. But what of his own position? All those resignations have washed over him like tide over a rock. In theory, they were showing that he had lost the confidence of the House, i.e. of his Conservative majority – but that is all it was, mere show. The expectation, of course, was that anyone with a shred of decency etc. would see that the game was up and do the decent thing: but how little, even now, do they know their man. Johnson simply refused to respond. Figuratively, they left him with the revolver and the glass of whisky, so he drank the whisky, shot Michael Gove, and carried on as before.

He is there even as I write, and unless they actually demonstrate, by a vote in Parliament, that he no longer has their confidence and can no longer continue as Prime Minister, there he will remain, working his mischief while his colleagues fight like rats in a sack to succeed him. And who knows what may happen in the interim?

Johnson loses no power by resigning as Leader of the Conservative Party. By staying on as Prime Minister, he retains an enormous amount (as he has already demonstrated by exercising his patronage in making new appointments). As John Major wisely observed, the hope that he will be constrained by his cabinet is not well-founded, given his conduct till now. I fully expect him to damage this country further before he departs – if, indeed, he does.

“Remainers’ Brexit”? he’s right, you know!

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In the realm of contemporary politics, I must confess to confusing David Davis and Lord Frost. It may be my mind’s refusal to accept that Nature could permit such a waste of space as to suffer two such grey and uninteresting men of such dismal incompetence to exist simutaneously, or my incredulity that there could be two men equally talentless in negotiation nevertheless appointed to key negotiating roles; or perhaps it is just that the utterances of each are indistinguishable in their stupidity – but in any case, it took time to realise that the memorable description of the present sorry mess we are in as ‘a Remainers’ Brexit’ came from Davis rather than Frost. Not that it matters.

He is right, of course.

The Brexiteers’ Brexit promised an extra £350 million per week for the NHS, sunlit uplands, the restoration of sovereignty and the Greatest Empire The World Has Ever Known, cheaper and better everything and no whiny foreigners cluttering the place up – and what have we got?

An unmitigated disaster.

Precisely the Brexit that those of us who voted remain said we would get, the single greatest act of self harm that any government ever needlessly* imposed on its own people at the behest of a minority** of the electorate.

A Remainers’ Brexit, indeed.

*the referendum was, of course, advisory: see The Real Enemies of the People
**there is not now, nor has there ever been, a majority of the British people in favour of leaving the EU: see When simple arithmetic is the elephant in the room: the collective failure of press and politicians in the Brexit debacle

President Brexit’s last stand – a new version of an old lie

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Jake Mogg may not be the subtlest of all the beasts in the field, but like the serpent in the garden (to use Dante’s description) egli e bugiardo e padre di menzogne – he is a liar and the father of lies. The Brexit crew have a passion for ‘Research Groups’, for which I believe they receive parliamentary funding [= our money as taxpayers]. These groups are little better than lie factories: listen out, and in various forums you will hear their members repeat, in different voices but strikingly similar forms of words, some falsehood they have contrived that they wish to propagate.

The original version of the ERG ‘Big Lie’ was that Brexit was ‘the will of the British people’ who ‘voted overwhelmingly for it’ [see ‘Liars in Public Places‘] . Both claims are false, of course: insofar as ‘the British people’ can be equated with the electorate who participated in the 2016 referendum, only a minority voted to leave the EU: the majority expressed no desire to do so. This lie was wielded as a weapon to shut down debate: because Brexit was ‘the will of the British people’ speaking against it was tantamount to treason and was certainly undemocratic; the people had decided, so the matter was settled (even, absurdly, to the extent of denying the same people any chance to reconsider it – see ‘A Most Ingenious Paradox‘).

Of course, to represent the 2016 referendum as an exercise in ‘direct democracy’ [see ‘Another Lie from the Egregious Bernard Jenkin‘] is itself a lie. At most, a referendum in this country can decide whether or not legislation already passed by parliament is to be implemented: that was the case with the 2011 referendum on whether to replace the ‘first past the post’ system with the ‘alternative vote’ (sadly, the change was rejected). The 2016 referendum was not of that sort: it served only to advise the government of the day on how the public felt regarding continued membership of the EU [see ‘The Real Enemies of the People‘] – and what it showed, of course, was that the country was divided on the issue and that a minority (37.5 % of the electorate, 26% of the ‘British People’, i.e. the total population) wished to leave. Nevertheless, ERG members strove consistently to present the referendum result as something which was so overwhelmingly decisive that to challenge it would be undemocratic.

Lately, this nonsense has been revived in a new and interesting form. With Johnson sinking ever deeper in a mire of his own making, Mogg popped up on BBC’s Newsnight to deliver himself of this breathtaking falsehood: “It’s my view that we have moved to…an essentially presidential system and that the mandate is personal rather than entirely party and each PM would be advised to take a fresh mandate…my view is a change of leader requires a general election.”

This, of course, is a tissue of lies. Regardless of Mogg’s ‘views’, we do not have, nor have we moved towards, ‘an essentially presidential system’ in which ‘the mandate is personal’, so that cannot be used to support the equally false claim that a change of Prime Minister requires a general election*. What we have is a system of representative democracy: constituencies elect Members to sit in Parliament, the legislature that decides our laws. The Executive or Government is formed by whatever group can command enough votes in the House to pass its legislation; this is termed ‘having the confidence of the House’. The leader of that group, which typically is formed from one or other of the parties, or sometimes a combination of them, is de facto Prime Minister. The different parties have different methods of deciding who leads them but none involves the electorate voting directly for them.

The dust that Mogg is trying to throw in the public’s eyes is that because Johnson has promoted himself as having ‘got Brexit done’ (another lie, since the process is still unfolding, and worsens at every step – consider the huge tailbacks on the M20) and because Brexit was ‘the will of the people’ (as we’ve seen, it wasn’t) then any vote for the Conservative party in any constituency was in reality a vote for Johnson. Factually, that is incorrect: votes are cast for individual candidates who stand for some party or as independents. The fact that some people, even the majority, may vote along party lines does not legitimise the claim that someone perceived (or promoted by the press) as a popular leader is directly elected by the public, or the notion that seeking to remove them from office is somehow undemocratic or even anti-democratic, as claimed today on Twitter by Lucy Allan MP:

‘Trying to remove an elected PM with a huge personal mandate, mid term, is anti democratic. Those who seek to do so are subverting democracy. If you respect democracy, Mr Major, Mrs May, Mr Heseltine et al, do it through the ballot box, not by abusing your power and influence.’

On the contrary, it is false claims like these, that misrepresent the nature of our system of government in order to bamboozle the public, that are anti-democratic. Boris Johnson is only Prime Minister by dint of leading the group that currently commands the confidence of the House and so is able to pass legislation. Should he lose the confidence of his supporters in the House, they will replace him, using the method the Conservative party has chosen to elect its leaders (interestingly, this now inolves direct voting by around 150,000 members of Conservative constituency associations, which is arguably less democratic than the former system, where the parliamentary party (each of whom has a mandate from the electorate) chose who would lead them).

[Should the ruling group itself lose the confidence of the House – typically through being unable to pass some key legislation, e.g. a finance bill – then even then there need not be a general election, provided another group can be formed that does command a majority of votes. It was the failure of Parliament to get their act together to do this for the good of the country in September 2019 (see ‘Only the Conservative Party can save us now‘), when Johnson had not only failed in every vote he attempted but had lost his parliamentary majority live on television, that landed us in the mess we are now in]

The most worrying aspect of the false claim that Johnson was somehow directly elected by the people to lead the country is that it appears to be part of a larger programme, to vaunt the power of the executive at the expense of Parliament and the Judiciary. Thus we see, on the one hand, a continual bypassing of Parliament which a weak and ineffectual speaker has done little to prevent: it has become routine practice to announce policy via Tory-supporting newpapers before it is brought to the House, while in the House itself debate is curtailed or even bypassed alogether using a combination of emergency powers or so-called ‘Henry VIII clauses’ that enable ministers to amend or repeal provisions in an Act of Parliament using secondary legislation, which is subject to varying degrees of parliamentary scrutiny.

At the same time, laws are being proposed expressly to prevent public opposition to the executive [the police, crime, sentencing and courts bill, to which Home Secretary Priti Patel added some 18 pages after it had been voted on by MPs – thankfully the Lords threw them out] , either through protest or recourse to the judicial system [the government wants to restrict recourse to judicial review, so that it could not be used to hold the executive to account, as it was by the redoubtable Gina Miller in 2017 and 2019 (in the first case, ironically, she sought to have the sovereignty of parliament upheld by giving MPs a say over triggering Article 50 – the legal mechanism taking the UK out of the EU. In the second, famously, she asked the court to rule that Johnson’s attempt to prorogue Parliament (which he lied to the Queen about) was unlawful]

When we consider these concerted attempts to portray Johnson as a leader with a mandate that comes directly from the people (and so is answerable only to them, not their elected representatives) against this background of vaunting executive power by undermining Parliament and the Judiciary, then Johnson’s recent remark that it would require ‘a tank division to drag him from office’ has a sinister ring – it is strongly reminiscent of Trump’s rhetoric leading up to the January 6th insurrection.

There may be trouble ahead.

*The extent of the falsehood is seen when you consider that, going back to the early fifties, Johnson succeeded May; May, Cameron; Brown, Blair; Major, Thatcher; Callaghan, Wilson; Douglas-Home, Macmillan; Macmillan, Eden; Eden, Churchill; all without the intervention of a General Election.

The question that Johnson must answer about Cummings

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Either Dominic Cummings’s action in driving to Durham from London had some justification that excused it or it had not.

That it requires excuse is unarguable, since the guidelines state clearly that infected households must isolate at once and that even healthy people should leave the house only for a narrow range of reasons and should not travel to stay elsewhere.

Mary Wakefield’s account of her own and her husband’s illness, broadcast on BBC Radio 4’s Thought for the Day and published in The Spectator, is mendacious, since it makes no mention of their travelling to Durham and implies that they remained in London (suppressio veri, suggestio falsi : to suppress the truth is to suggest a lie). However, the details it supplies may be accurate. If they are, then Cummings fell ill within 24 hours of being seen hurrying from Downing St. which happened around midday on 27 March:

‘My husband did rush home to look after me…But 24 hours later he said “I feel weird” and collapsed. I felt breathless, sometimes achy, but Dom couldn’t get out of bed.’

Since from that point

‘for ten days he had a high fever, with spasms that made the muscles lump and twitch in his legs. 
He could breathe but only in a limited shallow way’

it is evident that he could not have driven anywhere*.

We know from Durham Police that he was already in the city by 31 March, so the inference is that he travelled north either on the same day he left Downing St (27 March) or, at the very latest, on the morning of the next day.

10 Downing St issued a statement on 30 March saying that Cummings was self-isolating with coronavirus symptoms. It is scarcely credible that Downing St, and Boris Johnson, did not at that point know that Cummings was in Durham (if they did not, then Cummings must have lied to them, or at the very least concealed the fact that he had travelled).

We now come to the central point of the matter. If Boris Johnson knew that Cummings had travelled to Durham, in breach of general government guidelines on travel, and had done so with an infected person and possibly when infected himself, then either he was persuaded that the action was excusable or he was not. If he was not so persuaded, then he has colluded in concealing Cummings’s wrongdoing at the time and has lied about it since it came out, and persuaded members of the cabinet to repeat his lie.

But if he believed it was excusable, then he still colluded in concealing it. Why?

This is the crux of the matter. When Downing St announced on 30 March that Cummings was self-isolating with coronavirus symptoms, why did it suppress the fact that he was doing so in Durham?

If, as the Prime Minister now maintains, Cummings ‘acted legally and with integrity,’ then he would have saved himself and his colleagues a great deal of trouble if he had said so at the time. Indeed, given the furore that has been generated by it now, it would surely have been politically expedient to do so; unless –

and here we come to the sequels. Both Catherine Calderwood and Neil Ferguson were high-profile figures making a valuable contribution to managing the pandemic. Both were dismissed for trivial breaches of government guidelines when those came to light – Calderwood for making a non-essential journey, Ferguson for allowing someone to visit him. In neither case was any public good served in dismissing them – quite the reverse – since their contribution was valuable and important. The reason both had to go was the same: it looked bad.

It looked bad that two such high-profile figures who were very much part of the campaign to persuade the public to accept draconian restrictions on their freedom had flouted them. As Nicola Sturgeon said, ‘I know it is tough to lose a trusted adviser at the height of crisis, but when it’s a choice of that or integrity of vital public health advice, the latter must come first.’

If Boris Johnson is telling the truth – and given his record of public mendacity and faithlessness in private life, that is a big ‘if’ – then he sincerely believes that Cummings ‘acted legally and with integrity’ in travelling the length of England with an infected wife. So why did he not say so at the time?

If the answer is that ‘the public wouldn’t accept it’ (and remember that this was just a week into lockdown) then that is the same reason that both Calderwood and Ferguson were later dismissed – because what they did, though trivial in itself, was publicly unacceptable. What Cummings did was certainly more serious – he knew his wife was infected and that it was quite likely he was too – yet he broke both the guidelines on isolation and on travel. It would have looked very bad at the time had it come to light, even if there was some excuse.

That raises the question of timing. The story has come out two months into lockdown, when restrictions are already being eased in England and to a lesser extent elsewhere, seven weeks or more after it happened. It is evident from Mary Wakefield’s dishonest account – which her husband later corroborated – that she hoped it would not come out at all, since her version is expressly concocted to give the impression that they remained in London. Was it Boris Johnson’s hope that in suppressing it – as he did – that the passage of time and the possible easing of lockdown would render it, if not acceptable, at least less unacceptable than would have been the case on 30 March?

If that is the case – that (despite believing Cummings had done nothing wrong) he feared public outrage if it was made known at the time – then, besides showing his own cowardice and want of integrity, that is tantamount to saying that Cummings’s action was unacceptable in precisely the same way as Ferguson’s and Calderwood’s were – that it was not the breach of guidance that mattered, but its being discovered – and that he therefore colluded in concealing it.

If, on the other hand, he believes that Cummings ‘acted legally and with integrity’ it is hard to see what other reason he could have for concealing the fact that he travelled to Durham. If it is justifiable now, it was justifiable then. If Cummings has not already gone by the end of today, and if the Prime Minister does not shirk the five o’clock briefing – both distinct possibilities – the question he must be pressed to answer (and not allowed to dodge) is ’why, if you believe Mr Cummings to have acted legally and with integrity, did you not make public the fact that he had travelled to Durham when it was announced that he was in isolation with symptoms of coronavirus on 30 March?’

Supplement: well, I think my question remains the one to ask.

Cummings appeared half an hour late and gave a statement that bore all the hallmarks of being contrived to meet the needs of the moment, in the sense that it provided an explanation for each of the points of controversy that were in the public domain. Some explanations were less credible than others, but the key point for me remains the same: when did the Prime Minister learn that Cummings had travelled to Durham and at what point did he form the conviction that in doing so he had ‘acted legally and with integrity’?

We know, from Cummings himself, that he did not ask Johnson before he went, which was on the evening of 27 March, as I surmised. Cummings said that ‘arguably, this was a mistake’. It would be interesting to know why he thinks that. He says that ‘at some time in that first week when we were both ill and in bed I spoke to the prime minister and told him what I had done. Unsurprisingly, given the condition we were in, neither of us remember the conversation in any detail.’ [my emphasis]

Since that is a key point in the whole affair it seems particularly unfortunate that neither man can recall it in detail nor when it happened (a cynic might observe that it might as well not have occurred at all). At all events it occurred ‘in the first week’ [i.e. of Cummings’s isolation] at a time when both men were ill and in bed. That puts it between 28 March and 5 April when Johnson was admitted to hospital.

That means that for over seven weeks Boris Johnson has known that his chief aide ostensibly broke the guidelines on isolation and on travel that he was instrumental in imposing on the general public. Even in his fevered state, that must have been a matter of concern to him, more so when Catherine Calderwood was forced to resign for very similar reasons on 5 April, the day Johnson was admitted to hospital. When Johnson was discharged from hospital a week later (April 12) to recuperate at Chequers, he must have been fully aware that a serious situation existed with regard to his chief aide’s actions. (Was anyone else aware?)

Cummings returned to work in London on 14 April and at some point after that went to Chequers to see Johnson. I do not know when that was, but Johnson returned to Downing St on Monday 27 April. It is inconceivable that Cummings would have met Johnson at Chequers without discussing the difficulties entailed in his travelling to Durham instead of complying with the guidelines that everyone else had to follow.

If Johnson is telling the truth when he says that he believes Cummings to have ‘acted legally and with integrity’ then the inference is that he has believed that to be the case for nearly a month – yet he said nothing till 24 May.

On Saturday 25 April The Spectator published an article by Mary Wakefield in which she said  “we emerged from quarantine into the almost comical uncertainty of London lockdown” omitting the fact that they had emerged in Durham and then driven 260 miles to London. She had already broadcast the substance of this article, if not its entirety, on Radio 4’s Thought for the Day that morning. (curiously, this is not available on BBC Sounds, though all subsequent and some previous ones are. It is my distinct recollection that the London reference formed part of the broadcast, which I heard. I do not take The Spectator)

It is difficult to believe that the Prime Minister can have been unaware of that article and that broadcast especially as it was seen at the time as a deliberate distraction from the revelation that Cummings attended SAGE meetings. It is also difficult to believe that the mendacious implication that the Cummings family had spent their isolation in London can have escaped him.

In other words, a month ago the Prime Minister knew both that his chief aide had travelled to Durham in apparent contravention of both isolation and lockdown guidelines and that his wife had published an article and made a broadcast implying that they had remained in London. At the very least he must have seen that the situation called for some explanation. But if we are to believe him, he also thought that Cummings had ‘acted legally and with integrity.’

So why did he wait a month to say so, and then only because he was forced?

It is surely always wiser to control a difficult situation by forestalling it than to wait till you are forced to respond, provided you are in the right and your actions are defensible.

Otherwise you are liable to look as if you are not in the right and that your defence is a desperate contrivance to excuse something you had hoped would not come to light.

*Yet by his own account, he did – to drive his son to hospital, in another highly implausible set of circumstances. Despite having others to hand who could have done it for him (including, I believe, his wife), and the availability of taxis (which Cummings denies but taxi drivers and hospital dispute), he rose from his sickbed and took his wife and son – at a point when he had reason to believe that all three were infectious – by car to hospital. Still, I did say that his wife’s account is mendacious, and presumably she suppressed the bit about the journey to hospital as it might have identified their whereabouts.

The Magic Money Tree: is Covid-19 a game-changer?

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The idea of ‘convention’ and its associated activity of ‘deeming’ are fundamental to human activity, as I think I have said elsewhere.

By ‘convention’ I mean the agreement to be bound by something, to deem it to have a power which in reality resides with us.

The paradigm of this concept is when a child, in the course of a game, goes through the motions of tying you up with imaginary rope, then says, ‘there now, you’re my prisoner and you can’t escape’. Both child and adult know, on one level, that this is not the case (being called to the tea-table will dissolve it in an instant) but also that there is a space ‘in the game’ where it holds good, where you both agree to act as if you were bound.

There are two important things to note here: the paradox at the heart of this activity, and its origin in childhood, which suggests that it is ancient, instinctive and intuitive.

The paradox is that the power which we deem the external thing to have is actually our own: we are bound only by our own agreement to follow the rules; it is something which, in theory at least, we can shrug off at any time (though habit can be coercive). The fact that adult conventions are backed by a system of law and enforcement is proof of this: yes, I can be fined or sent to jail if I transgress certain rules that society has agreed, but that requirement for added enforcement is an admission that the conventions, of themselves, have no power to compel.

When children play games and set out the rules, they are not imitating adult behaviour; the reverse is actually the case – the use we make of convention and deeming in adult life derives, I would argue, from that instinctive childhood behaviour. Imposing order on the external world, structuring our lives by giving ourselves rules to follow, is, I would suggest, a method we have evolved that allows us to make sense of experience and manage the problem of existence; but how we do it is up to us.

And that brings us to the magic money tree and these extraordinary times we are living through. It was Theresa May, I think, who said that there was ‘no magic money tree’ in response to a question raised about funding the NHS. As many have since remarked in the recent turn of world events brought about by the coronavirus pandemic, the government now seems to have found an entire magic forest.

If we deconstruct the expression ‘magic money tree’ as Theresa May deployed it, we find it is shorthand for the notion that ‘no matter how worthy the cause (e.g. nurses’ pay) the government can’t just conjure up money to pay for it.’ The implication is that the government is bound by some iron necessity which it could not disobey no matter how much it wanted to; but that is simply not true – the necessity exists only within the conventions of the game – as recent events have shown, there is a magic money tree, if the game has reached a stage where one is needed to keep it going.

The truth is that our economy (by which I mean global free market capitalism, which obtains generally) has no basis in necessity: it is simply a grand and elaborate game, a set of conventions that can be reduced to the notion that people must work (in providing goods and services) in order to earn money to pay for the good and services which people work to produce, in order to earn money, etc. – but we do not have to live this way.

To be sure, there are necessities within the global freemarket economy (I must have money in order to survive) but those are – literally, not metaphorically – just the rules of the game: its logic is internal; it is not founded on any external necessity – there is, ultimately, no reason for it. The fact that we do not have to live this way is demonstrated by the fact that not everyone does, even now, and not so long ago, no-one did – civilisation, living in settled communities supported by agriculture, accounts for only ten thousand of the 200,000 years our particular species has been on earth; in other words, for 95% of human existence we have lived very differently from the way we do now.

Take the case of Richard Branson, one of those who have played the present economic game with such skill that they have amassed a vast pile of the magic leaves we call money, yet who is calling on his airline staff to make sacrifices, which led one Liam Young to tweet the other day

‘Virgin Atlantic have 8,500 employees and Branson has asked them to take 8 weeks unpaid leave. It would cost £4.2 million to pay all of these employees £500 a week to cover this leave. In total that’s a cost of £34 million for 8 weeks. Richard Branson is worth £4 billion.’

[in percentage terms, £34 million is 0.85% of £4 billion, so the implication is that even after doing this, Branson’s wealth would be 99.15% intact]

Now, there are various points for comment here: on the face of it, there seems a great unfairness to ask others to give up their income when you yourself have plenty, even if (as people have pointed out) having a net worth of £4 billion does not mean you have that amount at your immediate disposal; and it is the fact of people working at such and such a cost to provide such and such a service that makes that net worth what it is.

The most succinct summation of the matter was offered by the person who commented, ‘Branson didn’t get his £4 billion by paying staff any more than he absolutely had to.’

No doubt she meant this critically, but it expresses an important truth. For Branson to pay his employees for not working is to play a different game from the one that made him so absurdly rich. That game depends on paying the market rate (which is, by definition, as low as you can get away with) for people to provide goods and services which you sell at a profit. To pay them for unproductive activity is (again, literally, not metaphorically) as if the person who wins at Monopoly, having amassed all the money and ruined everyone else, then says ‘let’s just keep playing, and if you land on my property, I’ll pay you till you’ve all got some money again.’ And of course you can do that if you want, but it’s a different game (and one that completely subverts the point of the original).

I expect, when all this is done, that the world will settle into a new shape, and perhaps a surprising one: habits and customs, once broken, may not be resumed; we may come to see that we need not do what we always have. At the moment it is clear that the present game – global free market capitalism – is in serious danger of failing, so the various participants (i.e. national governments) are willing to abandon the rules, at least temporarily – hence the magic money forest – in order to maintain a semblance of economic activity till we are in a position to start again in earnest; but what they may find, after this, is that people don’t want to play that game any more.

 

Only the Conservative party can save us now

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A catchpenny headline, I grant you, but I hope to persuade you of the truth of it.

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By any measure, yesterday in parliament was an extraordinary spectacle. Here we had the least successful prime minister of all time, whose government has not won a single vote since he came to office, who has lost his majority live on television then compounded that loss by expelling more than a score of his party’s most loyal members (a band later joined by a defector from his own cabinet) – thereby rendering himself incapable of governing – who had the day before been the subject of an utterly damning defeat in the Supreme Court which judged him to have acted unlawfully in proroguing parliament for five weeks instead of the usual few days at a time of national crisis, yet in the face of all that, he was brazenly unabashed.

The warm-up act was his loud-voiced Attorney General Geoffrey Cox, who in an extraordinary demonstration of what psychiatrists call ‘negative projection’ attributed to the benches opposite every fault that was true, a fortiori, of his own government – that they were paralysed, incapable of coming to a decision, a dead parliament,  a disgrace, a zombie parliament without the moral authority to occupy the benches they sat on; he charged them with cowardice for failing to call a general election when his own government is so powerless that it cannot even do that for itself – he actually called on them to move a vote of confidence, not because he thought they would lose, but because he was sure his own government would be defeated.

Then came the main act. The tone was set early on when the Prime Minister asserted that he meant no disrespect to the Supreme Court when he said that they were wrong – this is a man who speaks in conundrums and contradictions, who likes nothing better than to deliver a sentence where the second part flatly contradicts the first and to move rapidly on while mouths are still gaping at the sheer brazenness of it – did he really say that? It was the same with the most infamous episode, where he dismissed as ‘humbug’ the plea by Jo Cox’s successor to moderate his language because it would inflame violence and put MPs’ lives at risk; while people were still fuming at that, he went on to suggest that the best way of honouring Jo Cox was ‘to get Brexit done’.

Given that Jo Cox was shot and stabbed to death in the street, in the run-up to the 2016 referendum, by a man who shouted ‘Britain First’ as he murdered her and later gave his name in court as ‘Death to Traitors, Freedom for Britain’, it is difficult to find a scale of inappropriateness on which the Prime Minister’s remark can be measured.

And yet there will have been those looking on who thought, not in spite of this shocking behaviour but because of it, that here was a man who could win an election.

In that they will have been emboldened by the success of Donald Trump on whose behaviour Boris Johnson has increasingly modelled his own, as last night’s performance demonstrates – and be in no doubt that a performance is what it was, cynically calculated to play well with pro-leave voters as it is conveyed to them through the sewers of The Daily Mail and The Sun and the other conduits of feculence that form their views. Those rags will present it as ‘the people’s champion’ standing up to the ‘Liberal Remainer Establishment’ – a term that encompasses Parliament, the Supreme Court, experts and anyone who is capable of articulating a reasoned argument to show that we are better off in the EU.

And this is where the Conservative party faces a stark choice. Across the Atlantic, the Republican Party ushered in the reign of chaos by throwing in their lot with a man they knew to be dangerously unfit for office, whose political credentials as a genuine Republican were doubtful at best, all because they thought he could win and keep them in power. That act of ignoble self-interest has not only served their country badly, it has made the world a more dangerous, unstable place.

If the Conservative party back Johnson because they think he can win and he does, then they will find themselves prisoners of their choice in precisely the way that the Republicans have in backing Trump: we will be out of Europe (on bad and economically-damaging terms), trying to stand alone against economic superpowers – China, USA, India and indeed the EU – and our government will be in the pockets of a small band of very rich men. It will suit the likes of Mogg, Duncan Smith, Johnson and the wealthy, privileged elite they count as friends but the notion that it will be a victory for ‘the people’ is a very sick joke indeed.

Para. 55 of the Supreme Court’s judgement opens with a timely reminder:

‘Let us remind ourselves of the foundations of our constitution. We live in a representative democracy. The House of Commons exists because the people have elected its members. The Government is not directly elected by the people (unlike the position in some other democracies). The Government exists because it has the confidence of the House of Commons. It has no democratic legitimacy other than that.’

 

Once you start talking, as an MP,  in terms of ‘people versus parliament’ you are disavowing the very thing that gave you authority to speak in the first place and espousing gangsterism – the gangsterism of Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Putin and Trump. There are, I am sure, enough decent Conservatives who are deeply worried by the direction in which Johnson and his advisers are taking their party, and who are as appalled as any decent people would be by his shameful and cynical conduct last night.

Now is the time for them to put Country before Party. Johnson has to go, and it is they who should take the lead in ousting him.

 

Hijacking the common speech: A bad deal is better than a worse one, but no deal is better than both.

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The use and abuse of language has been critical to the continuing political crisis initiated by David Cameron’s ill-judged and badly-executed attempt to stem the flow of votes from his party to UKIP in the 2015 General Election.

Recently I remarked on how ‘just get on with it’ and kindred expressions had been subverted to serve the Brexit cause. There are, I suggested, a great many ordinary people  – burden bearers, we might call them – who are the ones who keep things going from day to day, who make sure the mundane things happen – that the bills are paid, that there is food on the table, that the children are clothed and fed and got off to school. For them, the phrase ‘just get on with it’ has a peculiar resonance – it is what they do, day in, day out; it carries with it an implication that a whole lot of other things might be all very well if there was time to indulge in them, but life being as it is, we must just get on with it and get what needs doing done. As I pointed out, the phrase might well be one that we would agree with in everyday circumstances, but not in the particular case where you found yourself on a strange road in the fog with the growing sense that you might be about to walk over a precipice.

In the same way, an expression central to the debate (it may even have featured in Mrs May’s manifesto in 2017) has been hijacked from the everyday context where it makes sense and slyly introduced to one where it makes no sense at all, with deliberate intent to deceive: I mean the oft-repeated mantra ‘no deal is better than a bad deal.’

When is no deal better than a bad deal?

Always, I would say with confidence – and that is what makes the particular use to which the term has been put recently so pernicious, cynical and downright wicked.

Consider an instance. I set off for Italy because there is a special car there that I want to buy – an old classic Lancia, perhaps. The owner knows that I have come from abroad so can gauge the extent of my commitment – I am serious about wanting this car. He considers that this puts him in a strong bargaining position so holds out for a far higher price than he would otherwise ask because he is confident that I will not walk away, having come so far. But I consider that at this price I would be paying way over the odds – the car needs work done and further expenditure to make it presentable, so the price should reflect that. As it stands, this is a bad deal. I say as much. ‘Then it’s no deal,’ says the owner, in a last attempt to persuade me. ‘No deal is better than a bad deal,’ I say, and walk away.

There has been no transaction: the situation remains as it was – he has the car, I have my money (though I have to put down my expenditure to experience, the price I am willing to pay to achieve my desire). I tell myself that there will be other cars, or indeed that I could learn to live without one.

If we try to map this case onto our present one – leaving the EU – a peculiar thing emerges: no deal is indeed better than a bad deal, but only provided we resume the status quo – in other words, that we walk away, not from the EU, but from the idea of leaving it – on the very good ground that we cannot get a deal better than the one we already have, so we’ll just stick with what we’ve got, thanks, and put the time and money we have spent down to experience.

But that is not what is on offer here: rather it is a choice between a bad deal that is at least orderly and leaves us on good terms with our neighbours (though not as good as those we currently enjoy, which is what makes it bad) and a deal that is a great deal worse, because it involves our crashing out in a disorderly fashion, breaking all sorts of commitments in the process (such as paying our debts)and tying ourselves to WTO rules that will prove economically disastrous for the country as a whole and will ruin many businesses individually.

So yes, no deal is better than a bad deal and very much better than a worse one. So let us not make any deal to leave, but rather stay as we are.

This way to the oligarchy

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An odd collocation: I came home from a visit to Stanley Mills to find that Dominic Cummings had said he wanted to ‘get away from rich remainers’ and ‘talk to ordinary people.’ As many were quick to point out, Cummings himself is exceedingly wealthy, as are his closest allies in the Brexit camp; so this was clearly a bit of ‘projection’ on his part, the device where you attribute to your enemies the very fault you yourself are guilty of – if one thing is evident from the whole affair, it is that Brexit is being driven by wealthy men. But what is the connection with Stanley Mills?

Stanley Mills typify a period in the early industrial revolution, when energetic entrepreneurs saw the moneymaking potential of the mechanisation of weaving that happened in the 18th century. This led to the construction of vast multi-storey mills which were essentially huge complex machines for processing cotton from raw material to finished goods under one roof, generally driven by water power.

These mills required a numerous workforce so their construction was accompanied by the building of houses and related infrastructure for the workers and their families (many of the millworkers were young children, small enough and nimble enough to get in below the machinery to help keep it working by clearing away waste, etc.). 

Thus, the construction of a mill was also the creation of a community, with the millowners providing not only housing but schools, shops and churches. There was no doubt that the living conditions (and pay) were an improvement on anything the workers had known previously – most of them would have been agricultural workers – though the working conditions were in a variety of ways hazardous to health, from the perils of unguarded machinery, the deafening noise of the mill and the atmosphere thick with lung-threatening dust.

However, it was certainly possible for the millowners to consider themselves benefactors, giving their workforce clean, modern housing with sanitation, providing education and meeting their spiritual and material needs; and it is probable that many of their workers would have shared that opinion, especially if they still had relations toiling on the land and living in primitive conditions. But another aspect of this set-up was that the relationship between community and millowner was one of total dependence – they were relatively well-off and certainly well-provided-for, and as long as they did what the mill-owner wanted (working hard and causing no trouble) it would stay that way. And of course the millowner had a vested interest in treating his workforce well, since they in turn made him rich.

This looks, from some angles, to be what the Americans call a ‘win-win situation’: the workers get a secure livelihood and all sorts of benefits while the owner not only gets rich, but gets to feel good about doing so – ‘what’s not to like?’ as they say.

Well, the inherent inequality of the relationship, which for all its apparent modernity has a strong whiff of the feudal about it – the mill-owner holds the lives of his workers (and they are ‘his’ in every sense of the word) in the palm of his hand: all is in his gift.

The counter-argument is to say that this is all right as long as the owner is well-disposed, as he has every incentive to be – the better he treats his work-force, the more the rewards for him; and in any case, are there not strong social constraints among the mill-owners as a body, who see themselves not only as enlightened men who are benefitting the whole country through the application of modern ideas but generally as pious, upright Christians, with a strong sense of decency?

We will leave aside what happens when forces beyond the owner’s control – the American Civil War and its effect on the supply of cotton, for instance – lead to an economic downturn which imperils the livelihoods of the millworkers, and concentrate instead on the relationship between these two distinct classes of people, one of which is responsible for the livelihood – indeed, in many ways, the very lives – of the other.

It is an old-fashioned patriarchal model: the father provides for his children, who in turn do him proper respect and give him his place – which is in charge, naturally enough: the responsibility for direction and decision-making falls to him.  It seems obvious: after all, has he not created all this through his own acumen, built it up by his shrewdness, to the benefit of all (though most of all himself)? And everyone does well out of it, as long as they all know their place in the scheme of things.

This, I think, is the model that Johnson, Cummings and his fellow wealthy ‘Brexiteers’ are aiming for (and doesn’t the swagger of that title, ‘Brexiteer’, with its echo of ‘musketeer’ and ‘buccaneer’, fit perfectly here?). Look at recent history: the painful wake of the collapse of Soviet communism led not to the promised democracy but an oligarchy allied to political dictatorship – and did so by allowing the seizure of what were hitherto state assets (in theory, at least, the people’s assets) by private individuals, who have profited massively from exploiting them. [though advocates of free-market capitalism will doubtless recast this as proof that what becomes moribund under the dead hand of state control has its potential realised by enterprising individuals]

Look at what Trump is doing: weakening legislative power and state regulation in every direction, and benefitting the super-rich who already control so much of the American economy. He aims to revive the days of the ‘Robber Barons’  – Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Morgan, Rockefeller et al. before anti-trust laws brought them under some sort of control. The ambiguity with which America still regards the effects of concentrated wealth is neatly expressed in this lesson plan, quoted in the Wikipedia article on ‘Robber Barons’:

‘In this lesson, you and your students will attempt to establish a distinction between robber barons and captains of industry. Students will uncover some of the less honorable deeds as well as the shrewd business moves and highly charitable acts of the great industrialists and financiers. It has been argued that only because such people were able to amass great amounts of capital could our country become the world’s greatest industrial power. Some of the actions of these men, which could only happen in a period of economic laissez faire, resulted in poor conditions for workers, but in the end, may also have enabled our present day standard of living.’

The key that links all these groups – from eighteenth century mill-owners to Cummings and the gang – is the sense that large affairs of state are best left in the hands of a few wealthy individuals, as untrammelled as possible by any state regulation or legislation, whom the great mass of ordinary people (who know little of such things) should trust to do what is best. Of course they will get even richer as a result, but we should not worry about that – isn’t it their just reward? In any case, doesn’t it mean we’ll all be better off in the long term (just as long as we all remember our proper place in the scheme of things and don’t get ideas above our station)?

Viewed in that light, that bastion of democratically-agreed legislation and regulation, the European Union, for all its faults, looks very much the safest refuge in an increasingly dangerous world for ‘ordinary people’ who ‘just want to get on with it’.

If what they say is true, then how did we get here?

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A Dutch view of prorogation

A useful test is to ask whether the account that people give of events is consistent with the events themselves.

If it were really the case that in the 2016 referendum ‘the country voted overwhelmingly to leave’ (to quote the chronically untruthful Bernard Jenkin, MP*) is that at all consistent with the point we have now reached, and the path we have followed to get there?

If that were the case, is it conceivable that Theresa May, boldly flying her banner with a strange device – ‘Brexit means Brexit’ – would have lost her majority when she called an election expressly to increase it, so finding herself reliant on the ‘support’ of the DUP, which proved fatal not only to her Brexit deal, but ultimately to her premiership?

Would we not rather have expected her to be swept to power by the 80% of the electorate that supposedly support Brexit, according to the convoluted casuistry of the congenitally mendacious Jake Mogg? ** 

From such a position of strength, her deal would have passed first time, complete with Irish backstop, and we would have left the EU on the date originally intended.

But Mrs May did lose her majority, her Brexit deal and finally her job; yet if all this was the fault of a treacherous Remainer parliament determined to thwart the will of the British people, why did Mrs May and her successor consistently rule out a ‘People’s Vote’, i.e. a second referendum on the subject of EU membership?

If it were the case that ‘the country voted overwhelmingly to leave’ then a second referendum could only confirm the first, leaving those Remainer elite MPs without a leg to stand on, nor any rag to cover their shame. Surely – if the facts were as Jenkin, Johnson, Mogg, Gove and the rest pretend – it would be the Leavers who would take to the street in their millions demanding a People’s Vote? Why would the Remainers call for something that would only confirm once more that theirs was a lost cause?

And if there really was a solid majority in favour of leaving the EU would we not already have left in an orderly fashion under Mrs May, rather than have reached the present pass where a Prime Minister appointed by 92,153 people to lead a population of 65.5 million issues a public statement that “the claim that the govt is considering proroguing parliament in Sept … is entirely false.’’ when in fact he has already decided to do so (as was demonstrated at the Court of Session in Scotland today)?

And would the same Prime Minister have to maintain the threadbare pretence that, by ruling out the Irish backstop – which the EU have made clear is not negotiable – and by taking the position that the UK will leave on 31 October ‘with or without a deal’, he is genuinely engaged in trying to negotiate a better deal with EU rather than intentionally precipitating a no-deal Brexit? (an outcome that is generally agreed to be calamitous for the country)

I suggest that, if Messrs Jenkin, Johnson, Gove, Mogg and the rest were actually telling the truth when they said (as they have repeatedly) that the British people voted for Brexit, then events would not have played out as they have to bring us to our present predicament. I therefore conclude that those ‘honourable gentlemen’ have not been telling the truth and that our present situation is quite the opposite from what they claim it to be: far from a recalcitrant Remainer elite group of MPs  attempting to thwart the will of the people, the reality is that a small gang of unscrupulous and self-interested MPs have hijacked the government of our country and are determined to force through an outcome that has only ever been supported in any form by a minority of people and in this latest form – a disorderly Brexit with no arrangements in place – has few supporters if any.***

They appear to be hellbent on steering the ship of state onto the rocks, in some cases at least (the egregious Mogg) for personal gain: it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that their behaviour is both criminal and treasonable.

*as I have pointed out many times before, there are around 65.5 million British people, of whom 46.5 million were eligible to vote in the 2016 referendum. Only 17.4 million expressed a desire to leave the EU and so change a status quo that is all that half the population has known since birth (according to the most recent census data (2011) over half the population were 39 or younger at a time when Britain had been in the EU for 38 years; it is safe to say that it was certainly the case that by 2016 more than half the British people had grown up as EU citizens) It is therefore impossible to sustain with any truth the claim that the British people (or even a majority of them) voted to leave. The great majority of the electorate (62%) expressed no desire to do so. For a closer examination of this point, see ‘Liars in Public Places‘.

**In a brief interview of extraordinary mendacity, the egregious Mogg attempted to claim that there was no need of a further referendum because ‘We had an election in 2017 where over 80% of people voted for parties committed to leaving’. He conveniently overlooks the fact that it has been the norm for the last hundred years for the great majority to vote for the same two parties, and also that many who voted for those parties did so for reasons other than their Brexit stance.

***No less an authority than the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster himself, plucky Michael Gove, has assured us that ‘no-one voted for no deal’