Any competition with a prize worth having attracts cheats. That is as true of politics as it is of sport. Whether cheats prosper depends on a combination of regulation and culture. There must be rules, enforced by independent institutions, but also an ethos of honouring the rules, policed by conscience.
The introduction of mandatory voter ID for local elections in England this week is doubly insidious because it smuggles dishonourable intent in a measure purporting to strengthen the rules.
On paper, the demand that voters show photographic proof that they are who they say they are is a protection against fraud. In reality, the crime being thwarted – lying about your name to steal someone else’s ballot paper – is vanishingly rare.
It is a cumbersome way to rig a poll. Each impersonation alters the outcome by just one vote. To swing the result, a cheating campaign would need an army of serial liars, probably with multiple disguises.
An easier way to skew elections is to make it harder for some people to vote. Under the new rules, pensioners will be allowed into a polling both if they show their bus passes. Younger people with an equivalent travel document will be turned away. The bar for admissible ID is lower for older voters because they tilt Tory.
It is hard to predict what the impact of this ruse will be. Not much, perhaps. But changing the rules of a competition in ways designed to disadvantage one side is cheating, even if that side still does well. Making it harder to vote limits the number of voices that are heard in an election. It is a reasonable assumption that new barriers to democratic participation will obstruct those who already feel marginalised by the political process. Encouraging abstention is a way to boost incumbent power.
This is low-grade stuff by international standards of electoral malpractice. Britain is not a country where polling stations are pantomime scenery to flatter some despot’s ego. Thursday’s votes will be cast freely and counted fairly.
The Tories are dabbling amateurs in democratic subterfuge compared with US Republicans, whose position in Congress is fortified by aggressive voter suppression and gerrymandered boundaries. But that comparison is hardly encouraging given how much British conservatism borrows from across the Atlantic in the field of campaign techniques and ideology.
Stitching up elections is not a left or rightwing proclivity. People who like power resent the idea of giving it away, regardless of the doctrine that won it for them in the first place.
Clinging on is easy for tyrants with tools of state repression at their disposal in countries that have little or no history of peaceful transitions between regimes. In established democracies, governed by the rule of law, methods of subversion have to be more subtle.
When supporters of Donald Trump stormed the Capitol on 6 January 2021 they were defeated by the resilience of the US constitution and a culture of democratic order still capable of pricking enough Republican consciences into repudiating the insurrection.
But those safeguards are not enough to disqualify Trump from another run at the White House on a platform of denial that he lost in 2020. His supporters believe that democracy is an American virtue, but only if election results validate their choice of candidate and their prejudices.
British politics is not that polarised. If the Tories lose the next election, there will be no mob storming the Commons to insist that Rishi Sunak stay in No 10.
There was a pale approximation of Trumpian denial in the campaign by Tory MPs for Boris Johnson’s restoration to Downing Street when Liz Truss’s government unravelled last autumn. Sanity prevailed.
Johnson doesn’t pretend to still be in power, but nor does he accept any responsibility for his downfall. He narrates the events of last summer as a spasmodic panic by lily-livered colleagues over-reacting to opinion polls, which had dipped in response to bogus scandals and slanders against a blameless leader.
That implausible configuration of events gets a conspiratorial twist from the recruitment of Sue Gray, the former senior cabinet office official who investigated Partygate, to be Keir Starmer’s chief of staff. The move was not unprecedented, but hardly an advertisement for civil service impartiality.
Johnson denounces it as evidence that Whitehall was agitating against him all along, in covert service to the opposition. The flaw in that theory is that he was guilty of attending lockdown parties and got a fixed penalty notice for breaking the rules. The public turned against him because they saw the facts and understood the kind of man he was. Also, Johnson claimed Gray’s report exonerated him when it was first published, in which case she must have drafted it in betrayal of her mission as a Labour secret agent.
The former Tory leader’s model of the dutiful civil servant is not someone who upholds the integrity of the system but someone adept at moulding it to prime ministerial caprice; someone like Sir Simon Case.
The cabinet secretary makes a significantly enigmatic appearance in last week’s report by Adam Heppinstall KC, investigating the recruitment of Richard Sharp as BBC chair around the same time that he was brokering a bailout scheme for Johnson’s shambolic personal finances.
Heppinstall describes a meeting between Case and Sharp at which conflicts of interest were discussed, but no minutes were taken. Both men declare hazy recollections of the episode.
Anthony Seldon, Johnson’s most recent biographer, reports that Case was elevated to the top civil service job, despite never having run a department, because no properly qualified candidate would submit to the will of Dominic Cummings, then in command of No 10. Private accounts of the way Case serviced Johnson remind me of record company executives who squeamishly enable their biggest stars’ self-destructive habits in order to keep the show on the road, because the show is also their career.
That is not what the civil service is for. But its function as a non-partisan machine for the delivery of government policy is hard to maintain in a culture that values ideological purity over administrative competence and measures fitness for office in subservience to a party leader.
The partisan impulse to capture the civil service – and discredit the parts that resist capture – is symptomatic of a wider corrosion of democratic traditions and institutions by winner-takes-all populism.
It is a depletion of the pluralist spirit that allows rival parties to compete for power, confident of two things. First, a defeated party recognises the legitimate authority of the government. Second, the winning party doesn’t change the rules to lock the losers out of power. The integrity of electoral politics rests on those twin pillars of trust. Thankfully they are still standing in Britain. But they are not standing straight.
Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist
Rafael Behr will discuss his new book, Politics: A Survivor’s Guide, at a Guardian Live event on Monday 12 June. The event will be live in London and livestreamed. Book tickets here
