If the government were a company, the shareholders would have thrown out the chairman and board of directors by now. If it were a school, Ofsted inspectors would have judged it inadequate and put it into special measures. If there had potentially been lawbreaking, the police would have been involved a lot sooner. But the government knows it is bigger than any such institution, and consequently thinks it can’t be moved.
Its behaviour over the past few weeks has chillingly echoed the pattern adopted by many organisations accused of something horrendous, which is to double down, evade, attack accusers, hide behind investigations, and ultimately use the shield of an apology to say – as Mark Zuckerberg has been saying for half his life – that clearly we didn’t get everything right, and we must now look to a future where such things never happen again.
Look at the examples of churches hiding abusive priests, banks involved in money laundering, racist cricket clubs, national broadcasters disciplining a duplicitous reporter, a political party investigating antisemitism, specialist care homes looking into complaints of assault, police departments investigating failings within their ranks or schools protecting an abusive teacher. They all consistently adopt a classic and rotten playbook now being used with some commitment by the prime minister and his cabinet. After stern denials comes manufactured outrage, for example, in the wake of the Allegra Stratton video: “I was also furious to see that clip”. Then comes a firm commitment to investigate, “to establish the facts and report back as soon as possible”.
At this early stage, the organisation’s instincts is to police itself, so keeping any findings away from the public sphere. Unfortunately, in this instance Simon Case, whom Boris Johnson had only recently appointed to his job as cabinet secretary, had to recuse himself since he appeared to have held a gathering in his own office.
No worries. There are other blunter but heftier weapons in the backpack. Sue Gray may be more formidable, but in a neat jiujitsu move, you can use that to your advantage. “Look, we’ve asked no less ferocious an investigator than Sue Gray to examine this, so that shows how transparent we’re being.” Since everything’s above board ( with someone who wasn’t your first choice), this gives you the chance to question the motives of those who persist in challenging you and the opportunity to belittle them. It’s a thread that connects failing schools or special care units that vilify complaining families, Labour party members who call out antisemitism being attacked as disgruntled opponents, a graphic designer being sidelined by the BBC after raising concerns about Martin Bashir, or Ghislaine Maxwell’s lawyers questioning the sanity of those who accused her.
With “partygate”, the same playbook has been used, taking in attacks on the media for wanting to engage in tittle-tattle, Jacob Rees-Mogg denouncing the Scottish Tory leader, Douglas Ross, as “a lightweight figure” and the sinister decision by Johnson himself to drag a rightwing online conspiracy theory about Keir Starmer and Jimmy Savile into the broad daylight of mainstream news.
With gaslighting in full throttle, a parallel manoeuvre is also under way: to hide behind legal technicalities wherever possible. These can often involve absurd twists of logic, as when, for example, Prince Andrew’s lawyers tried to argue he couldn’t be sued since he was protected by an agreement the complainant had made with a dead paedophile. There was a degree of absurdity on Tuesday when the disinformation minister, Chris Philp, before a parliamentary committee scrutinising his online safety bill, refused to distance himself from the online disinformation about Starmer – the kind that his bill is intended to root out. It’s a position that has also been taken publicly this week by our ministers for culture and justice.
But that’s how the rot spreads. If a sociopath is at the heart of an organisation, then the organisation itself begins to take on the characteristics of the person controlling it. Each one close to him or her becomes infected, because it’s now too late to do anything else. The best they can do now is delay; say they’d love to tell you everything, but their hands are tied. They rely on the fact that we’ve all got lives to be getting on with, we can’t keep paying lawyers, and some of us have died, while others are just tired. A government is different, though: its adversaries are, potentially, all of us. It may be that there are just too many of us following the smell of something rotten for this to end cleanly for them.
Armando Iannucci is a film and TV writer whose credits include The Thick of It, In the Loop, and Veep
