Philip Collins
(Picture: Daniel Hambury)We might just have found the perfect metaphor for this government. Yesterday the news broke that Boris Johnson’s former head of propriety and ethics had been fined by the Metropolitan Police over a karaoke party in the Cabinet Office at which there was a drunken brawl. As many as 20 members of staff at Downing Street have been issued with fixed penalty notices. The police have not finished yet and there is a chance that the Prime Minister himself will have to dip into his pocket. This is both extraordinarily new and, perhaps, a sign that an old kind of politics is returning.
For the last half-century there has been a simple formula that predicts political good fortune. If living standards are going up and a party’s leader is preferred to the alternative, then that party will win. Economic competence plus leadership was an infallible guide to victory or defeat. Then Brexit intervened and appeared to upset the simplicity of British politics. At the 2019 general election, the dominant issue was European belonging or not and the dividing line was where you stood on the culture. Class-based politics, income-based politics, gave way to attitude-based politics.
