And so, at last and unlamented, the 2019 parliament will finally be laid to rest on Friday. This parliament’s prorogation is not shamelessly illegal, as Boris Johnson’s lawless attempt to end its predecessor was five years ago. But that is just about all that can be said in its favour. In almost every respect, this has been as shoddy and as discreditable a period as British government has had to endure. There can rarely have been a parliament that comes to its end as unmourned as this one.
Yet the 2019 parliament is dying as it lived, amid needless chaos and with political desperation once again taking precedence over legislative substance. Rishi Sunak’s gamble on a July election means that most of the government’s programme, which was announced in the king’s speech in November, will now never reach the statute book at all. This underscores a very troubling truth: that modern government is becoming more performative than effective, with MPs increasingly expected to campaign rather than to scrutinise or legislate.
Some of what seemed at times to be Mr Sunak’s proudest boasts – his anti-smoking bill, his leasehold reform bill and his commitment to a football regulator among them – have simply been abandoned for self-inflicted lack of time. His promise to back Martyn’s law legislation, toughening up safety at public venues, has proved worthless. It is as if the promise was all that mattered, with delivery reduced to a tedious but optional extra.
Mr Sunak’s ministers spent Thursday trying to ensure that one of their signature pledges of recent months, the Post Office (Horizon system) offences bill, will get over the line. The bill quashes hundreds of the postmaster convictions caused by the Horizon IT system. It addresses matters of life and death for some of those affected, while also raising difficult points of law, which a responsible parliament should have had time to debate. But Mr Sunak was blithely willing to put all that at risk. His victims and prisoners bill is still hanging in the balance too.
If one saga embodies what has been wrong with this government and with this parliament, it is the Rwanda deportation scheme. This was performative politics incarnate. It took up months of parliamentary time that could have been far better used. It was legally and morally dubious, and was fought to the end. It involved tens of millions of pounds of public expenditure. Yet along came Mr Sunak on Thursday to reveal that actually it is not now going to happen this side of the July vote anyway. This may be welcome, but the whole scheme was an abuse from the very start.
Unusually, there have been three governments in this parliament. All of them, especially those led by Mr Johnson and by Liz Truss, have provided object lessons in how not to govern well. But Mr Sunak has proved little better. By coincidence, the cabinet secretary, Simon Case, was being quizzed on Thursday by the Hallett inquiry on the Covid pandemic. His evidence painted a picture of a dysfunctional government and of political leaders and advisers who were simply not up to the job that the crisis required. Since 2019, they as individuals and the government system that they created around themselves have been weighed in the balance and found wanting. Good riddance to them all. But Britain deserves so much better.
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