If you haven’t ploughed through the Sue Gray report yet, it is easily summarised: numerous parties were held in Downing Street, breaking the Covid rules that bound the rest of us. They were organised, approved and attended by some of the most senior politicians and civil servants who run this country. Some were even commemorated by an official photographer at the taxpayer’s expense. While elderly and ill people could not see their relatives and mothers underwent the rigours of childbirth alone, at the heart of government staffers drank till they threw up, enjoyed punch-ups and mistreated the security guards and cleaners they saw as beneath them. They laughed at the rest of us and congratulated themselves for having “got away with” it. The squalor of the set-up is inseparable from its outrageous arrogance.
What comes next? Judging by past form, not much. Some unlucky minister will be served up for a sacrificial roasting on the BBC. Others will fulminate to friendly journalists, knowing their juiciest quotes will be printed without the incriminating detail of their name. Some liberal columnists will bang their tiny fists and demand the prime minister’s resignation, as they have done each week of this affair, always with the same lack of success.
All will be turned into The Boris Show, just as everything in Westminster has been since he moved into No 10. Between them, the prime minister’s ego and the political classes clapping like eager seals have combined to turn the affairs of the UK into the longest-running and most grimly predictable box set of all time. Each episode starts with a scandal and ends on the same dreary cliffhanger: how does our antihero get out of this one?
Even if SW1 can’t tear itself away, the rest of us should – and observe how the system that has enthroned and enabled Johnson has in the process almost destroyed itself. I am not referring to Dougie Ross and Charlie Walker and the other insipid Tory careerists trying to unseat him. I mean the institutions and the ideology that swept him into No 10, and keep him there today. And at what price! Through his full-bellied carelessness, Johnson has clumsily yanked down the entire stage set of the puppet show that passes for British democracy. Our political culture and economic rationales lie before us, drained of credibility and emptied of purpose – except to hold in place the hollow man who hasn’t the faintest clue how to govern, save to mouth trite slogans about getting Brexit done and levelling up and building back better.
Let us start with the senior civil service and the Metropolitan police, neither of which have held the prime minister fully to account. What about the party held in the flat above No 10, the one where aides blasted Abba and “drank their socks off” to celebrate the departure of Dominic Cummings? That, it is said, is where some of the most egregious rule-breaking happened, with Johnson joining the revelry.
Consider, too, the Conservative party, which put at its head a man whose integrity and conduct had triggered so many warnings. From his teachers at Eton to his employers at the Times and the Telegraph, to his colleagues in government, nearly every reference for the guy has been a dud. Now, the party’s door-knockers can’t put him on their election leaflets, his cabinet colleagues can’t bear to defend him – and yet nobody can come up with how to get shot of him, for who else could be sent out to bat for the final few overs of the Tory innings? What a fate for Britain’s supposed party of government.
Finally, consider the media. Not just the Daily Mail, enjoyable though it has been to read its furious avowals that the parties held by its man were innocent work affairs, while the takeaway curries eaten by Keir Starmer and his team rivalled Weimar Berlin for debauchery. We must look to the BBC, which for many years treated a professional hard-right politician as little more than a genial host for Friday night gameshows. Also, to the Times, which, in its leader column on Wednesday, fretted over the haemorrhaging of “public confidence in the integrity of Britain’s political system”. If only the newspaper of record had warned us of such a prospect beforehand! But on the eve of the 2019 election, it urged readers to vote for “a big Tory majority” to allow Johnson to maintain “close links with European partners” and helm a “pragmatic, responsible government”. This was the same election during which Johnson and Cummings ran a deliberate campaign of what Prof Ivor Gaber of Sussex University has dubbed “strategic lying”, intended to confuse voters, magnetise journalists and undermine public faith in the political process.
The pair ran the same strategy in the Brexit referendum. But they also capitalised on another powerful force: the public’s frustration with a broken economy. It is a wellspring from which Johnson has drawn many times, yet when faced with a genuine economic crisis – the rocketing in global food and fuel prices – he has reverted to Thatcherite type, chuntering about “making work pay”, even while it is obvious that low-paid workers live in penury. And he and his government have done next to nothing to help those people who are struggling.
Johnson’s sometime rival for leader, Rishi Sunak, had the chance to do something to help the poorest people at last October’s budget. Instead, he made the single biggest cut to benefits since the second world war. He had another chance to act at his spring statement in March. Instead, he slashed the real value of benefits again. “What looks good in terms of helping the bottom 10% doesn’t necessarily make good headlines,” one minister told the Times recently. It is the same culture exposed in the Gray dossier, where what those at the top worry about most, amid all the boozing, is not what’s right or wrong, but the “comms risk”.
Yesterday, I chaired an event a mile away from Westminster where the heads of a few of the charities working at the eye of this storm revealed what they are seeing right now. At food banks run by the Trussell Trust, its chief executive Emma Revie said, people now turn up asking for “kettle packs”: food that can be cooked using only an electric kettle. They take away hot-water bottles and blankets, what she called “artefacts of destitution”. Clare Moriarty, the chief executive officer of Citizens Advice, remembered how a woman waiting in one bureau last week burst into tears. What’s wrong?, asked a member of staff. Nothing, replied the lady, but this is the warmest I’ve been in months.
This is a world far away from budgeting tips and money-saving tricks – one whose population will swell over the next few months. And, while Johnson and Sunak are ultimately responsible for this suffering, they are not solely to blame. In this pile-up of vast economic forces and purposeless leaders, an exhausted regime supervised by run-down institutions, you can see something far bigger than the fate of one prime minister. You can glimpse the end of a political era.
Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist
