The Debatable Land #9: Ambushed with a cake

If you can't run Downing Street, you can't run the country

Welcome to a special mid-week edition of my newsletter, The Debatable Land! As always, if you cared to share this - on Twitter, Facebook, by email, however and wherever you like - that would be appreciated greatly. Now: on to cake…

He who lives by cake may die by cake

For some of us January 25th will henceforth be celebrated as Conor Burns Night; an evening of whisky and cake and hilarity. The MP for Bournemouth West told Channel 4 News that, really, all this has become a fuss about nothing very much. Cake! It is only cake!

Absurd and desperateas this may be, it is not entirely without a point: the prime minister’s defenders have every reason to downplay the seriousness of the claims made against Boris Johnson. If it is just about a slice of birthday cake, how could any reasonable person conclude the prime minister should resign? Swaddle the scandal in nonsense and you diminish its seriousness. In other words, you bring it down to the prime minister’s level.

But of course it is not actually about cake. Nor does it matter if other people - thousands, perhaps even millions of them - from time to time ignored the precise letter of the covid laws even while, broadly speaking, more or less respecting their general spirit. For - and it is amazing this must still be said - the prime minister and his team in Downing Street are in a rather different position. Those who make the laws must obey them. This is, should you think about it, a simple proposition, albeit one too deep for Johnson’s defenders.

Thus Richard Bacon, MP for South Norfolk, tell the Commons that all this is a fuss over very little. The prime minister has only committed a “relatively minor offence”. Well, if this is the calibre of your defence there is no need for a prosecution.

Meanwhile, Jacob Rees-Mogg - the government’s Comical Ali - appears on Newsnight and declares that the British way of government is now a “presidential system” and a “change of leader requires a general election” since Boris Johnson’s “mandate is personal rather than entirely party”. Rees-Mogg, it should be noted, is notionally a conservative yet here, once again, we see that nothing is sacred if jettisoning or rewriting it may help preserve the prime minister’s time in office. As my old friend Iain Martin observed, Rees-Mogg’s constitutional haverings “Will be news to the head of state, the Queen”.

In like fashion, the pretence we cannot change a prime minister because these are dangerous, complex, times and there is a real risk of war in europe is a bold interpretation of British history and bolder still coming from members of Neville Chamberlain’s party. Much of this saga is comedic, but this aspect of it is so grim it might, in modern parlance, be considered inappropriate.

Nor, frankly, is there any need for Sue Gray’s report or a police investigation. The fact the former has spawned the latter is, plainly, further evidence that the prime minister’s troubles cannot and will not disappear. Caesar’s wife must be beyond reproach but so should Caesar and the facts already established indicate all that needs to be indicated.

For we have the prime minister’s own admission that the lockdown rules were not followed in Downing Street. Not just not followed once or twice but repeatedly, thoughtlessly, stupidly, consistently, not followed.

Heads will roll and Johnson will sacrifice as many officials and staffers as necessary, the better to save himself. This, we will doubtless be told, is what true leadership looks like. This is a prime minister getting all the “big calls right”. We should, when you think about it, consider ourselves fortunate to have him.

But, look, this is just as ridiculous as everything else. Downing Street is Johnson’s workplace. He is the boss. He sets the tone. He chooses who works there. The price of sacking everyone is acknowledging the man who hired them lacks the judgement and grip to run his own office. And yet we shall be asked, once again, to entertain and take seriously the proposition that a prime minister who cannot run Downing Street remains the right man to run the country. These things do not add up.

And, of course, the explanation for all this is quite obvious too and does not require Sue Gray’s report either: the restrictions imposed upon the rest of the country were, in the view of Boris Johnson, ridiculous and being ridiculous there was no obligation for him to pay attention to them himself. The prime minister’s impatience with and intolerance for such matters is a rare constant in his career. A dog which barks in the night is a dog worth paying attention to.

It isn’t, then, about cake and nor is it about the occasional glass of prosecco. It is a question of ethics and fairness. The British public will often put up with a lot - more, you might say, than it should - but it will not tolerate this kind of thing any more than it will suddenly become enamoured with queue-jumping.

Which is why, in the end, this is both an absurd scandal and a major one. For it is a question of judgement and a question of character and while a prime minister may be deficient in one of these qualities and survive he - or she - cannot afford to be sadly short of both.

And so it does matter. For what it is worth, my sense is that Johnson has so completely misjudged the public mood that defending him is henceforth likely to be a futile business. Loyal ministers may continue to do so on the grounds no-one else would advance their parliamentary careers but they bat for Boris at considerable risk to whatever remains of their own reputations. Defending the plainly indefensible - and, again, admitted as such by the prime minister himself! - can only make those advancing these lines seem ridiculous.

The facts are plain and there to be seen without further need for elaboration. The jig is up and, unless I am very much mistaken, there is no recovery from this. More importantly, nor should there be.