Six of one, half a dozen of the other (Photo by Toby Melville - WPA Pool/Getty Images)
At Balliol, Boris Johnson’s old Oxford college, there was a society, now dormant, called the Hysteron Proteron Club. Members were required to live an entire day backwards at least once a term, and discharged the duty conscientiously. The 12-hour ordeal would start with cigars and brandy over cards in dinner jackets, desserts giving way to soup courses, and end in the evening, a little dangerously one imagines, with a “pre-breakfast” swim in the River Cherwell.
Meanwhile, at Merton, where Liz Truss read PPE in the Nineties, undergraduates still perform “The Time Ceremony” every autumn when the clocks go back. Between 2am British Summer Time and 2am Greenwich Mean Time, students dressed in full sub fusc (black tie and gowns) walk backwards around the Fellows’ Quad in order “to maintain the space-time continuum”. According to her biographers Harry Cole and James Heale, Liz Truss delighted in Merton’s eccentric ceremony. I wonder whether her thoughts turned to it at any point during her own liminal 44-day premiership, before it too collapsed into an extensionless point in political space-time.
The tricks being played on us by the accelerated pace of political upheaval are well in evidence in both Cole and Heale’s Out of the Blue: The Inside Story of the Unexpected Rise and Rapid Fall of Liz Truss, and Sebastian Payne’s The Fall of Boris Johnson, both of which enter a kind of warp-speed as their protagonists’ regimes spiral and crash. Great offices of state change hands like debased currency; in the last three years, we have practically doubled the stock of living ex-Chancellors. And remember when Grant Shapps was Home Secretary for six days? At times, it looked as if Andy Warhol’s prediction may become true of politics, if not elsewhere: in the future we shall all be Cabinet Ministers for 15 minutes.
What explains this unusual volatility in the political system? One widespread attitude expresses itself in the form of an exceptionalist view about the present: our politicians are peculiarly crap and ill-suited to govern. The watchword of this theory is “unprecedented”, and its characteristic mood is one of ahistorical sanctimony about contemporary political life. It is often difficult for these theories to rise above the flippant register of the sketch-writer’s caricature: Boris Johnson is a Machiavellian clown, psychologically incapable of telling the truth; Liz Truss is a Thatcherite human-GIF who loves pork markets. That is, the account struggles to actually explain the data in place of merely describing them.
Another more jaded mode of explanation is ahistorical in a different way. This outlook regards today’s problems as nothing special. Disaster and tumult are more or less eternally constitutive of political life. On the subject of Johnson and Truss’s downfalls there is little to add to Enoch Powell’s dictum that all political careers end in failure. While offering a useful correction to the former account, this view is also too complacent. It is, for one thing, often a little unclear what content there is supposed to be to the claim that all political careers end in failure beyond the banal truth that all political careers simply end.
In fact, there are several, somewhat novel, destabilising political phenomena described in the work of Cole, Heale, and Payne. Foremost among them is the manner in which the 24-hour online news cycle, with its insatiable appetite for a worsening situation, encourages a form of speculation on political confidence and capital. The combined desiderata of round-the-clock media scrutiny — a demand that officials be publicly accountable, and the lightning movement of news data — is an inherently unsteadying mixture. It is, after all, well-observed that social media can help to precipitate bandwagon-effects of popular resentment under repressive regimes; it would be curious if analogous effects were not also in play under settled liberal governments. Of course, the demand for accountability and a merciless attitude toward failure in public office are good things in their way. But almost no good thing arises without loss in some other dimension.
At pivotal moments of collapse in both books, events outpace the ability of political actors to effectively manage them. The lumbering anatomy of Whitehall is not built for acceleration. It is difficult to imagine how, in a previous technological era, a spectacle as engrossing, damaging and chaotic as the cascade of resignations from Boris Johnson’s government could have been similarly achieved. In the age of paper and post, it took a bit of time to resign. In one revealing anecdote of Payne’s, the spectral figure of Charles Moore sidles casually up to Treasury Minister Simon Hart who is sitting on a park bench on Twitter. “Oh Simon, what are you up to this evening?” Moore asks. Hart responds: “If you wait 15 seconds, I’m literally resigning.”
There are, thankfully, some reliable frictions left in the political process. Professional vanity, for instance, provides some residual robustness in the face of even the most vividly disintegrating political fortunes. Brandon Lewis, for instance, “breezed into” Johnson’s strategy room, at a moment of high calamity, and surveyed the reshuffle whiteboard. “Sensing the weakness of the team that was being assembled, Lewis argued he should get a grander job and was offered Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster.” He left, apparently pretty pleased with himself — much in the spirit of a passenger who’s just successfully upgraded their cabin on the Titanic — before resigning a few hours later.
The relation between Johnson’s administration in its final months and the media placed him in a posture of increasingly hopeless damage-control. According to Payne: “from October 2021 onwards, [Johnson’s] administration was… entirely focused on firefighting.” At moments when instantaneous response was needed, aides found the Prime Minister “was always away”. Channels of communication stalled. The chief problem, as Payne tells it, was not so much that Johnson’s Number 10 team were mendacious and corrupt, but that they couldn’t stay ahead of the story — whether it was Paterson, Pincher or Partygate — for sufficiently long to counteract it. One unwelcome effect of the emergence of these intense, and no doubt irreversible, political pressures is to increase the appeal of a certain virtue of bloody-mindedness in public life. It might be, however counter-intuitively, that increasingly stringent demands for transparency and integrity in public life end up favouring not the squeaky-clean class of politician, but those who are able to cultivate a calculated indifference to the rules in play.
Needless to say, politicians who possess these qualities won’t just exercise them when they’re useful; they’ll do so too when their effects are destructive or straightforwardly unhinged. Mere hours before his resignation, Johnson remained “determined to carry on through sheer effort of will”. “All my life,” he is reported to have said, “people have been telling me ‘you can’t do that’. And I’ve always proved them wrong.” The same morning, Michael Gove made his fateful visit to Downing Street, by that stage a bunker of panicked activity, and urged Johnson to stand down. The Prime Minister responded by relating a story, apparently in admiration, of an uncle of his “who had ‘failed to take his meds one day’… [and] so barricaded himself into the town hall with a shotgun. The uncle was eventually bundled out by the police. ‘That is going to be me,’ the prime minister said.” Returning to his Ministry from the meeting, Gove informed his staff that the Prime Minister had unfortunately “gone mad”.
As with Johnson, the portrait developed of Truss by Cole and Heale, is one of a political agent almost pathologically insensitive to the influence of other minds. Aides noticed how “very thick-skinned” she was, with this “delightful Terminator-like quality”. But, on closer acquaintance, her steady hand could be unnerving, even to allies. At the height of the income tax U-turn, with the pound crashing, allies “were struck by her ‘worryingly zen-like’ demeanour”. As David Laws recalled of Truss at her first department, Education: “I like Liz but she doesn’t listen very much, and when people try to make points, she just talks straight over them in a slightly irritating and rather ‘deaf’ way.” This quality of political “deafness” can of course be useful, allowing one to wilfully resist the demands of external opposition and public scrutiny that might move a less headstrong individual to self-doubt or compromise.
But as Laws’s description implies, there is a constructive ambiguity in Truss’s case as to how far her obstinately “deaf” temperament is actually under her control, or about how far it is a part of a more general strategy of calculated madness. Rory Stewart recalls his years under Truss at Defra as “traumatic”. There, watching her civil servants “you could see the panic in their eyes and them thinking ‘does she really want to do this?’” And according to Dominic Cummings, Truss is “about as close to properly crackers as anybody I’ve met in Parliament”.
To her credit, Truss occasionally reveals a degree of pragmatic awareness of the manner in which her political strengths entwine with her personal incapacities. Addressing close allies in the early stages of her leadership bid, “she was blunt and to the point, telling one visitor: ‘I think I would be a very good Prime Minister, there are just two problems: I am weird and I don’t have any friends. How can you help me fix that?’” Presented with the consequences of the mini-Budget, and the possibility of simply throwing the old steamroller into gear and ploughing on, Truss at last recorded a final and uncharacteristic twinge of self-doubt: “the problem is the last time I ignored all these people they were right.”
Some years after his own short premiership (366 days), Alec Douglas Home is said to have encountered an elderly woman at a train station who admiringly told him that she’d always thought he would have made rather a good Prime Minister. He reportedly responded, with good grace, that he actually had been, though admittedly only “for a short time”. Liz Truss can for the moment only dream of comparative levels of anonymity. As her short administration collapsed around her, though, I wonder whether her temperamental deafness proved something of a solace — as Truss addressed the nation outside Downing Street she seemed almost to be smiling. (“Don’t worry, I’m relieved it’s over,” she is reported to have told those on the inside of the black door, “at least I’ve been Prime Minister.”)
But the lessons from Johnson’s demise and Truss’s implosion, so far as I can see, are not as commiserative. Today’s political environment makes remarkable demands on the modern politician — demands of exertion, openness, imagination, resilience to criticism, and speed of response. It is sometimes difficult to see how any decent politician could be equal to meeting them, though it is increasingly clear how a bad one could be wilful enough to resist them.
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SubscribeFine.I agree. But the academic insult that is the open letter from academics is missed. Normally we would expect an academic who is considered to have erred to be responded to academically. So an article would be answered by another article, both based on reason supported by evidence. Now a twitter frenzy or an open letter seems enough to get academic journals to withdrawn and even delete published academic articles. Surely we should just point out to the editors of such journals that all they need do is ask the complainants to do an academic riposte to an academic piece. And that riposte should itself be peer reviewed. Why this is not happening speaks eloquently of the collapse of standards we are seeing in university culture in the Western World, though not I believe in Asia. We currently have the dumbest elites in the history of civilisation.
Thanks, Daniel Rasmussen, for a highly readable history of the open letter. How many readers remember “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate”, published in July, 2020? Signed by 153 “notables”, it complained about the growing “intolerance of opposing views”. Transgender activists claimed that this was transphobic, social justice warriors claimed it was anti-BLM and liberals claimed that it was just a dig at political correctness. I could go on, but the final irony was that some signers wanted their names removed when they realised that some of the other signers had right-of-centre views.
So despite the open letter’s condemnation for the “vogue for public shaming” and “the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty”, those tendencies have continued apace.
Shaky premise, I think.
I see the issue as in the past we had ‘Greats’, very respected thinkers and achievers that were known as that, and therefore their signature commanded at least reviewing their argument.
Today we have Celebrity, and then lots of Politicals, but no one who commands, popular, actual, respect as a thinker, and some ‘Experts’, but we think they all have an agenda of some kind..
That is why the Open Letter – they wish to show an entire class of people with some level of authority are collectively saying something.
That they inevitable end up being some loons all just flocking together further undermines what they are trying to promote.
July 2021 saw The Lancet “Over 1,200 doctors and scientists condemn UK COVID-19 policy as “dangerous and unethical” in a hysterical movement to keep lockdown. This suited the agenda, so they won.
This was one of a great many of scientists writing group signed open letters advocating a multitude of different things.. almost all pushing for Lockdown, that crazy form of ‘Self Harm’ which the Young of the West will be crushed paying for.
The best open letter was
“Great Barrington Declaration
The Great Barrington Declaration is a statement advocating an alternative approach to the COVID-19 pandemic which involves “Focused Protection” of those most at risk and seeks to avoid or minimize the societal harm of the COVID-19 lockdowns. Authored by Sunetra Gupta of the University of Oxford, Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University, and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University, it was drafted at the American Institute for Economic Research in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and signed there on 4 October 2020″
And it did no good, may as well have not bothered, as it was correct – but was contrary to the Political Agenda, and so dismissed by the MSM, Social Media, and Government, the WHO, and the Medical Industrial Complex.
Anyway – that is the evolution of the open letter – the individuals are no longer of caliber to command respect in today’s systems (and deservedly so) – so groups try to manage by numbers, but that does not even matter – because today, with agenda driven Social Media Tech, MSM, Gov, algorithms, censoring, banning, we are powerless against the Swamp.
The main problem with the Barrington declaration is that their argument was not convincing. They never gave good reason to believe that their policies would actually work as advertised. Protecting the very most vulnerable (who all need lots care and help from others) while everybody else around them got sick did not sound feasible – and would leave the slightly less vulnerable, like the over-60’s exposed. Protecting everyone over 60 was obviously impossible. Meanwhile the sick and dead from the less vulnerable – a small fraction of a very large number – would still weigh on the health system, the long-term consequences of COVID would still fall widely, and people would be unlikely to keep going to raves and restaurants while everybody got sick around them – we are not all fanatical libertarians. A very likely result of the Barrington policies would be that the measures for protecting the vulnerable would fail, and everybody would get sick, with death counts and hospital overfilling to match – but meanwhile the restaurants would stay open and nobody would be out to inconvenience.
The Swedish example argues against the need for stringent government imposed lockdowns, and that of some US states as well. However none of this virtue signalling saying how much we cared about the elderly and vulnerable actually meant we protected them at all, as in care homes. I agree it is fundamentally difficult, but I would not say impossible, with thorough testing of staff, special facilities where staff would live in etc. The point is though that in neither Sweden, France, Spain, Italy, New York or the UK were the elderly meaningfully protected by the policies that they actually adopted. Shielding was effective, but precious little support was offered.
Accidental duplication. Removed