Boris Johnson Prime Minister – An Assessment

British History: Amazon.co.uk: Godsell, Andrew: 9781720175605: Books

The concluding pages of a recent update of my book “British History” look at the Premiership of Boris Johnson.

The 2019 Conservative Party leadership contest saw Boris Johnson emerge as the winner, defeating Jeremy Hunt – who had replaced him as Foreign Secretary – in the final ballot. Johnson was appointed Prime Minister by Elizabeth II on July 24, having given an untested assurance that he commanded a majority in the House of Commons. Johnson was widely distrusted, due to his serial dishonesty and incompetence, plus racist, sexist, and homophobic comments. Most members of May’s Cabinet immediately departed, either refusing to serve under Johnson, or being sacked to make way for hard-line Brexiteers. May had failed to deliver an exit from the EU, more than three years after the referendum, but Johnson claimed departure would happen on October 31, a date just over three months away.

    In August, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Leader of the House of Commons, obtained agreement from the monarch to prorogue Parliament, for five weeks, leading up to a planned Queen’s Speech in mid-October. It was generally believed that Johnson and the government were seeking to prevent Parliament scrutinising Brexit plans, and legal challenges began. In early September, Parliament passed what became known as the Benn Act – introduced by Hilary Benn, a Labour MP, and son of Tony – requiring Johnson to seek a further extension to Brexit if, by October 19, Parliament had not approved either a withdrawal agreement or a no deal departure. The combined Conservative and DUP MPs were now in a minority position in the Commons, and the government was defeated on several substantive votes. Johnson, acting with increasing irrationality, said “I’d rather be dead in a ditch” when asked if he would seek an extension. In late September, after Parliament had been prorogued for two weeks, the Supreme Court ruled the government’s action unlawful, and the legislature resumed sitting.

    On October 19, Parliament met on a Saturday (for the first time since the Falklands War, 37 years earlier), to consider an amended agreement, which Johnson had reached with the EU. The Commons voted to delay any approval until the necessary legislation had been passed. Johnson sent the letter to the EU required by the Benn Act, but petulantly refused to sign it, and also sent a contradictory letter, arguing against an extension. Three days later, the Commons gave a second reading to the Withdrawal Agreement Bill, but rejected a government attempt to rush it through Parliament. Johnson announced a pause in this legislative process, and was forced to agree with the EU that Brexit would be delayed for a third time, probably until the end of January 2020. With the extension in place, Johnson got the agreement of the House of Commons, at the fourth attempt, to an early General Election. With polling date set as December 12 2019, Britain entered its first Winter Election since February 1974 – and the first such contest in December since 1923.

    At the start of the campaign, the government suppressed release of a report, from the House of Commons Intelligence and Security Committee, on growing interference in British politics by Russia, including large scale funding of the Conservative Party by Russian oligarchs – it finally arrived the following Summer. The Conservatives sought to make Brexit the main Election issue, and were helped by the Brexit Party, set up by Nigel Farage (previously leader of the now rapidly declining UKIP), not opposing sitting Conservative MPs. Labour proposed a programme that would end austerity, and rebuild the NHS plus other public services. Labour aimed to negotiate an improved deal with the EU, and put this to a second referendum, with an option to remain rather than leave.

    When the results were announced, the Conservatives had 365 MPs, and an 80 seat majority. Labour were reduced to 202 MPs, their worst total since 1935, largely due to the loss of support in areas that voted to leave the EU. Despite great proclamations from Farage, who lacked the courage to actually stand as a candidate, the Brexit Party failed to win any seats. When the new Parliament opened, Johnson’s government reintroduced the EU Withdrawal Agreement Bill. It became law eight days before the UK left the European Union, the latter event taking place on January 31 2020. This ended the era of EEC / EU membership, which had lasted 47 years, and the UK entered a transition period, due to expire at the end of 2020.

    The first UK cases of the Covid-19 Coronavirus pandemic were diagnosed on the day that Brexit took place. Johnson and his government, particularly Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, took little action to alert the public to the scale of the danger. Johnson announced, on March 3, “I was at a hospital the other night, where I think a few there were actually Coronavirus patients, and I shook hands with everybody, you’ll be pleased to know, and I continue to shake hands”. Johnson’s handshakes were politeness turned into pure irresponsibility. Pressure from NHS staff, opposition parties, scientists, and the wider public, prompted action, as the death toll rose. The government belatedly started to recommend social distancing, and closed schools, but Johnson did not announce a national lockdown until March 23.

    Hancock had declared the NHS to be ready for the spread of the illness, back in January. In the following months, testimony from NHS staff, and patients, showed this was not true. Hospitals that were struggling, due to underfunding during a decade of austerity, suddenly had to deal with additional admissions of Covid patients. There was a shortage of ventilators, despite claims by the government that they were urgently arranging to increase production and acquisition, while many frontline health workers lacked the required Personal Protective Equipment (PPE). The UK rapidly suffered one of the largest Covid death totals, per head of population, in the world, and this continued to be the case for many months.

    In late May, it was revealed that Dominic Cummings, the chief advisor to Johnson, plus the former’s wife, Mary Wakefield, had deliberately broken lockdown, while they were both ill with Covid, taking a trip from London to Durham. Wakefield and Cummings had also published a false account, claiming that they stayed in London, self-isolating, while unwell. Despite widespread public anger, and political pressure, Johnson refused to dismiss Cummings. A few months later, Cummings departed from his role, having upset Carrie Symonds, who was Johnson’s partner, and a person with a disproportionately large influence in a power struggle within Downing Street. Lockdown eased over the late Spring and Summer, with pubs and restaurants re-opening, and then schools returned to normal in September. These events caused a rise in Covid cases, to which Johnson and his government reacted with a delayed second lockdown, lasting four weeks, from early November to the start of December. Post-Brexit negotiations between the UK government and the EU took place at intervals during the transition period, with increasing concern that unrealistic demands from Johnson’s team could prevent a trade deal being agreed. An agreement was finally announced onChristmas Eve, following which Parliament approved legislation on December 30, and the European Union (Future Relationship) Act 2020 received Royal Assent on the last day of a tumultuous year.  

    Johnson announced a third lockdown, on January 4 2021, as the numbers of Covid cases, and deaths, moved towards a peak higher than in the first wave, the previous Spring. Throughout the pandemic, the government displayed a grotesque combination of incompetence and corruption. The co-ordination of the national Covid test and trace system was outsourced to Serco, a private company with links to the Conservative Party, rather than being led by the NHS. Edward Argar, one of the Conservative Health ministers, was a former executive at Serco. The current chief executive of the company, Rupert Soames, was the brother of Nicholas Soames, a recently-retired Conservative MP, and grandson of Winston Churchill. The Serco system failed to be effective, despite a massive budget, which increased to £37 billion in March 2021. The government also awarded hundreds of multi-million pound contracts to private companies, for the procurement of PPE. Many of these contracts went to organisations, with little or no experience in PPE, run by people who were donors to the Conservatives, or friends of the party’s MPs. In an attempt to conceal the extent of the PPE scandal, Matt Hancock delayed publication of the contracts, which led to a High Court ruling, during February 2021, that he had acted unlawfully. The Covid death total in the UK reached 126,000 people in March 2021, based on the government’s preferred measure, which was a death within 28 days of a positive test. A more realistic record showed a higher figure, as more than 149,000 people had Covid recorded as a cause on their death certificate.

The Assault on Truth

Peter Oborne

The Assault on Truth: Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Emergence of a New Moral Barbarism

I read this book with a combination of fascination and horror, but not really surprise. Most of the ground covered will be painfully familiar to anyone who is an afficionado of politics. Peter Oborne is a political journalist, formerly part of the mainstream media consensus – writing for the Spectator and Daily Telegraph, either side of a spell at an unspeakable tabloid (think of something that rhymes with fail) – who has started to take a more critical line in recent years.

“The Assault on Truth” looks at Boris Johnson’s spell as Prime Minister, from its start in July 2019, through until late 2020. Oborne draws comparisons between Johnson’s antics and those of Donald Trump, the President of the USA – elected in 2016, defeated in November 2020, but still refusing to accept the latter result when the postscript to this book was written, over a month later.    

The basic premiss is that Johnson, following the lead of Trump, and joined by his all-too-loyal allies in the current Conservative government, constantly tells lies. At the same time, Johnson and his ministers do not receive the level of challenge, especially from the mass media, that the public have a right to expect in a supposedly democratic society. Oborne makes his point with many examples of Johnson’s repeated falsehoods. These are evidenced by extensive footnotes, in which Oborne directs the reader to media reports – many available online – with contemporary accounts of what Johnson said.

As an aside, the layout chosen, with footnotes appearing on the page to which they relate, rather than being gathered at the end of each chapter, or even the end of the book, makes for a smooth read – I wish more authors / editors / publishers (delete as applicable) would use this approach.

I was particularly struck by the second chapter, which details lots of lies told by Johnson, and other ministers, during the 2019 General Election campaign. As a public servant, who works in the National Health Service, I was outraged by Johnson’s repeated lie that his government were building forty new hospitals. Oborne points out the reality was agreed funding to rebuild six existing hospitals, with the possibility of further work at other hospitals across several years. At the same time, Johnson was claiming his government were investing a record amount of extra funding in the NHS. Oborne points out that, in real terms, the proposed increase was lower than that achieved by the last Labour government, a decade earlier.

The sorry catalogue of Johnson’s Election lies, ranging from Brexit to the suppression of a Parliamentary report on Russian interference in British politics, his misrepresentation of the Labour Party and Jeremy Corbyn, along with much else, were amplified by inaccurate adverts on Facebook. The Conservative Party Twitter account even pretended to be a fact checking service – literally creating “fake news”.

Johnson and the Conservative Party won the December 2019 Election, with a majority of 80 seats, giving them power to push ahead with an agenda previously kept in check by precarious Parliamentary numbers. A few weeks later, the Covid pandemic spread across the world. Oborne looks at the way in which Johnson and Trump, showmen who lent themselves to good coverage, by an admiring media, had built on this to create a populist political base, and then win power. Neither man, however, was equipped to deal with the tragic reality of the Covid crisis, leading to massive death tolls in both the UK and USA.

Oborne draws attention to the relatively successful response to Covid in Germany, a country led by Angela Merkel, a “conservative” woman with a background in science. Jacinda Adern, the Prime Minister of New Zealand, a nation of two islands which has eradicated Covid from its shores, gets a single mention. Adern is both a woman and left wing. In April 2020, Jeremy Corbyn was replaced as Labour leader by Sir Keir Starmer, praised by his supporters for “forensic” attention to detail, but sadly failing to expose the dishonesty of Johnson in the way that Oborne, a right wing journalist, manages in this book.

In Oborne’s analysis, political lying on a vast scale was first practised in Britain by Tony Blair, the New Labour Prime Minister, who thought his dishonesty served a greater good. After 18 years of Conservative government, led by the ruthless Margaret Thatcher, and the gentlemanly John Major, the latter of whom was surrounded by Tory MPs embroiled in sleaze – the polite 1990s word for corruption is now making a comeback – Blair liked to believe he offered a fresh start. Blair lied about the reasons for the illegal Iraq war, and many other things. Blair gave way to Gordon Brown, after which Labour were replaced in power by the Tories, with David Cameron and Theresa May as premiers. 

Oborne tells us that Brown, Cameron, and May “were capable of being devious” in “the pattern of worldly twentieth-century prime ministers like Harold Wilson and John Major”. On the other hand, Brown, Cameron, and May “were not habitual liars, and all three were driven (like Wilson and Major before them) by a sense of public duty and integrity”. Perhaps I am biased, as a member of the Labour Party (and very much on the Socialist wing), but I must differ with Oborne’s suggestion that Cameron and May offered an honest Conservatism. There were a lot of scandals in the Cameron and May governments – the latter was even found to be in contempt of Parliament – while many ministers from those years easily transitioned to the Johnson regime.

There are some interesting digressions into political history and philosophy. Oborne recalls his meeting John Profumo, late in the life of the latter man. Profumo, a Tory Cabinet Minister, famously lied to Parliament in 1963, denying his affair with Christine Keeler, but then admitted the lie, and resigned not just from government but from all political activity. Such things do not happen when politicians lie nowadays.

Oborne refers to Edmund Burke being “the nearest thing we have to a conservative philosopher”. The quote is from Chapter Nine (page 160), in a passage that virtually repeats comments from near the end of Chapter Eight (pages 145-146). There are other instances in the book of repetition – perhaps a reprint, after better proof reading, may follow! Oborne’s estimation of Burke follows the generally accepted view, but there has been much muddled Conservative Party thinking along the way. Burke, an eighteenth century MP and writer, was a Whig for most of his life, before becoming a Tory in his final years. I am admittedly pedantic at times, but must question Oborne’s statement that the Tory Party / Conservative Party “was founded around 1834”. The names are often regarded as interchangeable in political parlance, but the Tory Party dates from way back in 1681, and was renamed the Conservative Party in 1830. Oborne is probably thinking of the “Tamworth Manifesto”, issued in 1834 by Robert Peel, a Conservative Prime Minister. This Election manifesto failed to actually mention the party Peel led!

The mention of barbarism in the sub-title of the book had me thinking of the choice, posed by Marxists, between Socialism and barbarism. The idea appears to have originated with Karl Kautsky, and been developed by Rosa Luxembourg, both of whom were influenced by suggestions from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. None of these people get a mention from Oborne, but he does draw upon a British Socialist, namely George Orwell.

Oborne looks at Orwell’s dystopian novel, “Nineteen Eighty-Four” (published in 1949), with its re-writing of history, and suggests – at less than a totalitarian level – the Johnson government are doing something similar. This is combined with a mention of “The Prevention of Literature” (1946), my favourite among Orwell’s many brilliant essays.

There are other references to Orwell in the book, and I see echoes of our greatest political writer in the conversational prose style adopted by Oborne, which make for an engaging read. Indeed “The Assault on Truth” is strangely reminiscent of Orwell’s almost forgotten book, “The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius”, a 1941 analysis of our nation, and pointer towards a post-war Britain, which quickly proved prescient, as a radical Labour government was elected four years later.     

“The Assault on Truth” was published on February 4 this year, a fortnight after Trump departed office. The last few weeks have seen the case against Johnson accelerate, with a series of revelations about misconduct from himself, and other ministers. A two minute video by Peter Stefanovic, exposing lies Johnson has told to Parliament, has been watched 15,500,000 times on social media. The video has been endorsed by a variety of figures, ranging from Oborne to Caroline Lucas, the Green Party MP, who has mentioned it in Parliament. Another champion of the video is Alistair Campbell, who was the spin doctor in chief for the Blair government (yes people are seeing the irony!). Campbell challenged the BBC, when being interviewed by them, to show the video, but they are declining to do so. The same is the case with ITV, Channel 4, and Sky.

Political pundits on television are starting to raise questions about allegations of cronyism, and sleaze, in the Johnson government. Strangely these commentators, who had no problem detecting, and reporting on, the daily lies and corruption of the Trump regime in the USA, are still reticent to point out that the Johnson government in the UK follow the same blueprint.