Boris stumbles at Rishi’s mended fences

On 6 May 2021, there was a parliamentary by-election in the constituency of Hartlepool, an archetypal “red wall” seat once held by the former Labour heavyweight, Peter Mandelson. The Conservative candidate, Jill Mortimer, took the seat from Labour with 51.9% of the vote, a 16% swing to the Conservatives on a turnout of 47.2%, not a bad poll for a by-election. It was only the second time since 1982 that a governing party had won a by-election and the first time the Conservatives took the seat since 1974.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson visited the constituency on 23 April to canvass for Ms. Mortimer. To co-incide with his visit. a group who designated themselves as The Wombles of Hartlepool (but who chose to retain individual anonymity) mounted a 30-feet high blimp of the Prime Minister in a typically ebullient pose at the end of the local pier.

According to the Hartlepool Mail, the move was part of a project to make people smile and help showcase the town in a positive light. They said that this was the first in an intended series — though my googling did not detect any successor blimp yet to Mr. Johnson. The Prime Minister was their first choice — to mark the opening up of the country after a COVID lockdown. They claimed the blimp had been ordered before the announcement of the by-election date. It remained in place until after the by-election.

In the week before the by-election, a “row” “blew up” between the UK and France over alleged tardiness in the issuing of licenses to French boats to fish off Jersey, a right that had been curtailed by Brexit. Speaking in the Assemblée Nationale, the French Minister for Maritime Affairs, Annick Girardin, proclaimed the delays as unacceptable and mused that the transmission of electricity by underwater cable to Jersey from France might be used as leverage in the dispute.

As French fishers planned to mount a blockade of the port of St. Helier on 6 May, the UK Ministry of Defence announced the night before that two Royal Navy vessels were being dispatched to the area. On the morning of the by-election, the Prime Minister himself confirmed that the vessels would “remain in place to monitor the situation as a precautionary measure”. I’m sure that lost him no votes in the by-election.

This was probably the high watermark of the era of performative government, politics as deliberate public theatre, presided over by Mr. Johnson: Britannia unchained or buccaneering Britain with a cheerful, cheeky chappy at the helm. Boris bestrode Britain, not just Hartlepool, like a colossus. Blustery bombast was the lingua franca of the hour.

A general election had been comfortably won in December 2019 on the back of an oven-ready Brexit deal. The election victory allowed the deal to be cooked. The UK exited the EU in January 2020. A “bare bones” (no tariffs, no quotas) trade deal was settled and transition arrangements ended a year later.

Any unease over the handling of COVID through 2020 was muted if not dispelled by the speedy vaccine rollout from late 2021, a success spiced by the EU’s apparent hapless and desperate scrambling to secure adequate vaccine supplies for its own people. Though in the end, the mortality rate from COVID in the EU was lower than for the UK.

But in those early months of 2021, there were early serious whiffs of an unsavoury odour of mutual irritation, recrimination, posturing and finger pointing surrounding the special Brexit arrangements for Northern Ireland designed to enable the region to operate commercially as normal within both the UK and the EU Single Market and Customs Union. On 20 April, Mr. Johnson described the issues in characteristic terms to a BBC Spotlight programme:

What we are doing is what I think is removing the unnecessary protuberances and barriers that have grown up and we are getting the barnacles off the thing and sandpapering into shape…

If it looks as though the EU is going to be very dogmatic about it and we continue to [be in an] absurd situation so you can’t bring in rose bushes with British soil into Northern Ireland, you can’t bring British sausages into Northern Ireland, then frankly I’m going to, we’ll have to take further steps.

The remaining 15 months of Mr. Johnson’s premiership was a dialogue of the deaf mixing desultory “technical discussions” and “Who me? Yes you!” public proclamations in which the UK’s insistence on the impossible (effectively the evisceration of the Protocol) was met by matching EU coyness to elaborate expansively on the flexibility that might be possible in its operation — “we have some great cards to offer you, but we can only show you if you really want to play”. The engine of the dialogue rumbled, sometimes noisily, but the vehicle stayed stuck in the mud, wheels spinning pointlessly.

Until last week.

Before pronouncing on where we are as a result, some caveats.

So much of what passes for news coverage in the rolling wave of current affairs media is not information about stuff that is actually happening but “analysis” of what has happened and speculation about what might happen next and later. Second, when I say “happen” I am not speaking only of “things” that happen in the sense of making the world look, sound or feel a bit different. Much of the raw material on which the voracious vulture that is the media machine feeds is only stuff that is “said” very often to set the media off running in a particular direction. Third, the alliance between the media and those who feed it raw material to chew on is an unholy one to further their interests rather than our knowledge.

“Contributors” want to promote their agenda. The media wants to move issues along, preferably in a way that holds its audience in that uncertain tension between fear and excitement — a bit like the subject of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” — unable to watch or listen, but unable to tear ourselves away either. The media doesn’t control the direction of the story. Things get swept into and cast aside from its involuntary flow accidentally and casually. It is an orchestra with neither score nor conductor, obliged to play relentlessly 24/7.

For several weeks before last week, we witnessed a Niagara Falls of verbiage on whether there would be a Protocol related agreement, when it might come, what might be in it and how people would react to it. Most of that was immediately rendered redundant by the choreographed events in Windsor on 27 February including the publication of the separate documents by the EU and UK Governments. Now, we are in a period of lingering uncertainty about the impact those events will have.

A week on from the release of the documents, my guess is that they will effectively close down the Protocol issue as an open wound within the Conservative Party and in the relationship between the UK Government and the EU. They MIGHT lead to the restoration of the political institutions in Stormont, but the UK Government is more likely to press on regardless. And I venture nobody else can say any wiser with assurance now although plenty more will pretend to.

But we can say a few things that are important.

First, the seductive slogans bedevil politics everywhere these days, but they have been especially virulent in the UK. An “oven ready” deal sounds much better than a deal that is merely “agreed” or “settled”. The phrase has a bit of fizz to it, but it tells us nothing additional about the quality of the deal. Similarly, “levelling up” sounds wonderful. Who could possibly be against everyone and everywhere getting prizes even of different sizes? Everybody is a winner and nobody a loser in this abstract verbal metaverse. But a pithy phrase is not a policy, let alone a strategy and least of all an implementation plan detailed down to specific steps and timelines. The same for “Taking back control” and “Getting Brexit done”. Both sound great, but are actually vacuous. Control is still elusive and Brexit is still being done.

Second, and in the same vein, though sound policies are rarely simple and simple policies rarely sound, sometimes “simple” and “policy” can hang together with some coherence. For example, “Lower taxes!” is clear enough as an intended course of action — and who does not like paying less tax? But outlining the full effects of whatever reductions are proposed is a less reliable guessing game. Untested short cuts leave you lost more often than they bring you home faster. Before the Brexit deal was done, “No deal” had a wisp of coherence as a policy and a lot of apparent simplicity but would have been fiendishly complicated and destructive in implementation. Fostering “sovereignty” is a virtuous policy but no country is a metaphorical island just as no man ever was.

Take the general Johnson/Frost/Truss ostensible modus operandi with the EU. Call their bluff. Face them down long enough and they will eventually give way. That nonsense rooted in smug superiority rather than empirical reality frightens nobody. It just irritates them — in its substance, its pointlessness and the implied insult of your negotiating partner being of inferior character. Mr. Sunak’s performance has reminded us that civility is not a synonym for servility. When he speaks of the UK’s European friends, you can imagine he might mean it. When Mr. Johnson spoke of “our European friends and partners”, it was drippingly plain that he did not.

Third and relatedly, framing negotiating dynamics as win-lose, zero sum games — and especially doing so publicly — leaves you more likely to end up with closer to an empty purse than the full pot. In both its exit deal and its trade deal, the UK wound up with the lowest common denominator of what was achievable, not a crumb of cake in sight, because it shunned as weakness the notion of a collaborative pursuit of the highest common factor.

Relatedly again, credible and trust bound negotiation does not travel well with publicly dispensed self-serving commentary to media courtiers on what is going on along the way. It is a sorry reflection on contemporary British politics that something so obvious should require mention.

Fourth, being good “craic” or the kind of person you might fancy going for a pint with is not an argument for placing somebody in a position of political responsibility. It is not a disqualifier but can very often be an amber light. The best conmen are as good as they are because they are practiced ingratiators.

Relatedly, government of boosterism at home and gunboat diplomacy abroad died with the Victorian age. Churchill’s wartime ascendancy was the bounce that confirmed the death of that cat and Churchill took office in 1940 with decades of high level government, military and other relevant experience. Mr. Johnson had a couple of years as Foreign Secretary.

Domestic government and international relations are serious complex activities. It might be more fun to have a comedian perform keyhole surgery but a qualified doctor is more likely to deliver a successful outcome. Harnessing the government machine requires competence, discipline and commitment, willingness to expend a great deal of time and perspiration mastering briefs rather than winging it on native wit and inspiration.

Rishi’s riches will always be a millstone around his political neck. Likewise that he looks and sounds like the head prefect at a distinguished public school anxious to please the headmaster — and an evening out with him might not be a barrel of laughs. But, for now at least, he enjoys the inestimable esteem of having shot Johnson’s fox.

Johnson’s response to the Windsor Framework? He had to say something because he couldn’t bear to say nothing. His response reeked of resentment that his successor had achieved a result that totally eluded him. The UK had essentially accepted Brussels’ terms. The deal might work or it might not. But, if it didn’t, the answer was more hardball “no matter how much plaster came off the ceiling in Brussels”, because it was the hardball of the NI Protocol Bill that had brought Brussels to negotiate at all. You could see he was going through the motions, the old routine sounding tired rather than impish. The audience shuffled restlessly in their seats. Yesterday’s man for now. But Rishi should gather about him a stack of bibles, sharp stakes, crucifixes and garlic bulbs, in case Boris tries to resurrect himself as tomorrow’s.