Clang, clang, clang, went the trolley. Ding, ding, ding went the bell.
Published in 1968, The Best of Myles is a selection of the Cruiskeen Lawn columns in The Irish Times contributed by Brian O’Nolan under the pseudonym Myles na Gopaleen from 1940 until his death in 1966.
The book clusters the columns thematically in individual chapters. One set is gathered under the heading Bores. Christmas is fertile country for regurgitated cliché. I am still seething at seeing my first “glowing” television advertisement on 2 November: a thin veneer of ersatz mystery and wonder coating a battering ram of commercial messaging.
Myles assembles a rogues’ gallery of conversational opening gambits about the so-called “season” from which one should immediately run a mile (if your bore detector is in decent working order).
Christmas? Do you know I wish it was over.
Christmas? Do you know, I always think it is a sad time.
Do you know what is the hardest day of the year to get through?
Some other classic bores. There is the Man Who Spoke Irish At A Time When It Was Neither Profitable Nor Popular and wants to waste an hour of your life telling you all about it. Or the man (yes, most of his subjects are men) who challenges you to guess how old he is, imagining that he looks 20 years younger than he actually does. And the man who knows the ONLY way to pack a suitcase properly and insists on instructing you in smug detail.
But the type I want to focus on today, he describes as ‘the one who is mortally curious to know “how is it done?”’, this supreme interrogatory formula delivered as the climax to a lengthy narrative of human behaviour that appears to contravene with impunity the laws of God, man, nature and science, the conclusion already visible from the outset of the story.
In mid-October, The Irish Examiner published a column by Fergus Finlay under the headline:
How is Britain still backing Boris Johnson?
The immediate pretext for his reflections was the publication of a report by a parliamentary committee on which Tory MPs comprised a majority about Britain’s handling of the COVID pandemic. Couched in the careful, unhysterical mandarin prose of such documents, the report is nonetheless inescapably scathing in its multiple criticisms of the government’s performance. Terms like “serious error”, “major deficiencies”, “operational inadequacy” are tossed around liberally like confetti.
Mr. Finlay concludes indignantly:
Do you think a report like that, that excoriated government failure and was written by some of its most heavyweight backbenchers would dominate the news agenda here? Do you think the government might be under heavy pressure over it? Resignations, even?
To which we are expected to roar a collective resounding: “YES! Surely, it would be so!”
Instead, he informs us, Boris Johnson didn’t respond to the report. He was on holidays, painting in a lavish Spanish villa lent to him by a mate, doing his best impression of Winston Churchill in repose, returning only in time for his party’s annual conference to which he delivered a speech of windy waffling and joking that ignored the pandemic, empty supermarket shelves, queues at petrol stations.
In Mr. Finlay’s view, the man is a charlatan. Reckless, feckless, self-indulgent in the extreme, devoid of any sense of moral value, he “doesn’t even believe in the core ideological values of the party he leads.”
Yet, Mr. Johnson and his party enjoy clear and consistent leads in public opinion polls.
Mr. Finlay winds up the conclusion which is flagged by the headline and is visibly and audibly rushing towards us like an oncoming train from early on:
…they seem willing to forgive Boris Johnson almost anything. All the lies, all the mismanagement, all the self-indulgence. His country is at serious risk of economic collapse, and they’re buying his line that it’s all just part of the transition to greatness. He’s already been re-elected once and looks likely to be re-elected again. If you can explain it to me, send me a postcard. Because I just don’t get it.
Before addressing Mr. Finlay’s question, it may be obvious but merits noting that there are two separate issues in play here. One is whether Mr. Johnson should be able to get away with this? On that, my emotional sympathies are largely with Mr. Finlay. It is a pity that he does, but that’s how it is.
Though related to the first question, how Mr. Johnson does get away with it is a different matter.
I want to suggest a few reasons.
If you and your friend are walking in the woods and encounter a hungry bear on the warpath, survival doesn’t require you to be able to run faster than the bear, only faster than your friend. Mr. Johnson enjoys considerable advantages over the opposition seeking to outrun him. The Conservative party has won 11 of the 18 elections and been in government for 46 of the 70 years since 1951. Within the past decade, two structural developments have weighted the odds even more in its favour.
First, the rise of the Scottish National party to overwhelming dominance in Westminster elections over the past decade has been at the expense of Labour which was previously entrenched as the comfortably majoritarian party in Scotland.
Second, largely as a consequence of Brexit, the Tories tightened their grip on England between 2015 and 2019. In 2015, the UK Independence Party (UKIP) won 3.9 million votes across the UK, 3.6 million of them in England. Brexit and pseudo-concept of UK Independence are essentially Englsih phenomena. Two years later, with the principle of Brexit established by the previous year’s referendum, UKIP’s national vote collapsed to 594,000, 557,000 of them cast in England. At least as many of the deserters fled to Labour as to the Tories in 2017. But, in 2019, the Tories offered to the electorate a leader whose commitment to Brexit was much more full-throated, urgent and determined than that of his predecessor and who was able to offer an “oven ready” deal to boot. The Tories gained 48 seats in England alone. That figure matched their gains across the entire country and gave them an overall majority of 80 seats. Indeed, the 345 out of 543 seats they won in England would have yielded a comfortable overall majority of the 650 seats in Westminster on its own.
With UKIP put to the sword, the Tories now have sole ownership on the franchise of what might loosely be called the political “right” with a cluster of left wing and others (Labour, Liberal, Scottish Nationalists) to its left, a clear government option on the right and only vagueness on the left. Labour’s prospects are further dented by Mr. Johnson having placed his policy tanks firmly on Labour’s front lawn, rhetorically at least. The Tories are no longer the nasty party — domestically at any rate. Yes, its not terribly keen on foreigners (except maybe Russian oligarchs), still anxious about law n’order, but more concerned about schools n’ hospitals, dismissive of business, green to its very core and with a special place in its heart for the NHS — as well as “owning” Brexit. Their clothes stolen, Labour seems flaccid and floundering, chasing rather than dictating the agenda.
Which brings us nicely to COVID which, in the UK, was a game of two halves. The first, from March to December 2020 was a sequence of seat-of-the-pants bungling mediocrity. But, in the public mind, this seems to have been largely, possibly entirely, redeemed by the vaccine rollout which makes up the second half.
Never mind that the story varnishes the truth. The rollout was not enabled by Brexit and, by now, many EU countries have caught up with, indeed surpassed, the UK’s vaccination coverage. In the public mind, the government’s COVID performance has been something of a “wash” or a “draw”. But a draw in which your team has come from three goals behind at half time seems closer to a win. Of course, the COVID drama may be embarked on a third “half”, the outcome of which is uncertain, but for now, past performance isn’t hurting Mr. Johnson.
Last, let’s talk about resignations. There is a harking back to an alleged golden era in British and, indeed, Irish politics when Ministers and/or entire governments supposedly resigned for even the lightest breach in conduct or competence. In Ireland, ironically, the exemplar most frequently cited is Phil Hogan who resigned as a junior minister in 1995 when his special advisor faxed details of the upcoming budget to journalists only hours before they were announced in the Dáil. Mind you, even then, his resignation was not entirely voluntary, no more than his resignation as European Commissioner 25 years later.
In Britain, Lord Carrington resigned voluntarily as Foreign Secretary in 1982, accepting full responsibility for the policy and management failures implied by Argentina’s invasion of the Falkland Islands. The former Northern Ireland Secretary and European Commissioner, Peter Mandelson, resigned from Tony Blair’s cabinet, not once but twice over what might justifiably be termed as issues of standards rather than policy or administrative failures.
But in my lifetime, no British Prime Minister has resigned over such matters — or even come close. In Ireland, when Charles Haughey resigned in 1992 and Albert Reynolds in 1994, it was only because Fianna Fáil’s coalition partners of the time would otherwise have brought down the government. No Irish Minister for Health has resigned in recent times despite no shortage of “system failures” leading to the loss of people’s lives. If the hepatitis C “scandal” of the 1990s is too long ago to linger in the memory, the cervical smear testing “scandal” of three years ago is not.
Political journalists and commentators, whether the professionals of published or broadcast media or the amateurs of the Twitter sphere and other social media, are, I suspect, much more concerned about perceived breaches of public standards of conduct or competence than ordinary members of the public. The latter might consider them a black mark but not grounds for immediate disqualification.
For the public, government and politics are comparatively incidental features of life. They might moan or feel good about incidents and aspects between times, but they are largely content to express their feelings at the ballot box, leave it at that and , otherwise, get on with ordinary everyday life.
For the anoraks, however, obsessive intensity about politics and political fortunes rule. Every dawn is a new day in which to assert the ascendancy and excitement of chaos and discontinuity over enduring order and normality. Every bump or wrinkle is a crisis or a catastrophe with ripple effects extending to eternity, an open and shut “bang to rights” moment offering at least the glimmer of rolling heads, enduring instability, regime change or an early election. Or so, they would like to think.
Mr. Johnson has been around the political game long enough to know that today’s headline normally ends its life as tomorrow’s fish and chip wrapping, not the first draft of history. While there may still be gaps on supermarket shelves, petrol is flowing freely again. Britain is certainly hurt by Brexit, but it is not collapsing. The grim days of 2020 COVID were overtaken by the glory days of 2021 vaccine rollout, salutary reminder of the folly of rushed judgement. The vortex of the media cycle is like a shark. It must keep moving or die — and move on it does.
And, to some extent Mr. Johnson has spiked at least some of the media guns trained on him. While he has never positively accepted the picture of him painted by Mr. Finlay and many others, he has never attempted to project himself as a model of personal virtue either.
But, if Mr. Johnson looks undeservedly invulnerable for the time being, remember that most political careers do indeed end in failure eventually. Mrs. Thatcher won her third general election in 1987 with an overall majority of 102 seats. Just over three later, she was defenestrated by her own party. Bertie Ahern was gone within a year of winning his third successive general election in 2007.
The anoraks and the naysayers see every bump in the road as having serious potential to unhorse the leader, but they are like the economist who predicted nine of the last three recessions. They rarely get it right and, when they eventually do, they are the second last to realise to realise that they have done so. Leaders themselves seem to be the last to realise that their tide has ebbed and their welcome outstayed.
It is rarely the product of a single instant or incident. Like Hemingway’s description of bankruptcy, the decline occurs first gradually, then suddenly. Perhaps last week’s hamfisted attempt to prevent the short suspension from parliament of Owen Paterson may be a turning point. It is certainly a black mark. And the polls have tightened in the weeks since Mr. Finlay’s article.
Having burnt his own fingers on parliamentary standards, as Mr. Johnson considers whether to “trigger” Article 16 of the Northern Ireland Protocol, an act that could spiral into a major trade war with the EU, he might consider whether his confidence in his own convictions of the moment is as much his greatest liability as his greatest asset.
Maybe he should pay more attention to how and where he steers his shopping trolley.
