How many more times does it need to happen? How much more proof do we need that the country is run by a man with contempt for the rule of law, who believes that he and his friends are beyond its reach?
Jonathan Freedland www.theguardian.com
Boris Johnson demonstrated that again to the nation this week, as vividly as he could. Faced with the prospect that Owen Paterson, a comrade from the Brexit trenches of 2016, would be punished for what parliament’s standards committee called “an egregious case of paid advocacy”, Johnson instructed MPs to let his chum off the hook. The prime minister’s orders, dutifully followed by 250 of his troops, were to halt Paterson’s 30-day suspension from the House of Commons and to scrap the system that had found him guilty, replacing it with one that would be gentler in its treatment of Conservatives – because Conservatives would design it and dominate it.
The move was shocking because it was so brazen, not because it was novel. For this was merely the latest instance of Johnson deciding that an ally clearly in breach of the rules should escape all consequence. The roll call should be familiar by now. When Dominic Cummings decided the national lockdown did not really apply to him, Johnson stood by him. When Robert Jenrick fast-tracked an “unlawful” planning decision that would save Richard Desmond, a Tory donor, £45m in local taxes, Jenrick stayed in his post. When Priti Patel’s bullying behaviour was found to be a violation of the ministerial code, she too kept her job. If you’re on Team Johnson, the normal rules don’t apply.
Sometimes it’s about rewarding loyalty or a valuable favour. So when the Lords Appointments Commission decided that another Tory donor, Peter Cruddas, was not fit to receive a peerage, Johnson gave him one anyway. But just as often, the prime minister’s disregard for the rules extends to the gravest matters of state.
One of his first acts in office was to suspend parliament altogether, a move struck down by a unanimous supreme court. Later he proposed post-Brexit legislation that a cabinet minister cheerfully admitted on the floor of the Commons would break international law.
Johnson does not regard even those laws he himself put on the statute book as binding. An impeccable source reports that, at the G7 meeting in Cornwall, the prime minister told French president Emmanuel Macron that he had only “sort of” signed the Northern Ireland protocol, currently the cause of so much tension between the two countries.
And sometimes these two elements – favours for pals and rule-breaking in matters of state – come together. The most obvious example is in the bonanza of Covid-related contracts handed out to chums at the start of the pandemic, with a “high priority” VIP lane created for those lucky enough to be in a minister’s contacts book. That created a stampede of ministerial mates, often hawking goods or services that didn’t work, which both cost taxpayers’ £2.8bn and wasted precious civil service time. As the Good Law Project’s Jolyon Maugham puts it: “So keen were they to get their mates to the trough they interfered with getting the right stuff.”
Even the Paterson case’s ugliest aspect – retrospectively changing the rules to produce a desired outcome – is becoming all too familiar. This week the government rewrote the job spec for the new chair of Ofcom after its favoured candidate, the former Daily Mail editor and ardent Brexiteer Paul Dacre, failed to meet the initial standard. Handily, the new job description is receptive to a more, ahem, confrontational candidate.
The pattern is now clear. Rules that might hold the government to account, that might act as a check on its power, are either to be ignored or rewritten. The bodies that enforce those rules are similarly to be hobbled or neutered in the name of “reform”. Johnson wanted to do that this week to the parliamentary standards system, adding it to a target list that already includes the courts and the electoral commission. Meanwhile, his culture secretary threatens the BBC, announcing that fearless questioning of the prime minister by one of its interviewers has cost the organisation “a lot of money”.
We hesitate to use the word because it sounds so hyperbolic, but this is how the slide to authoritarianism begins. Not as it was in the old newsreels, with strutting dictators and balcony speeches, but with cronyism and special treatment; with enforcement of the law for “them” and exemptions for “us”; with the steady weakening and eventual removal of the constraints on government power. It is the dismantling, bit by bit, block by block, of the apparatus that holds up a liberal democracy.
I spoke with a minister late on Thursday who, though furious over the Paterson debacle – “It’s a total car crash” – rejected the notion that Johnson is like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán in Eton tails. “This was the Brexit gang looking after one of its own,” he said. Johnson keeps making special dispensations for his friends not out of a power-crazed desire to demolish the democratic architecture, but because “he wants to be liked … It’s a damaged neediness.” Add to that, he says, a Vote Leave self-righteousness that tells itself: “Elites have let the country down; we don’t have to follow their norms.”
Even if you buy all that, it doesn’t matter. It’s not the motive for Johnson’s actions that counts but their impact. He didn’t get his way this time: fury from usually supportive newspapers and on the Tory benches forced a rapid climbdown. But this was what he wanted, and what most of his MPs were ready to give him – a shredding of the rules to ensure those in power are unbound, and ever harder to remove.
East Devon Watch 