Three. Word. Slogan.
Stop. The. Boats. It’s funny what power a three word slogan can have, isn’t it?
“Take Back Control”, “Strong and Stable”, “Hands. Face. Space”. When you think about it for more than a fleeting moment, it’s telling that every one of these three word slogans that has been deployed in recent times by the government has mostly been a diversionary exercise to cover up the fact that they didn’t actually know what they were doing in each specific case.
The Brexit vote came with the Leave camp not quite knowing what they wanted when they were asking for it, nor what the consequences were. This was then followed by three years of arguing between the factions to work out what “Leave the EU” actually meant in the first place, and how they wanted to do it. Even now, after seven years, most of us don’t quite know what the full extent of the damage is, or how long it will continue. Then came COVID, and we are currently having the fears of just how lacking in clue things were all too conclusively confirmed.
Another week has passed at the COVID enquiry, this time taken up with Worzel Scummidge himself arriving early (though not in a fridge) to avoid the scrutiny of relatives of those who’d died of the disease, to then sit in his chair like a week-old sack of semolina laced with dog shit, trying hard not to untie the Gordian knot of his own inadequacy and incompetence in a public place. Quietly the lead KC, Hugo Keith, has gone about his unassuming business. In the process he has demonstrated what many of us had known for a very long time: Johnson was a man unfit for the weight of public office, and incapable of leadership. He was nominally in charge of a government of his own choosing, in his own image, who were all similarly unable to do the job. If you were of a more cynical cast, as I am, you might well think that they were chosen for their roles for exactly that reason: competence is not a good thing to possess in a government of self-promoters and arse kissers, where the ability to actually do things might show up the “World King” for exactly what he was, and will forever remain: a self-absorbed lightweight, who was happy to be continually tendentious if he thought it would burnish his own myth. I sometimes wonder what the late Douglas Adams would have made of Johnson, and Trump in the US, given how he wrote the all too prescient character of Zaphod Beeblebrox over forty years ago.
Next week, in a not wryly unamusing way to some of us, Sunak will sit in that same seat, and it will be his turn to have us all reminded of his numerous shortcomings by Mr Keith at possibly the worst time for him. On Tuesday his latest attempt to call black white will be dragged back into the Commons as the government introduces its latest Rwanda Bill. This will attempt, sometime before the heat death of the Universe, or an election¹, to manage to finally send a single person applying for asylum there. It’s not a good look when the number of people you have so far managed to put on a plane to Rwanda numbers three, and they’ve all been Home Secretary. Already, most of his own side are telling him it will not work, though for wildly differing reasons. In one ear he has his party’s almost sensible wing trying to keep him vaguely in the territory of the sane. In the other, he has the ERG² and their self-proclaimed “Star Chamber”, trying to pull him further to the dark side telling him he’s not going far enough. Right now, it’s hard to tell exactly what will happen in the Commons. That’s before we even start to consider what the House of Lords will think of all of this later. Sunak, who was supposed to be competent and sensible in the way we could all see Truss (and Johnson) was not, is likely to find this examination of his performance on two fronts very very uncomfortable.
But Rwanda is just the latest thing. Every decision seems to be just another dainty little piece in an ongoing adventure to complete a huge jigsaw of clusterfuck. From HS2, the cost of living, environmental policy, the economy, collapsing schools, and public services. And that’s not even exhaustive; the list goes on, and on. Every decision seems to be precisely calibrated to make both Sunak and his government look unprepared and incapable of making sustainable long-term decisions for collective benefit. Of course, there’s a certain amount of luck involved in such things, as Hrold Macmillan knew only to well³. Ukraine and Gaza could have come at other times, so too could COVID⁴, but the measure of effective government is partly about being lucky⁵, but also about how you manage when the luck runs out. And this is where Sunak doesn’t score high.
To those of us of a certain age, it’s all quite depessingly familiar. Sunak is pretty much doomed by fate: the end of the line in the procession of a government, and a party, in disrray and decay. He is essentially just like Jim Callaghan, or worse yet, Michael Foot. Sunak maybe doesn’t have the donkey jacket, but he does have trousers that look like he’s mourning a recently demised family budgie. On all sides he’s assailed by people who clearly hate him. Like Foot he is faced with a Militant Tendency, only this time they’re called the ERG, and it’s not Eric Heffer who’s spitting invective his way, it’s such luminaries as Mark Francois, the man who looks like what you’d get if you ordered Penfold from Wish. Like Foot he’s not seen favourably by the electorate, and doesn’t really satisfy any of the warring factions of his party, who are waiting for the next battle of ideological purity, when the makeweight will be gone. Unfortunately, unlike Foot, Sunak is a lightweight. Foot did at least command some respect as a Parliamentary orator, had been in the Commons for more than twenty minutes, and was widely seen as someone with no little intellectual heft, who could at least be respected, if not agreed with, or even liked. Sunak has none of these qualities. The debating soc. tics don’t cut it in the glare of the camera, and he frequently looks irritated, tetchy and unable to hold the room. He’s not a man you’d feel comfortable following into battle, or sitting in a trench with, so it’s no surprise he’s not finding it easy to marshall the forces supposedly under his command. With no effective leadership, and no coherent plan, what is there to actually follow? If you want to be a credible government, it’s simply not enough to trot out a three word slogan, slap it on a podium, and hope for the best. “Stop the boats” is an almost textbook example of this, and it’s going to be the final stone that probably (and perhaps ironically) sinks him.
¹ Whichever comes sooner. Right now it feels like the former will be here first.
² The home of intellectual giants like the egregious Rees-Mogg, a Marc Francois, and the … ahem … somewhat ‘hands-on’ Peter Bone. It’s not exactly Keynes, or Bertrand Russell, is it?
³ “Events, dear boy. Events.”
⁴ Though the enquiry has already talked about the fact that government knew something was coming at some point sooner rather than later, but still failed to prepare. They even actively defunded efforts to do so earlier in the decade. And who was the Secretary of State for Health at the time? Oh yes: Jeremy Hunt.
⁵ The lucky general, at least apocryphally, being Napoleon’s favourite type.
