26th November 2021
Yesterday Nick Fletcher, a little-known member of parliament (with his own taste for time travel), tweeted a daft statement on headed paper about whether casting a female Doctor Who was the cause of a real-world crime surge.
Conservative MP Nick Fletcher says Doctor Who being played by a woman has pushed young men into crime. pic.twitter.com/08rFuCtmgS
— Adam Bienkov (@AdamBienkov) November 25, 2021
— Nick Fletcher MP (@NickFletcherMP) November 25, 2021
And yet that was not the most stupid thing on headed paper tweeted yesterday by a politician.
The current prime minister surpassed even that missive.
My letter to President Macron. pic.twitter.com/vXH0jpxzPo
— Boris Johnson (@BorisJohnson) November 25, 2021
What was stupid about this prime ministerial letter being tweeted was not so much the content – though the content was bombastic and demanding.
The letter had all the quality of an English person outside a Parisian café ordering in English slowly and loudly, with hand gestures.
The real stupidity of the letter was in its tweeting.
If you tried to write a letter designed to irritate France, this would be it:
1 self-congratulate and take moral high ground
2 make letter public, to enhance 1
3 tell France and EU to do more to patrol a border that the UK left EU in order to regain control overBreathtaking https://t.co/IHTdUPrj2c
— Sophie Pedder (@PedderSophie) November 26, 2021
And so what then happened was almost inevitable.
France cancels high-level migrant talks in protest at letter published by UK PM Boris Johnson https://t.co/YsmbiaitBf
— BBC Breaking News (@BBCBreaking) November 26, 2021
The French interior ministry tells the BBC that Priti Patel is not invited anymore to the meeting of ministers planned Sunday in Calais. “We consider Boris Johnson’s public letter unacceptable and in opposition with discussions between counterparts.” HT @paulprad90
— Richard Colebourn (@rcolebourn) November 26, 2021
PM’s letter appears to have backfired. 2 senior No 10 figures told me last night tone of letter was ‘not designed in any way to be combative’.
When I asked if letter was designed to put public pressure on France was told: “Genuinely the aim is to find a mutual way forward” https://t.co/rG0UMmuXHk
— Beth Rigby (@BethRigby) November 26, 2021
Emmanuel Macron sur la lettre de Boris Johnson: "Je suis surpris des méthodes quand elles ne sont pas sérieuses, on ne communique pas par tweets" pic.twitter.com/2rkDtSiCRe
— BFMTV (@BFMTV) November 26, 2021
*
Le whoopsie (with *hand gestures*).
There are two observations to make about this latest pratfall.
The first is personal to the current prime minister: there is no policy predicament so bad that it cannot be made worse by his intervention.
This is yet another unforced error by perhaps the greatest political manufacturer of unforced errors.
The second is that it demonstrates a tension – if not a contradiction – at the heart of Brexit and post-Brexit politics and policy: the political need for the United Kingdom government to play to its domestic audience and the policy need for it to cooperate with European states.
Often the United Kingdom government gets away with it, as those in Europe care little or nothing about the front pages of British newspapers.
But in this instance, the play for the domestic audience was at the direct expense of cooperation.
The café door has slammed shut.
And the loud English man is left outside gesturing to nobody in particular, while trying to assure himself that nothing has gone wrong.
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Our government still doesn’t seem to have accepted that we’ve actually left the EU. Even while leaving, it didn’t absorb the fact that the existence of the EU, literally surrounding us, dramatically changes the balance of power within this small continent of tiny countries.
Johnson has been daft, but the fact that a bolshie response was predictable does not make it right either. A plague on both their houses.
Fletcher brought up the Kray Twins as negative role models during his ramble.
“The Kray Twins, your honour, were East End gangsters.”
“I see. I was a big fan of The Sweeney, myself.”
“Ah, happy days!”
” “We’re the Sweeney, luv, and we ain’t ‘ad our dinnah.” Mater was not amused when I shoulder changed the dining room door on a raid at dinner time.” ”
“I aspired to be Regan, but had to settle for Rumpole.”
“Now, why is this little toerag before me, again, today?”
Weapons grade stupidity. And his acolytes at No. 10 are either too stupid or (more likely) too powerless to persuade him of the folly of such actions.
Unfortunately (for us, I mean) I think Johnson knew exactly what he was doing in both the tone and the publication of this letter. He is playing to a British audience: “Look, here’s me, being all reasonable, just asking for what you [his audience] want – send them back, wash our hands of them” etc. etc.]. And he knew how Macron would take this (for all his faults, he isn’t stupid), so now he can pick up his “It’s all France’s fault” banner, and (he hopes) deflect the Press and public away from all the other manifest deficiencies of his premiership.
And he’s probably right: the public (generally – or at least those who supported Brexit) will lap this up, it will lend fuel to their fires, and we, as a country, will slip further and further into oblivion.
Governing from day to day, like a Prime Minister without even a working majority.
Oh for a John Smith to provoke and peel away Johnson’s bastards in debate after debate, vote after vote, seeking a consensus here and a consensus there with the One Nation Conservatives still remaining on the Tory backbenches.
Major’s hardcore bastards were way, way fewer in number than are Johnson’s today, although some of them are the same MPs.
I too have written to M. Macron and, following the example of our glorious leader, have published it.
Cher monsieur le président
Je voudrais m’excuser pour notre premier ministre. Il est un embarras. En anglais, nous avons un dicton : “Fuck off back to Peppa Pig Land”. Je pense que c’est approprié.
Encore une fois, toutes mes excuses.
Bravo!
And to Chris Hopkins – Indeed bravo! I’m thinking of pretending to be anything but British when out and about.
Tres bien!
Magnifique!
The prime purpose of Johnson’s letter was to garner stories in the Tory press that would supposedly put pressure on the French. But what Johnson is too foolish and arrohgant to realise is that (a) the French would immediately spot his purpose; and (b) this is simply not how politics is done in France and in the EU more generally. With a few notable exceptions, in the EU the daily press simply reports on the political process, but in the UK the bulk of the UK daily press, that is, the part that supports the Tories, is an absolutely crucial player in this process.
I think you’re wrong, David, that ‘those in Europe care little or nothing about the front pages of British newspapers’. Many continental Europeans are well aware of the contents of British newspapers (the reverse is certainly not the case) and they have long been absolutely sick and tired of the daily diet of xenophobia supplied by them. Rightly they see this as one of the causes of Brexit, and frankly, are very relieved that we’ve left the EU.
Absolutely. If the Italian press is at all representative of other European dailies, the behaviour of the British government does not go unnoticed. It’s met with part derision, and part sadness. A once great country ……. etc. etc.
Johnson is comfortable campaigning, and doesn’t like governing. Macron has an election coming up in which his main opponent is likely to be one of the ultra-right challengers.
I imagine that both of them are quite happy talking to their own electorates while pretending to talk to each other.
It could be dismissed possibly as naïve to attempt to draft the minutes of a future meeting as Johnson’s letter attempted to do; but it’s stupidity of epic proportions for Johnson to make the letter public in an effort to make himself look magnanimous and at the same time, attempt to bulldoze France and its EU partners to submit to UK demands that the EU police the UK border.
“Taking back control” doesn’t translate to “command and control”; maybe someone should explain this to Bunter and his pals…
When at the European Commission, I – like most officials who reached a certain seniority – took an intensive and in-depth course on negotiation. We can be quite sure that Macron, or at least his close advisers, has followed a similar training, and equally sure, sadly, that no one who talks to Johnson has ever heard of such a thing.
Nothing in Johnson’s past suggests for one moment that he has any idea about how to persuade people with a real stake in an issue, as opposed to those who read headlines, to adopt a course different from their first inclination. If he had such an idea, he would have realised that you do not publicise your proposed final outcome before starting; you do not suggest a slate of measures that put all the obligations on your opposite number and you do, seriously, consider what you AND YOUR OPPONENT are hoping to gain from the exercise. Sadly, this incompetence will not cost just money and prestige: it will lead to more loss of life.
P.S. all the above can, inevitably, be applied to Lord Frost as well.
The really sad thing about what you say – which is entirely correct – is that this country once had a great reputation for diplomacy. That is now dead.
I am not sure that we did – it seems British diplomacy too often included a “gunboat”. “Play up, play up and play the game” was all very well as long as we won.
It takes about a century and a half for a once imperial nation / state to regain a sense of reality of their reduced place in the world: Venice, Portugal, Spain, Netherlands etc. One can only hope that our status as a Third Country to our neighbours might accelerate this process even if reduced to just the one country of England
So, when Lord Frost worked at the Commission he clearly didn’t get the training, if I understand you correctly.
Frosty the Nowhere Man on the art of negotiation from the Brexit negotiations of 2020 …
He instructed his own team on the art of doing a deal, resorting to eccentric analogies such as a grid of four types of negotiator:
Teenager
Tank
Mouse
Leader.
EU, Frost avowed, tended toward the first two, whereas the UK was too often a mouse.
He exhorted his team of negotiators to be the leader in the room.
Whilst whiling away the enervating hours, Frost and his exhausted team would sip whisky at the UK Ambassador’s residence in Brussels.
“There was one night we were discussing our favourite Batman — Frosty could only think of Adam West,” says one British official.
If he remembers 1960s Batman, perhaps he knows the lyrics to The Beatles’ Nowhere Man?
Priceless! Thank you.
What makes this even worse is that more people will die as a consequence of Johnson’s posturing and indeed as a result of the totally predictable French response. Prime Ministers have to make life and death decisions all the time, but mustn’t do so with posturing as the motivation.
Whilst your PM is engaged in these stupid an tactless activities, Macron is in Rome, meeting with Draghi and signing a pact of enhanced cooperation with Italy, having aready signed a similar one with Angela Merkel.
The coincidence seems to me significant. The EU carries on, albeit not without the inevitable problems that these terrible times pose. The UK is far from accepting the sour fact that the room for absentee nations – third nations, in fact – is shrinking. And that the loss of bargaining power and credibility cannot be hidden by a clown’s childish jeers.
Indeed, but the problem is that those who govern the UK simply cannot conceive of it as a “third nation” in any way at all.
Megaphone diplomacy rarely works. Macron also has a domestic audience, and bigger issues to deal with than Johnson’s circus.
One of the reasons we have dozens of desperate people on small boats in the Channel each day is that the other routes they might have used in years gone by (in the back of lorries, on trains and ferries) are essentially closed to them. Largely due to cooperation between France and the UK.
What would the UK do, if France ceased or scaled back that cooperation, and allowed more of the people to leave by less dangerous methods, so the UK had deal with them as they arrived?
And what would we do if, for example, those desperate people took ferries to Ireland instead, and crossed into the north?
Brexit has resulted in the UK losing its meagre ability to transfer refugees to EU member states under the Dublin Regulation.
For some facts, here is what the UNHCR says about asylum in the UK: https://www.unhcr.org/uk/asylum-in-the-uk.html
You’re quite right, but the price for the French of the co-operation that you mention has been that the environs of the Port of Calais have gradually been turned into something resembling a hideous prison camp. If the UK had a workable and humane system for dealing with asylum applications, most of this would be entirely unnecessary.
I can understand why the French would agree to help out their fellow EU member. But what benefit does France derive from continuing the existing cooperation with the UK as a third country, particularly when we are so surly and ungrateful?
Brilliant! I love the comical café metaphor – if only the situation weren’t so tragic.
While it’s always gratifying to accuse the PM and his team of stupidity, I disagree in this instance. I think they knew exactly what they were doing.
In fact, what they managed was a rather neat trick: to appear to be making a “reasonable” proposal, whilst provoking an “unreasonable” response from the French – for entirely political purposes. Tweeting it was one of the elements about this letter (along with the proposal to “send back” migrants) calculated to “provoke a fight” – and the French fell neatly into the trap.
What was that political purpose? To show a domestic audience that they are “dealing” with the migrant issue, and that any failure to do so is purely a result of French intransigence. This little manufactured spat has the added aim of distracting from the fact – perfectly clear to migration wonks in the know – that Brexit is at least partly to blame.
The pub conversation they are looking for goes like this: “Hey, did you see Boris told the French they should take their migrants back – but Macron said this was ‘unacceptable’. The bloomin’ French, eh?”. Boris needs the French to be the fall-guys in the public mind.
But these manoeuvres also imply a much deeper moral failure than any pratfall, one rightly pinpointed by Macron: the UK Government is “playing politics” with migrant lives, with an eye to the next election – instead of sincerely trying to solve the problem.
I am torn between two equally-disastrous-in-their-consequences explanations for this latest débacle from Downing Street: the first is Johnson’s habitual default condescending cack-handedness, uncontrolled by a communications team as stupid or clearly out of their depth; the second is that it was a too-clever-by-half attempt to negotiate and bully Macron by means of anti French headlines in the Tory newspapers. Neither of which is a grow-up approach to negotiation over practical measures to meet a desperate situation.
Equally distasteful yesterday was Priti Patel’s faux regret in the HoC at the drowning of 27 human beings who met their “hostile environment” in the Channel rather than at the cruel hands of the Home Office. She must be secretly delighted: it was an inevitability she did everything to encourage, but think of the savings and the message of deterrence. I suspect her own “refugee / economic migrant” parents arrived in the UK by aeroplane.
I think what made her faux regret even worse was the fact that rather than referring to the Channel she had to mention French waters.
If negotiating in good faith you don’t need unilateral side letters.
If things are going badly ( or even well) a jointly agreed Press Release should be enough.
Macron earned his spurs in the commercial world before entering politics as an adviser and had one foot out of the political camp before Hollande begged him to stay and made him a Minister.
Whilst he can at times appear petulant he shows attention to detail and is capable of going a full 15 rounds.
If a solution is to be found it will owe more to Macron than it will to Johnson.
I despair that the simplicity of the idea that these people are not illegal is so far from being openly stated by almost our entire political cadre
You can call it an unforced error as long as you still either believe or hope that Your Majesty’s Government works in the interest of the United Kingdom.
From an unsafe continental distance it looks like the chaos, the absurdity and the planned unruliness serves the purpose of furthering the “us and them” atmosphere amongst the English.
It already gave you Brexit and its architects and zealots can only continue this path.
I fear it will end in armed conflict, sooner or later.