24th May 2022
‘What is justice?’ is a question that has been long discussed by clever philosophers, jurists and political theorists.
But one way of understanding justice is to see it not as a thing, but the absence of a thing: justice means a lack of injustice.
Justice is thereby defined by what it is not.
A just society is one where concrete injustices have been addressed; a just outcome is the solution to an actual unjust situation; and so on.
And for many it is injustices that matter, for injustices rankle.
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With ‘Partygate’ it seems what rankles most is the unfairness of it, the injustice.
That the current Prime Minister lied to Parliament and to the rest of us surprises no sensible person, for it is the one quality about Boris Johnson that all sensible people will know to be true.
That the current Prime Minister broke the law and guidance again is no shock – and, indeed, it would be more of a shock if, in any given situation, Johnson had followed the law and any guidance when he did not need to do so.
It does not even seem to matter to that many – though there are exceptions – that Johnson broke laws and guidance designed to keep people safe.
The anger about ‘Partygate’ appears (at least to me) not to be motivated primarily by the concern that Johnson was personally putting others at risk (though this will anger some).
What seems to be what upsets people about ‘Partygate’ is that while others were immensely affected because they had to comply with rules, or were punished if they did not, the Prime Minister and others in Downing Street casually did not comply with those rules.
The rules, of course, that Johnson and his government imposed upon the rest of us – the laws his government issued and enforced, the guidance he and his government promoted night after night.
The stories which appear (again to me) to be getting the most traction on news sites and on social media are those from people who, for example, could not visit their loved ones on their deathbeds or were not able to attend funerals.
Had the story been about Johnson in a serious dilemma choosing to break the rules to see a loved one in hospital or attend a funeral, then people would perhaps be more forgiving.
Many people in extreme situations may choose to break rules.
But the situations in which Johnson and his circle broke the rules were not extreme situations or dreadful dilemmas.
And this disparity in the seriousness with which one abided with the rules is what annoys – disgusts – people who would otherwise shrug.
Not the lies, not the rule-breaking itself – but the unfairness.
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‘Partygate’ is not about parties or cakes; and it is not ultimately about lying to parliament, or about breaking the criminal law, or about putting lives at risk; it is at bottom about fair dealing.
And that is why – months into this scandal – ‘Partygate’ will not go away easily.
Downing Street partied while the rest of us were prevented from going to visit deathbeds or attend funerals, at the behest of Downing Street.
That was unfair.
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I agree.
*I* care about MPs lying to parliament, but the majority of people seem to be pretty sure that politicians lie all the time, so they can’t muster much energy for that.
What they do care about is “One rule for you, one rule for me” – particularly when people sacrificed important things, while Johnson breaks them for a bit of fun.
The most succint summary I’ve seen was in this piece of graffiti:
https://andrewducker.tumblr.com/post/674079242026467328/the-tories-drank-wine-whilst-your-nan-died-alone
And this injustice is something which has clearly pierced to the heart of a bunch of people who would otherwise vote Conservative.
Labour, the Lib Dems, the Greens and the SNP should co-ordinate their advertising campaigns and use that as their election slogan. I’m sure Banksy or Cold War Steve would contribute the art work for free.
As a comment on the blog piece, I think that fairness is being a bit too polite about it. Where I’m from the feeling would be that he’s taking the piss. Analysing that feeling I think that the real problem is that he’s humiliating the public, and a feeling of humiliation is perhaps more personal and wounding than a sense of unfairness.
The humiliation also reveals something about ourselves in that we were duped. The revelations show us a truth what kind of society the UK really is. We are not a society of fair play and rules, we are a society where the people who make the rules don’t obey the rules, and where institutions set up to monitor and enforce the rules on Us has *no intention* of enforcing the rules on them.
Quite, Justice goes hand in hand with fair play. The problem that enters is the relative triviality of the parties themselves compared to, say, the “unfairness” with which pandemic contracts were awarded to businesses and individuals whose sole qualifications for being awarded those contracts was their close association with the Conservative party. Or that those parties were trivial compared to the tens of thousands of deaths that could easily have been avoided if the Government had imposed lockdowns earlier. Trivial compared to the thousands of avoidable care home deaths.
I would suggest that if as much time and effort was applied to addressing these other injustices as has been spent on parties at downing street it’s possible that DePfeffel’s continued tenure at No 10 might be more precarious, no right-minded person could describe these other matters a “trivial”. Instead, both the media and HM loyal opposition decided to go for the man (Johnson) instead of the ball (The Conservative Government as a whole). Focusing on party-gate focus’s attention on Johnson himself, to the relative exclusion of his party . I would aver that this is why we have party-gate and not, say “PPE-gate” or “Care Home Deaths-gate”.
I think the reason is that it is relatively easier to get away with failures of policy or delivery than for failures of personal behaviour.
The behaviour reeks of entitlement. That is what really rankles!
A false multichotomy, perhaps. He lied to us, he lied to Parliament, he broke the law, he put others at risk, he treated us unfairly, fuelled by amorality driven by Eton and Balliol exceptionalism.
The important thing is that he either resigns or he is fired. We can all assign different percentages to the different reasons why he must go, but go he must. His survival would fully expose the inadequacy of our constitution.
Damn right. But you have to acknowledge the skill with which Johnson has slipped away from the jaws of destruction so many times. Denials, minimisation, false parallels, non-apology apology; Sue Gray, police investigation, Parliamentary committee; throwing junior staffers under the bus, allowing more senior people to take the blame, throwing ordure at the leader of the opposition. The works. And yet new and worse facts keep leaking out, and it still won’t go away.
This is not new. I go back to the reports from Eton:
“[he] seems affronted when criticised for what amounts to a gross failure of responsibility … he honestly believes that it is churlish of us not to regard him as an exception, one who should be free of the network of obligation which binds everyone else.”
He has lived his life as if the world owes him a living, using his charm, connections, and linguistic skills to do or say virtually anything he likes with minimal repercussions. “bumboys”, “letterboxes”, “piccaninnies” with “watermelon smiles”. Millions of public funds wasted on the Garden Bridge. Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe. The venal corruption at the heart of the COVID response.
I can’t believe that a man of his character became prime minister. I can’t believe that a man of his character is *still* prime minister. The seeming inability of the Conservatives to do anything about about the canker at the core of their party means he might still be in office if Trump is reelected in two and a half years time.
God help us all.
As Eddie Mair said to his face: ” You really are a nasty piece of work, aren’t you?”
And yet the country once loved him.
“the country once loved him”? Evidence?
I mean, he certainly became well known as a buffoonish journalist, often with an amusing or insulting turn of phrase but a somewhat loose grip of facts, but does that celebrity status count as “love”? I suspect as many people hated him for the horrible things he said and did: the atrocious way he treated his first two wives, for example.
He won two London mayoral elections in 2008 and 2012, 53-47 and 52-48, and did a fair job as a figurehead, leaving much of the real work to others. And his party won 44% of the votes (but 56% of the seats) at the 2019 general election. A very strange sort of love, that. Perhaps the same sort of love that saw Churchill unceremoniously turfed out of Downing Street in 1945.
Here are some approval ratings as prime minister:
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/explore/public_figure/Boris_Johnson?content=trackers With the odd blip, almost universally rated as incompetent and untrustworthy (and getting worse). Initially strong, now weak and indecisive.
And “how well is he doing”, initially fairly evenly split, and then six months from January to June 2020 (when he “got Brexit done” before aspects of the deal unraveled, and then immediate pandemic response) since then it almost entirely negative, and getting worse and worse from the middle of last year.
That so many Conservatives MPs are still willing to support him says something damning about their judgement.
He was elected with a huge majority, ergo “the country” (by which I meant the electorate) apparently loved him. Not everyone, of course. But I think you knew this.
I cannot abide the man, but it has staggered me how popular he has been amongst the electorate in general. But then perhaps I can smell a charlatan when one approaches, or at least know that charlatans have no place in government.
“He was elected with a huge majority” – by 43% of the votes. Thus most voters didn’t love him and no doubt some of those who voted for him did so because they loved Brexit, not Johnson.
Your reference to Donald Trump provides us with a useful opportunity to compare and contrast. In common, they share the ability to appeal, populist-style, to the respective core of voters (their “base”). They also hurl offensive attacks at their opponents (though thankfully BJ does so with more restraint than DT).
But this is where we see a peculiar tactic take shape.
Donald Trump told us what he was doing and why when he answered that question from the journalist who asked, “Why do you attack us?” His response was, in effect, “So that when you print critical things about me, my party won’t believe you…”
Johnson is too smart to claim outright that reports of his partying are “lies” when faced with such overwhelming evidence. (Even he has enough restraint to not try to claim that this was a “perfect phone call”). But on the other hand, he seems to have not only weathered the storm, but is welcoming the attacks.
He knows, intuitively, that his party don’t care as long as he’s a Tory, that the committed Labour/Lib Dem voters aren’t going to switch allegiances and certainly not over this, which leaves the middle ground of undecided voters who change their vote between elections. That’s the only group of people he cares about.
So now, perhaps, we see him goading the Labour party to continue their attacks, calculating that if they do so, this has now gone on long enough that the undecided general public will think, “Enough already!” and the attempts to hold him to account will have the opposite effect, because it will undermine the credibility of those being critical.
I suspect that in large part the Labour Party have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory here: first by having the ill-advised beer and curry (or whatever it was) for Starmer; and secondly, more importantly, for the inept and careless manner in which they have gone about highlighting the Tory malfeasance.
Though not working at Trump’s level, Johnson has demonstrated he is more than able to “mix it up” with Starmer, in the gutter, so using guttural attacks in PMQs and trying to shame him in a shouting match (which won’t work in perfect conditions) certainly won’t work here.
The best way to show up Johnson for the boozy, boorish lout he clearly is would be to offer the public something different.
The problem is, Starmer seems more like Blair – he just wants his turn at the trough. That isn’t going to work.
Are injustice and unfairness equivalent?
Life is full of unfairness. The PPE scandal is a good current example of unfairness to companies who should have been given the opportunity to supply the goods.
Injustice, breaking rules or laws by persons making the law, then denying it is a different matter. It undermines trust in governance. Unfairness is a lesser matter.
Yesterday there was a Henry Mance interview in the FT with Peter Hennessy. “A bonfire of the decencies”. Worth reading in full but this paragraph is key:-
‘Johnson seems to be the only subject that makes Hennessy visibly angry. “He is the greatest trouble to the good chap system of any prime minister that I’ve observed,” he says. “Anthony Eden lied to parliament about the collusion with Israel [in the 1956 Suez crisis], but in his defence he felt he had to do that because it was overwhelmingly important for the state. But Boris does it, you get the impression in the bad weeks, almost daily.” It has led to “a bonfire of the decencies”.’
Yes, it’s partly the unfairness but it’s also the contempt – the sense of entitlement that displays sheer contempt for the law and contempt for all those who abide by it or feel obliged to abide by it.
Contempt, that’s the word that’s always in my head about these. We talk about ‘the man on the Clapham omnibus’, and ‘the reasonable bystander’, both of whom – had they been present in the relevant place at the relevant time – would have said “What are you doing? this is against the rules! Everybody’s suffering under lockdown and you’re all on the lash!”
And Boris would have said: “Fuck off, oik.” As long as he thought no-one was recording him.
Yes, I think unfairness captures it. Johnson is a rotter and surrounds himself with those who are weak, venal or rotters themselves.
I also think the MET stinks also. If Partygate had taken place in chavtown on a Saturday night all involved would be up before the beak. Johnson et al get the ‘there is no evidence’ treatment – it stinks. But we must look forward to Ms Grey’s report and see if that knocks the smirk of Johnson’s face. I fear it won’t, I feel Mr Johnson could molest the Vienna Boys Choir on the steps of St Pauls and walk away with the full approval of the MET.
I get your point DAG, but surely it is about all of them. The lies, the sleaze, the corruption, the law-breaking: they demean us all as individuals and because they were committed quite shamelessly and without any remorse by the PM himself, they demean the country, us collectively and so how it and we are viewed by the world.
DePfeffel’s behaviour demeans himself, the party who continue to support him and those in the media who either willfully ignore his actions, deflect onto others or otherwise cheerlead for him. In no way does his behaviour demean you or I or anyone outside of the “Basket of Deplorables” that enabled his rise to power. I don’t even blame those who voted for him given the litany of lies that went unchallenged in 12/2019.
It is, but those aren’t really things that cut through to most folk. The unfairness does. My mum, for example, isn’t really concerned about the country or the office of the prime minister being demeaned but she did have to sit alone in a hospice watching her barely-conscious husband slowly die while this lot broke the rules simply to have fun. That’s what’s getting to a lot of people.
It’s not just about not fair dealing, they’ve been gaslighting the population. This government has a long history of blatantly lying and Partygate sums it all up. Even after the truth is out they still lie about it and tell us we are wrong to believe it.
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. George Orwell would be saying “I told you so” if he wasn’t already spinning in his grave.
It’s about a number of things, and unfairness is certainly one of them.
Firstly, I’d say that just about everyone agrees with the tenet that leaders should lead by example, and if they don’t, they will lose respect. That’s just basic stuff. And Johnson failed to ‘lead’.
Secondly, what happened over the two years from March 2020 was probably the most traumatic event in the lives of anyone over the age of 85. I was born post war, and can still recall the last months of rationing (just). The majority of the country either weren’t born then or are too young to have any memory of it. But as I was a small child then, and had known nothing different, I only remember this because I was with my mother when she went shopping. And, in reality, it had no impact on me. But the last two years have pushed us all into a world where nobody has escaped some impact on their lives, and for many it has been truly traumatic. Luckily, I lost no-one to Covid, but an aunt died of other causes during 2020. Only one of my cousins was allowed to visit her: nobody was with her when she died. We were fortunate in that all who were closest to her were able to attend her funeral, but it was a very small and weird affair, with family dotted around a large chapel, yearning to offer support to each other, but denied the small comfort of even holding hands. We all agreed that we’d wait until measures were lifted and meet to celebrate her life. That happened last year, but we were all outside, and observed the precautions recommended so as to avoid any risk of spreading the virus, if any of us were unlucky enough to have it.
That’s just what happened to me, but everyone has been damaged by these two years, whether by losing loved ones or by having to be something that is unnatural for us as humans: deliberately unsocial.
Most of us did this willingly, to keep ourselves and others safe. Some (as we know) refused to comply – and I have a great deal of sympathy for them in some ways as it went entirely against our human nature to behave in this way, as well as offending our sense personal freedom.
Then there has been the great inequity of treatment throughout the pandemic, be it through the way in which support was handed out or the careless/corrupt way in which the government handed our money out to its mates in the name of PPE and other contracts. And that’s without the cruelty with which care home residents were treated.
The end result is that the nation is pretty traumatised and angry now. The (un)fairness (to which you refer) has revealed itself in so many ways. People’s mental health has taken a battering.
So, when we find that the person who is supposed to lead us, supposed to set an example at a time of crisis, has basically put his fingers up to the rest of us, we know that not only was he not leading us as he should, but that he holds the country he leads in contempt.
So much for clapping for the NHS.
So much for “putting a ring around” the care homes.
So much for the superspreader that was “eating out to help out”.
We know they were taking the rise out of us, that they couldn’t really give a monkeys about what happened to us, just as Johnson never gave a damn about Nazanin. We are just his playthings.
All Johnson cares about is staying in power so that he can keep dipping into his dressing up box and playing at being leader.
And yet the one part he cannot get right is just that.
As a postscript to the above, this excellent article by Rachel Clarke, a palliative care doctor, is worth a read.
Especially if your name is Boris Johnson.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/may/24/boris-johnson-party-nhs-doctors-covid-rules
This post is superb and covers Johnson & Co’s whole sickening assault on decency.
Seconded
There was a precursor to all of this.
The day before ‘Freedom Day’ last July, Health Secretary Sajid Javid tested positive for COVID and went into self-isolation for ten days.
The Prime Minister and Chancellor had both been in close proximity to Javid the day before, so under the rules in place at the time, they should also have gone into isolation.
But lo and behold, a ‘pilot’ was suddenly announced that allowed certain test groups to carry out daily testing which (assuming they came up negative) would mean that the test subjects could avoid self-isolating.
And as luck would have it, both Mr Johnson and Mr Sunak were selected to take part in this pilot.
This was widely seen as unfair – “one rule for them, a different rule for the rest of us” – and in fact the bespoke policy that the PM had availed himself of didn’t last for more than a few hours before the inevitable U-turn.
When the history of the downfall of Boris Johnson is written, the above episode may be seen as the first chapter in the saga.
I completely agree. There are so many people in the country who could quite easily have justified to themselves breaking the rules in desperate circumstances *but didn’t*. And many of those people would have kept to the rules due to the constant threat of police intervention.
So you’ve got Number 10 breaking all the rules for no good reason and in full sight of numerous police officers. And a police force that has now done an *ahem* thorough investigation and done hardly anything about pissups that were happening every single Friday plus the odd special occasion when there’s something particular to celebrate.
The ranklement is extreme.
Excellent.
I’d just like to pick up on one narrow thread of David’s argument, where he says, approximately, that this is not about lying to parliament, it’s about fair and equitable treatment for all.
There are a couple of elements here.
Let’s start with the lying. I am reasonably confident that I can state that nobody reading this blog would dispute that the PM lied to parliament. Where this gets a bit more contentious is how we react to that. I wonder if anyone has seen the film, “A Few Good Men”, starring Tom Cruise, Jack Nicholson, Kiefer Sutherland, Kevin Bacon and Demi Moore… There is a scene in which Cruise’s Lawyer is questioning Sutherland’s Marine Corps Corporal in court and they are disputing whether a marine has the freedom to differentiate between which orders are serious and which are frivolous. In a statement that he comes to regret, Sutherland’s character argues they do not. In much the same vein, we might want to question whether some lies to parliament are sufficiently egregious to warrant a VNC (Vote of No Confidence) response and which could be glossed over. I’m not sure that it is right to even contemplate a scale of offence here. Johnson lied over the fact that he’d broken the law, repeatedly. Tony Blair lied over Weapons of Mass Destruction existing in Iraq. I’m not trying to argue that these two examples are comparable or equivalent, just that, so far, the consequences for both politician have been completely irrelevant.
The second issue I have concerns the way that the government have gone about investigating this. Whilst a lot of (digital) ink has been used already to discuss what will come in Sue Gray’s report, the fact remains that she was appointed by Boris Johnson. Even if she does the scrupulously fair and complete and honest job that we hope, no matter how good a job she does, there will be some who will argue ‘whitewash’ on nothing but the fact that because she was appointed by Johnson, she must therefore have skewed her report to paint him and/or his minsters in a better light.
The only way to do this – to go back to David’s point about fairness, is to have a completely independent agency (for example, an agency a bit like the National Audit Office but covering ministerial conduct, where the appointments are completely independent of political influence.
To exaggerate for effect, political accountability in the UK feels like it’s as about as effective as Rupert Murdoch having Lachlan Murdoch investigate the Phone Hacking scandal.
And whilst it’s inevitable that there will be considerable interest in the government literally ‘drinking on the job’ (to excess if we are to believe today’s headlines about people having to ‘sleep it off’ in the office), this means that parliamentary, ministerial and other time is being squeezed.
Where, for example, are investigations in to:-
1. Covid Lessons learned…
2. Ensuring hospitals and health centres have adequate supplies of e.g. PPE
3. The contracts awarded during the pandemic, with particular focus on the no-bid awards, some of which ran to hundreds of millions of pounds
4. National Emergency Plans for the next pandemic, with focus on closing borders
5. What the government is doing with regards to the Northern Ireland Protocol
6. I could go on, but, well, you get the point.
It’s almost as though the PM has decided that HM Opposition simply don’t have anything damaging enough to say, but they happy to let this farce continue because its a useful distraction from other things the government would rather not have to answer for.
And to end on the element of fairness… it is fundamentally to the British people, who pay for all this tosh through exorbitant taxes, that we have to put up with this while so many are suffering. Holding those in power to account for their actions won’t lessen the impact we’re feeling in our lives, but it might restore our faith in a government that is supposed to be made up of Commoners and supposed to have our best interests in mind.
The sense of unfairness arising from ‘Partygate’ would seem to arise from being able to compare our own individual actions with the actions of Johnson (as an individual).
This was a situation where “we were all in it together” and we were faced by pretty much the same decision that Johnson faced. So we can feel confident in being able to judge Johnson, they aren’t any other factors which which complicate that viewpoint.
And yet despite that, there is a great difficulty in holding this man to account.
Accountability has been a common theme through this blog. A lot of the business of government are not things that we can not have personal experience of in the way that we can have with ‘Partygate’. What is the implication for accountability we don’t hold Johnson to account for something that we can all see is unjust? What is it that will motivate accountability?
I was furious at the time about Dominic Cummings, completely raging. But actually being close to alternative childcare if he and his wife got properly ill seems pretty reasonable now, when compared to having a party “just because it’s Friday night”.
I actually think it’s the hypocrisy that rankles the most – “do as I say, not as I do”.
There was nothing reasonable about his childcare argument. It was a problem faced by all parents and his solution wouldn’t have been considered legal for them. Travelling the length of the country spreading the virus. His whole story was riddled with unlikely and inconsistent detail. His wife’s account in the Spectator mentioned none of it. Clearly the Durham trip wasn’t intended to be known about, and i suspect the excuses were invented afterwards.
Oh I do agree it was still outrageous – but it had a figleaf of respectability, at least compared to drinking booze at parties in No 10 til people vomited in the rubbish bins….
Sue Gray report is here:-
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1078404/2022-05-25_FINAL_FINDINGS_OF_SECOND_PERMANENT_SECRETARY_INTO_ALLEGED_GATHERINGS.pdf
I recall people used to complain that politics was boring. Not any more.
Johnson just picked up the ball and ran with it. Deceit lies bombast, anything goes.
Au contraire. I am extremely bored by this endless conveyor belt of liesandmuckandliesandmuck.
I’m reminded of Rudyard Kipling’s poem Norman and Saxon, in which a elderly Norman baron, a veteran of Hastings, gives some deathbed advice to his son:
“The Saxon is not like us Normans. His manners are not so polite.
But he never means anything serious till he talks about justice and right.
When he stands like an ox in the furrow – with his sullen set eyes on your own,
And grumbles, ‘This isn’t fair dealing,’ my son, leave the Saxon alone.
https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_normansaxon.htm
Where do you think I took the ‘fair-dealing’ from?!
I considered quoting the poem, but I find it (and its author) problematic (to say the least) in so many ways, and so I just went with taking the ‘fair-dealing’ from the final line.
The problem we have in the UK is that we realise that there is no legal way to rid ourselves of a Rogue Government ( I include the entire Cabinet ). Just as in the US they discovered they couldn’t rid themselves of a rogue President.
The only option is to wait for elections – to this end this Gvmt and their sychophantic press supporters – Mail, Express etc are the Opposition’s biggest assets. There’s no such thing as a safe seat any more and if all the Opposition Parties work together in the best interests of the country there could be some big changes ahead.
The Conservative Party is now proven to be ineffective and unelectable – imagine not one name comes forward as a potential saviour that decent Tory voters can get behind. He has driven them all into a spiral of duplicity, corruption and ideology.
There is an additional element that rankles the most:
He broke the very rules that he himself introduced.
That (to me) is the very saltiest part.
He did not break a longstanding law – he wasn’t caught speeding and then lied about it. He didn’t break an obscure law. He didn’t break an old law.
No, he broke a new law that significantly impacted the whole population, a law he had only recently drawn up.
That is the outrageous arrogance of the scoundrel.
I have to disagree.
While I know you are not a great fan of a more codified constitution, I’m sure you would agree that the formal checks and balances built into the UK’s constitution are, well, rather flimsy in many respects. (Incidentally, a reason why a more codified constitution might be desirable, imo, is that such mechanisms as exist are vastly less effective due to the difficulty of accessing or activating them and to the lack of clarity as to when and how they apply.)
Notwithstanding any of that, I’d be curious to know what you feel are the grounds for describing the UK as a democracy if the executive or its members can lie to Parliament and, particularly, if they can do so without the consequence of being removed from office.
“While I know you are not a great fan of a more codified constitution…”
As this is false, I am afraid the rest of your comment does not work – sorry!
A more codified constitution could be a good thing. My view is that it could also be a bad thing. It depends.