Big Dog's Last Bark
A Bad Day in Drowning Street
All good disaster movies develop slowly, giving the viewer time to get to know the characters and care about them. In the first part of the film you oscillate between two parallel narratives. Firstly, there’s the one the characters inhabit, innocently oblivious to the catastrophe about to engulf them. And then there is the one in which we see their world is beginning to collapse before they do.
It’s a standard disaster movie trope that some of the characters do see the potential for calamity, but their warnings and predictions are ignored. This indifference might be due to hubris, complacency and greed: the architect who cuts corners on his budget; the mayor who won’t close the beaches; the arrogant first class passengers on the Titanic who believe that nothing bad can ever happen to them; the corrupt corporation that takes reckles risks to maximise profits.
In all these movies there will be a point when these Cassandras see their predictions painfully vindicated: the moment when a real shark appears in the water; when the partygoers smell smoke; when the oil rig bursts into flames; when the rivets burst out from the steel plates and the water comes gushing through the corridors.
From this point onwards a new story unfolds, in which we are no longer braced for disaster, but waiting to see who will survive and who won’t.
Yesterday was the day when the disaster that is Boris Johnson’s government achieved that narrative convergence. It was the day when the rivets popped out, the cabin doors broke and the engines screeched; when the smoke burst into flames, and the chaos, dishonesty, and ineptitude at the heart of this most corrupt of all British governments reached the point of no return.
The day began calmly enough – another standard trope in disaster movies. In the morning we saw Johnson riding a vintage tram in Blackpool to showcase his ‘Levelling Up’ agenda-changer. Johnson took a little time out from the cosplay to hold forth on his disgraceful attempt to smear Keir Starmer at PMQs the previous day, when he accused the former Director of Public Prosecutions of having ‘used his time prosecuting journalists and failing to prosecute Jimmy Savile’.
It wasn’t an apology. As Cobra Kai would say, apologies are for pussies, in Johnson’s world. Instead Johnson ticked off those foolish individuals, many of them members of his own party, who had allowed themselves to get ‘hot under the collar’ for making an accusation that his own advisors had urged him not to make, even though it had already been pointed out to him that Starmer had no personal responsibility for the Savile investigation, and that allegations to the contrary had originated as a far right smear on the fringes of the Internet.
Never mind, because Big Dog does what Big Dog wants to do at any given moment. And having smeared Starmer on Wednesday he now wanted the world to believe yesterday that he had not actually been discussing Starmer’s ‘personal record when he was DPP’, and that of course he knew Starmer had nothing personally to do with the Crown Prosecution Services’s decision not to prosecute Savile.
Our furry canine PM was merely making a point about Starmer’s ‘responsibility for the organisation [the DPP] as a whole.' This was not how this ‘point’ was originally expressed at all, and Johnson’s revisiting of his own lie was not just another lie, but a cunning if somewhat illogical distraction from another bitter truth that he would prefer went unacknowledged.
By accusing Starmer of bearing overall organisational responsibility for the Savile investigation, Johnson was simultaneously trying to shrug off his own personal responsibility for Partygate, on the grounds that he, like Starmer, was merely the head of an organisation in which certain failings had taken place under his watch that he had not been aware of.
This retrospective insistence on organisational responsibility ignored the fact that he - unlike Starmer - was a direct participant in the Partygate scandals, who broke the rules that he himself demanded others should follow, and then repeatedly lied to the public and to parliament about the extent of his participation in these events.
None of this bothered the Tory MPs and scribes who faithfully repeated Big Dog’s twisting of the truth with all the butter-wouldn’t melt-in-their-mouths earnestness we have come to expect from Johnson’s sycophants and courtiers.
But what’s this? In the afternoon none other than Johnson’s Policy Chief Munira Mirza resigned. In her leaked resignation letter, Mirza cited Johnson’s Starmer smear as her reason for leaving, claiming that it was ‘an inappropriate and partisan reference to a horrendous case of child sex abuse.’
Many people had already said the same. But coming from Mirza – the Spiked luminary and key Johnson insider – this accusation had a different kind of political weight, though many readers may dispute Mirza’s claim that Johnson is a ‘better man than many of your detractors will ever understand.’
Some liberal commentators praised Mirza for her principled moral conscience, but you don’t get to be Bertrand Russell when you’ve spent fourteen years working closely with a man like Johnson. So whatever the motivations, this was definitely water seeping up from the hold. And within hours of Mirza’s resignation, more rivets were popping as three other staffers also resigned, including the senior civil servant who had sent out an invite to a ‘bring your own booze’ party.
In a disaster movie this would be the pivotal moment when the hubris is painfully revealed, when the screaming crowds run for the fire escape or the lifeboats, but not in Johnsonland.
Unbelievably, Big Dog’s minions could be heard welcoming these resignations and praising the Great Leader for his decisiveness in separating the wheat from the chaff and bringing in a brand new team. The tone was set by Andrew Pierce – a ‘journalist’ who drains the meaning from the word whenever he opens his mouth, who tweeted:
Elsewhere MPs like Simon Clarke and Crispin Blunt could be found recycling Big Dog’s dishonest revisiting of his Savile remarks. You can’t fault the Tory spin machine for message discipline, though Stalin and Kim Jong Un might have been embarrassed by these craven, logic-defying pseudo-explanations.
Why, if Johnson was really clearing out his team and streamlining his operation, did he wait for resignations instead of firing the team members he supposedly wanted to get rid of? What kind of cowardly ‘leader’ would blame his team, when he himself is personally implicated in the events he is trying to distance himself from?
No Tories asked these questions, because these are moral mazes that too many Tories will never enter, and if they did, would never emerge from.
All Fall Down
Even as the House of Cards was collapsing in Drowning Street and the resignations flowed like wine from a Tescos takeaway (OK, I’ll stop), the Northern Ireland First Minister Paul Givan resigned, in protest at the DUP’s refusal to implement the Northern Ireland Protocol - a refusal which the UK government is trying to pretend is a purely Northern Irish matter that it has no responsibility for.
Elsewhere one of Johnson’s potential successors, the billionaire chancellor Rishi Sunak, took time to inform the public that he wouldn’t have made the Jimmy Savile remarks, which could be seen as dissent except Sunak immediately said he was pleased that Johnson had ‘clarified what he meant.’
As political assassinations go, this was like prodding someone in the back with a stiletto encased in a wellington boot, but by the standards of this ClownCar government it was a postively Jacobean gesture.
The main purpose of Sunak’s appearance above the parapet was to inform the public that he would be offering a £350 ‘discount’ to offset a projected 54 percent rise in energy bills this April – £250 of which will have to be paid back in instalments.
On the same day we learned that the British public faces the steepest fall in living standards since records began – including a drop in real income that will be worse than the 2008 financial crisis - , and Shell announced unexpected profits of $6.4 billion in the last quarter of last year that will enable it to raise shareholder dividends by 4 percent.
In the wake of these announcements, some wondered why the government would not raise VAT or impose a windfall tax on energy companies to help consumers. Some looked back to the halcyon days of 2016 when Johnson and his fellow-leave campaigners promised a drop in energy bills once Britain left the EU.
Back then we were told - by Johnson - that we would be able to cut VAT when we left -a proposal that would do a lot more to alleviate fuel poverty than Rishi Sunak’s ‘pay-back-your-own discount offer.
No mention of that from Sunak or anyone else yesterday. Elsewhere however, a number of EU member states are…cutting VAT on fuel, even though this was not supposed to happen, and the French government is forcing the energy company EDF to take a £7bn hit and capped energy bills at 4 percent to protect consumers.
We Brits have often been told that we were special these last few years, and it seems that we are. Yesterday Sunak told us that we should ‘get used to’ high energy bills – instructions that were echoed by MP Crispin Blunt on Question Time.
And faced with an eyewatering combination of rising fuel bills, higher prices, and inflation, the governor of the Bank of England told workers that they should not ask for pay rises to match the rising cost of living.
The prospect of millions of people being pushed into poverty or deeper into it than they are already is is a far greater disaster than the morbid political soap opera taking place at Drowning Street, though the two events are not unconnected. It hardly needs to be said that none of those who are telling the public to ‘get used to’ fuel poverty and falling incomes will ever feel the consequences of these developments themselves.
It remains to be seen how the British public responds to these developments, and what opposition politicians and future governments will do about them. But one thing is certain – the government we have now will not come back from a day like yesterday.
It might limp on, lying, distracting, gaslighting, and corrupting everything it touches, propped up by spineless and conniving MPs and rightwing papers who think there is something to be gained by keeping it in power, who fear electoral retribution, or simply don’t have the guts to stand against it.
But it will never recover the moral and political authority it has lost, which was not much to begin with, and Johnson will never be the politician he was. Today he might quote the Lion King, tomorrow it might be Peppa Pig.
But clowntime is over, and he can’t escape the shame, disgrace and humiliation that is waiting for him. All he can do is postpone it, until the water finally rises above his head, leaving Nadine Dorries to sing My Heart Will Go On, as a furious and disgusted electorate finally gets the opportunity to get rid of him for good and try to repair the damage that he and his party have inflicted.