There is now an embarrassment of riches to bring this entitled Tory party down
Nearly three years into Boris Johnson’s premiership, its defining theme may at last have arrived. For all his talk of “levelling up” and the supposed wonders of life outside the EU, his government has singularly failed to come up with any kind of coherent narrative, leaving events to tell their own story. And on that score, we now have an embarrassment of riches.
As much as the government would like people to view it as an irrelevance, Partygate grinds on. Johnson’s recent history is smattered not just with illicit social events, but tales of £840a-roll wallpaper initially paid for by a Tory donor, gratis holiday accommodation in Mustique and Marbella, and suggestions that he simply cannot afford to live on his prime ministerial salary. Massively lucrative Covid contracts have been handed to companies with clear links to Conservatives. Now, the Tory backbencher David Warburton is accused of sexual assault and cocaine use, the failure to declare a loan of nearly £150,000 from a controversial Russian businessmanand lobbying the Financial Conduct Authority on the latter’s behalf: he has so far said only that he has “enormous amounts of defence”, but “can’t comment any further”.
Most spectacularly of all, there is the plunge of Rishi Sunak. Once his wife’s non-dom status was revealed, further stories swiftly arrived: the £20m she may have avoided in UK tax, and the mind-boggling fact that Sunak had been classed as a permanent resident of the USA while he was both an MP and chancellor. Before all that broke, Sunak was already making one reputational error after another, as evidenced by his decision to donate £100,000 to Winchester college, his private alma mater. There are whispers about briefing against Sunak by people in Downing Street who want to remove a threat to Johnson: the slight problem with that logic is that Sunak’s air of arrogance and entitlement highlights the fact that his boss has very similar traits.
And there is more. The health secretary, Sajid Javid, insisted last week that it would be “morally wrong” not to put up taxes to pay for the NHS and social care. Thanks to the Sunday Times, we now know that he was a nondom for six years while he was earning up to £3m a year as a banker, that he based some of his investments in an offshore trust, and that he now wants to be open about his past “tax statuses”. Behind whatever masks it has adopted, the Conservative party has always quietly looked after ultra-wealthy people and put them in positions of power. But it is now being unsettled by the same cultural shifts that are undermining no end of establishment institutions, most notably the monarchy. In the age of social media and a 1,000mph news cycle, actions or images that are full of the worst kind of symbolism instantly balloon into huge, multifaceted stories that can sink even people used to impunity, and senior Conservatives are giving their detractors one gift after another.
The awfulness of the government’s current image is largely about what privilege looks like in the midst of massively rising living costs, but there is also something to be said about recent political history. Johnson and Sunak, let us not forget, are where they are because of the victory of the Leave side in the Brexit referendum of 2016, and its successful tapping into a lot of people’s longstanding view of politicians as a distant, cosseted elite. That kind of opinion had been given a new intensity by the Westminster expenses scandal that broke in 2009, revealing that mess of “second” homes, publicly funded swimming pools and receipts for packets of biscuits. The result was a white-hot fury about the gap between power and everyday life which fed into the referendum, and still lingers.
In the wake of the vote for Brexit, the people who first took control of the Conservative party seemed to have decided on a response to all that resentment. If you want a flavour of the thinking at work, have another look at the speech Theresa May gave to the Conservative conference in the autumn
of 2016, chiefly famed for its somewhat ugly jibe at “citizens of nowhere”. May talked about “a sense – deep, profound and, let’s face it, often justified – that many people have today that the world works well for a privileged few, but not for them”. She acknowledged “division and unfairness all around … perhaps most of all between the rich, the successful and the powerful – and their fellow citizens”. Part of the answer she offered was about a renewed spirit of common citizenship, and people at the top respecting “the bonds and obligations that make our society work”.
To cite this stuff is not to suggest that it would necessarily have been manifested in policy and political substance, nor that, if May’s time in Downing Street had gone on, she would have more of a sense of purpose than Johnson. She too was faced with questions about spousal tax arrangements: her husband, Philip, worked for an investment firm that paid no corporation tax for eight years, and was linked to offshore tax havens in the Paradise Papers. But her tone and style, at least, were very different from her successor’s. She was a roundhead; Johnson is a cavalier, and since he took power he has recklessly bounced around a political landscape that demands a sensitivity and personal restraint that he and some of his senior colleagues simply do not possess.
To some extent, Johnson has capitalised on voters’ dim view of politics and politicians, which – initially, at least – allowed him to make a pitch to the public delivered via winks and smirks: the suggestion that if all politicians were rogues, people ought to pick one they at least liked. But in his offer of “levelling up”, there is also an echo of the reconnection between power and people that May promised. What he and other Tories have constantly failed to understand is that the credibility of that idea is compromised not just by an absence of funding and detail, but by their conduct. Put bluntly, you are not going to convince people in Middlesbrough and Stoke-on-Trent that you are on their side if what they read about you seems to constantly involve sevenfigure sums of money, “tax statuses” and old-fashioned class privilege.
Over the next few months, a lot of attention will rightly be paid to people who are living in the most precarious and dreadful circumstances. But one of the most striking aspects of the mounting cost of living crisis is the way it is reaching further up the income scale. Here, I think of those great expanses of newbuild homes that now ring so many British towns and cities, where people pursue what politicians call “aspiration” on tight family budgets, and cynical, sceptical voters with the lightest of political loyalties play their part in deciding the outcomes of elections.
What do they think of politicians who are awash with wealth and luxury, and stubbornly reluctant to offer any meaningful help? If I were a Conservative being told to bat away the latest stories and allow my colleagues to carry on regardless, I think that question would be causing me no end of concern.
John Harris is a Guardian columnist