The Guardian view on Johnson and Cummings: cynical bluster
It has become a commonplace to observe that Boris Johnson does not welcome close scrutiny of his decisions and actions. During his premiership, the depth of his antipathy to normal procedures of parliamentary accountability has been repeatedly demonstrated. Even in the midst of a pandemic, the prime minister has remained elusive. Until the crisis over his chief adviser’s flouting of lockdown rules engulfed the government, Mr Johnson had presented only two of the daily Downing Street press conferences since late April.
This unwillingness to engage would have made Wednesday’s interrogation by the House of Commons liaison committee a significant and revealing moment, even before the recent revelations that Dominic Cummings broke the government’s own lockdown rules. The liaison body is the only MPs’ committee with the right to question the prime minister, but it had been trying in vain to exercise it since the autumn. After repeated cancellations, Mr Johnson belatedly agreed to turn up after the Brexiter luminary, Sir Bernard Jenkin, was appointed as chair last month.
The spectacle which ensued vividly illustrated why the prime minister had been so keen to stay away. Mr Johnson’s trademark technique of offering bluster and rhetorical flourishes in lieu of detailed responses was on display throughout. Questioned by Jeremy Hunt on the failure to ramp up testing targets until April, he failed properly to explain the lethal lack of urgency. It remains unclear whether, when the new test-and-trace regime takes effect, there will be sanctions for those who ignore advice to self-isolate.
But inevitably it was the Cummings affair – and Mr Johnson’s determination to both defend and retain his senior adviser – which transformed this occasion into a test of the prime minister’s leadership and priorities, at a time when national unity and public trust in government is paramount. His performance was characteristically blithe and depressingly inadequate.
Flying in the face of every opinion poll, the prime minister suggested that the public wanted to “move on”, having heard, he said, quite enough “autobiography” when it came to Mr Cummings. He rejected the idea that his adviser’s decision to follow his own lockdown rules could lead other people to do the same, placing lives at risk. A cabinet inquiry into the episode, he judged, would be “a waste of time”, and claimed to have seen evidence of Mr Cummings’ movements but refused to elaborate. The prime minister’s stonewalling was such that it prompted one Conservative MP to tell him: “Frankly no one understands why you hold these views.”
The explanation, clearly, is that Mr Johnson has no intention of doing without his most valued official, even at the cost of losing public trust during a national emergency. The majority of the public think that Mr Cummings broke the rules, should resign or be sacked, and that his actions have compromised government messaging. As the country begins the fraught process of easing lockdown, a fraying of a sense of collective responsibility would be disastrous, but the prime minister is willing to risk it.
The manner and content of his responses to the liaison committee were of a piece with the approach which has served him so well on his journey to Downing Street. The brazen willingness to obfuscate and bluff it out; the indifference to ordinary standards of accountability and the absence of detail all belong to a political style which treats dissent, or even scrutiny, with contempt. Partly thanks
to Mr Cummings’ divisive presence in
Downing Street, this has become the government’s modus operandi. But as the Conservative MP, Peter Bone, recently warned, it is not possible to run a government like “a Vote Leave campaign”. The refusal not only to sack Mr
Cummings, but even to express regret for his behaviour, amounts to a crisis of leadership and authority at the top of
British politics.