Andrew ROBERTS
One of the most powerful political weapons throughout history has been ridicule: the capacity to make one’s opponents look ludicrous as well as wrong. Deployed deftly – even, perhaps on occasion, cruelly – ridicule can be devastating. Ally that to a strong moral urge to protest against authoritarianism, a coherent viewpoint and a remarkably observant eye for the political jugular and you have polemical dynamite.
Quentin Letts, one of Britain’s finest parliamentary sketchwriters, is angry. He is infuriated by bureaucrats, jobsworths and politicians who enjoy bossing the British people about. In this punchy, short book, which you can read in a single afternoon, he superbly ridicules what he calls “the bossocracy”.
Although he employs his customary wit – and there are laugh-out-loud moments peppered throughout this book – Letts has a serious message to impart, which is that in recent years, and of course especially over the past year, what Denis Thatcher called the sheer “buggeration factor” in British life has increased exponentially, and needs to be lessened.
Letts is not opposed to the lockdowns altogether and is not a libertarian, but he recognises that when a crematorium assistant in Milton Keynes interrupts a funeral to stop a widow being comforted by her son from the same bubble, something very wrong is happening to our society.
Letts highlights scores of similar examples of the bossocracy and its minions preferring the rule book over common sense and, just as often, common decency. Yet instead of being a profoundly depressing work, as it so easily might have been in other hands, such is the author’s capacity for historical allusion, arresting metaphor and humour that the prose zings along. This is also a brave book – names are gleefully named – and one only hopes it has been properly “lawyered”, as some of his estimations of named members of the bossocracy are so swingeing as to be positively actionable.
Letts is at his most devastating through direct quotation, such as when he lists the joint “statement of ethical principles” put out by the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Engineering Council, the industry’s regulatory bodies. There are no fewer than 17 commandments, each more bossy than the last, but as Letts points out, engineers “are bridge builders and car designers and inventors of lifts and widgets and guns and elasticated bra straps, not builders of the New Jerusalem. What business is it of an engineer in, say, a bathrooms factory in Sedgefield, to ‘promote equality, diversity and inclusion’ or to proselytise about ‘the impacts and benefits of engineering achievements’?”
When Letts concludes that “codes of conduct are just corporate arsecovering, virtue semaphore and feeble compliance to interference by pressure politics”, we cheer, and further when he states that “grievance has become an exaggerated cliché” and that “trigger warnings are the dribbling get-out clauses of an equivocating arts elite that has weakly accepted the whinges of moral terrorists. Stop telling us what will offend us.”
What business is it of a bathroom engineer to ‘promote inclusion, diversity and equality’?
As one might expect from somebody who works in and around the Palace of Westminster, Letts is excellent at sniffing out politicians’ hypocrisy, such as Angela Rayner adopting a sanctimonious “blowdried, pink-cardie look” while taking the knee for Black Lives Matter, just before getting “back to her old self, scratching her pits in the Commons and slagging off a Tory MP for being ‘scum’.” Letts similarly identifies John Bercow’s career as Speaker of the House of Commons as “a classic example of obnoxiousness as a political survival mechanism”.
Nothing quite equals the assault on Mark Drakeford, Labour’s First Minister of Wales, however, whose speeches people “found so stupendously boring they had to be restored by defibrillator paddles”, until he discovered that adopting tougher lockdown measures than England attracted attention to himself, a state of affairs that delighted him, whereas previously “he could walk into a room with the Newport County reserve goalkeeper and the goalie would be the one mobbed by autograph hunters”. The takedown of Drakeford is worth the price of the book in itself.
Letts is superb at investigating the mindset of people, particularly in politics but in many other walks of life too, who want to boss other people around, frequently unnecessarily. His investigation into how banning things almost always backfires is inspired, and his overall political philosophy – that good, solid British common sense can be trusted more than officialdom’s bossiness – is an uplifting one.
There is something almost Burkean in Letts’ statement, apropos of officialdom’s demand that everything must be licensed by government, that “knowledge is a right. When rights need a licence, they cease to be rights.” Because he writes in such an engaging way, Quentin Letts might be mistaken as merely an entertaining journalist. He is that, of course, but he is also a political philosopher whose message is needed now more than at any time in the past half-century.
Andrew Roberts’s Churchill: Walking with Destiny is published by Penguin. To order Quentin Letts’ Stop Bloody Bossing Me About for £14.99, call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk