Nick Cohen

Conservatives once knew that command and control didn’t work. Even if they didn’t know it intellectually, one former Conservative minister told me as he looked in disbelief at the chaos of Johnson’s dictatorial administration, 'they felt it in their bones'. This nominally Conservative government has centralised control, Soviet style, into a triumvirate of Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings: two pundits and a maniac. Even if they were the greatest politicians in history – and they are not – they would never have been able to cope with the Covid crisis. As it is, they have been overwhelmed, along with the 60,000 or so of our fellow citizens sent to their premature deaths.

For months, mental health charities and Labour politicians have been telling the government truths that were so self-evident to anyone with experience of mental health they shouldn’t need telling. People with learning disabilities and autism faced exceptional risks to health and life from Covid-19. They were likely to die because now, as always, they are the last patients the NHS thinks about when the screws tighten. And so it has proved. I could quote dozens of warnings, but let one stand for them all. On 5 May, Labour’s shadow secretary for social care, Liz Kendall, urged Department of Health and Social Care minister Helen Whately to publish data on deaths reported to the Learning Disabilities Mortality Review Programme.

This government may not be good for much but it knows how to manipulate language. Attacks on the ‘establishment’ are the cover it uses to smuggle ideologues and 'yes' men into the civil service. We all hate ‘the establishment,’ don’t we? Even when, and especially if, we have never met a permanent secretary. The establishment, by definition, is hidebound and complacent, white, male, Oxbridge and biased. Although the awkward fact remains that you can only join the civil service by passing competitive examinations, that can quickly be dispensed with.

It isn’t news to say the Johnson administration doesn’t understand how to fight Covid-19 or reopen schools or save the economy. But the knowledge that it doesn’t understand the people who put it in power is new and worth hearing. A poll given to The Spectator today by the Best for Britain think tank shows the gap between ‘Red Wall’ voters and the Tory elite in London is dizzyingly wide. It reports overwhelming opposition to a no-deal Brexit in the seats that put Johnson in Downing Street. As striking is the widespread concern about living standards and equally valid worries about the Conservatives tying Britain to the Trump administration. Best for Britain’s pollsters interviewed 5,317 people across the country from 9 May to 5 June.

For an instant, it looked as if George W. Bush might be an example of integrity all who believe in liberal democracy could grudgingly admire. Last week, he announced his anguish at the police killing of George Floyd. ‘America’s greatest challenge has long been to unite people of very different backgrounds into a single nation of justice and opportunity,’ Bush explained. But African-Americans remained harassed and threatened in their own country. ‘There is a better way,’ Bush sighed as he rose to his peroration. ‘The way of empathy, and shared commitment, and bold action, and a peace rooted in justice. I am confident that together, Americans will choose the better way.’ And then he went and spoilt it all by stopping right there.

The combination of Covid-19 and Brexit is a double whammy. The first was a haymaker that hit Britain from nowhere. The follow up will come when Britain, quite deliberately and with malice aforethought, winds up its fist and punches itself in the face. The economic impact of the virus will be accentuated by the UK leaving the EU without a deal or with a meagre free-trade agreement, warns a grim report, sponsored by the Best for Britain think tank. Business leaders do not generally get much sympathy. Watch any thriller made in the last two decades and as soon as the corporate executive appears on screen you can guess with a fair degree of certainty that the hero will unmask him as the villain in the final reel. They deserve our sympathy now.

Boris Johnson is a populist who no longer understands the populace. Dominic Cummings pretends to be an anti-elitist but cannot see how lethal the slogan ‘one rule for me and another for everyone else’ is to him and the elite he serves. Their government and the Vote Leave movement it grew from once had a crass genius for simple slogans that cut through – £350 million for the NHS, Get Brexit Done, Stay at Home. Boris Johnson’s slogan was Cummings ‘acted responsibly, legally and with integrity’ when he packed up his family, drove 250 miles, stayed near parents and siblings and, according to a witness, went off on family walks.  The message has certainly ‘cut through’ but not in the way Johnson intended.

I am hearing stories about people with disabilities that make me feel ill. Visitors to care homes (parents and siblings, usually) tell me they cannot go inside. Fair enough, given the risks of coronavirus spreading you might say. But some homes are not allowing parents to wave at their children through the window or meet them at a safe social distance when they are released from lockdowns lasting 23 hours a day for a brief walk, assuming they are allowed a walk at all. Severely autistic people, who understand little, think their parents are dead or have abandoned them. They are injuring themselves and falling into deep depressions. My sources won’t go on the record.

Sympathy for Conservative politicians rarely overwhelms their political opponents. But everyone with the interests of the country at heart (not to mention a modicum of human decency) should try to put themselves in their place. Imagine being a government minister. You are in a crisis like nothing you have encountered before. Unlike every political storm you’ve trudged through, the pandemic has no foreseeable end. A temporary emergency is one thing. Most people are capable of handling short-term privation, and can repeat dozens of clichés about the need to grit our teeth, tighten our belts and keep calm and carry on. But no government in the world has a viable coronavirus ‘exit strategy’.

In the middle of a national crisis, Britain has become a parliamentary democracy without a parliament. The police now have extraordinary powers to fine and arrest those who break the lockdown. Do I hear you say that these are necessary powers for a time of pandemic? Maybe they are. But we have no parliament to raise the alarm if those powers are abused or hysteria and the urge to punish replace the calm implementation of the law. Meanwhile everyone is asking questions about how ministers, the NHS and Public Health England failed to provide enough protective kit for doctors and nurses and wondering why Britain is lagging so far behind Germany in its ability to test the population. Everyone, that is, except the House of Commons and the House of Lords.

If Brexit did not do it, the panic buying has trampled to death national myths patriots once cherished. We now see that ‘quintessentially English’ does not now mean a reserved character with a stiff upper lip joining an orderly queue. But a demonically possessed shopper lunging towards the last four-pack of loo roll. Conservatives can find one comfort, however: the crisis is upholding their view of human nature – or at least it appears to be. Covid-19 is giving life to Margaret Thatcher's sociological analysis. ‘There's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first.

I do not know enough to comment on the merits of the Labour party's action against Trevor Phillips. But I know what the far left looks like when it is building a cover story to hide its wickedness, and everyone else looking at the Phillips case should know it too. In normal circumstances, you would wait to see the evidence that Phillips is an 'Islamophobe', and read with care the judgement of impartial and competent Labour officials. But nothing about Labour is normal now, and its officials are the last people whose judgement you should trust. The easy point to make – and just because it is easy does not mean you shouldn’t make it – is that the Labour party isn’t competent.

Keir Starmer knows. He’s not saying anything, not letting one word of criticism of the Corbyn regime escape his lips, but he knows better than the journalists who cover politics, better than you, me or anyone who hasn’t lived in Labour for the past five years, the depth of the disgrace of the British left. Starmer knows because he was in the meetings that excused Putin and failed to tackle anti-Semitism. He knows because he saw Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell, Seumas Milne and Andrew Murray close up. And I for one would love to hear his insider account of life with the cranky tankies. More to the point, Starmer knows because he lived through the wars on the left in his own constituency.

If you want to see why Britain’s future will be so decrepit, look at the dramas on ITV. Unlike the BBC or Channel 4, ITV receives no state protection. It must compete in the market, and is targeting the most powerful audience in the country: the elderly. ITV has old soap operas: Coronation Street (first broadcast in 1960) and Emmerdale (1972). Agatha’s Christie’s Marple and Poirot always feature. Unlike the BBC with its colour-blind casting and willingness to tear-up and rewrite Christie’s stories until they suit modern sensibilities, ITV’s adaptations are traditional and its casts are typically white. The Christie stories, like The Darling Buds of May, The Durrells, Endeavour, Foyle’s War, Grantchester, and Maigret are set in the past.

The persecution complex of the British left is both a psychological reality and the outcome of a cynical strategy. No one can doubt that the left feels victimised. But left-wing politicians have an interest in pretending that dark forces predetermine its defeat. If they are to keep their supporters in line, they can never take responsibility. They must convince Labour members they are victims of an elite conspiracy rather than of their own abysmal leadership. https://twitter.com/adamec87/status/1227239993623506944?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw Maintaining the necessary levels of paranoia in the current Labour leadership contest looked a hard task. Until this week, the Labour party has resembled a Victorian family with a dirty secret.

Boris Johnson is the first party leader of the media age. Winston Churchill and Michael Foot wrote extensively. But Johnson is a journalist. Before he went into politics, producing Tory commentary and editing this magazine were the achievements that defined him. And yet no modern prime minister has shown a greater determination to limit media scrutiny. Whether it is banning ministers from appearing on the Today programme and Good Morning Britain, or banning them and their special advisers from talking to journalists, Johnson is revealing himself to be a brooding suspicious politician, wholly at odds with his cheeky chappie persona. Even when a terrorist attacked civilians on a London street, ministers were “not available” to speak to the public.