Why Operation Red Meat drives us to distraction
We assume policies are meant to cover up partygate, writes George Pitcher. But what if it's the other way around?
A predominant narrative in our public square just now is that the prime minister has hurriedly relaunched a load of policy initiatives to distract attention from his lamentable ability to be a party animal during the pandemic lockdowns of last year.
Operation Red Meat (full of saturated fats) provides the populist protein that his voter base craves – military intervention in stemming the tide of refugees to UK shores, sending them to west and mid-African countries for “processing” and de-funding our principal public-service broadcaster. All the sort of stuff that is central to Boris Johnson’s reputation as a liberal.
Mesmerised
The intention, it’s widely assumed, is that his newly-won electors in formerly Red Wall seats in the north will be so mesmerised by this display of manifesto policy fulfillment that they will forget all about partygate and that Johnson was living it up in Number 10 while ordinary people and the Queen alike were obeying the rules and burying their dead. A grateful nation will also consequently overlook that he may very well have lied to parliament about it all.
But there is an alternative interpretation and it is this: That the distraction is the other way around. I don’t mean that this is a deliberate strategy – nothing in the PM’s life is deliberate, except the lying, hypocrisy and faux contrition. But it is nonetheless the case that the whole palaver of Johnson’s lifestyle, his (understandably journalistic) inability to distinguish between a work event and a piss-up and, indeed, his very fight to survive against his dissident backbenchers, serves to distract everyone – present company excepted – from the fact that he has absolutely no policy agenda. That is, no policies at all.
In short, scandals of lockdown-breaking, interior décor funding and paramour budget-boosting distract from the bare cupboard of “levelling-up” and that there is now a cost-of-living crisis that’s not so much an elephant in the cabinet room as a herd of elephants in Johnson’s smallest room.
Silver bullet
Inflation has just hit levels not seen for 30 years. But what leads the news, even on the public-service broadcaster that Johnson promises to bring down? It’s whether Sue Gray has a silver bullet about whether Johnson was warned about a jolly in his garden.
The only thing that can remotely be called a policy is Johnson promising loads of public money to infrastructure-challenged regions and leaving his Chancellor to wrestle with the sums. And that doesn’t bear a moment’s public scrutiny. So, in this narrative, partygate is quite handy, assuming he can survive it.
Distraction is a funny thing in politics. It’s something that is almost auto-responsive when governments are presented with uncomfortable truths.
I remember a little over a decade ago playing the lead editorial role, as his principal flak at Lambeth Palace, for Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams’s guest editorship of the New Statesman. He drafted a beautifully constructed and extended leader for the magazine on the nature of the localism, which had emerged as a successor policy to the “Big Society” as a consequence of the austerity programme, in David Cameron’s coalition government.
An illustrative extract:
… child poverty, poor literacy… sustainable infrastructure in poorer communities… What is too important to be left to even the most resourceful of localism?
That’s a question that could have occupied the agenda of “levelling-up” a decade later. But it wasn’t the issue that attracted much, if any, interest. That came from these phrases:
… there is an understandable anxiety about what democracy means in such a context… anxiety and anger have to do with the feeling that not enough has been exposed to proper public argument.
And, mea culpa, I lifted those sentiments for the headline: “The government needs to know how afraid people are”.
The Tory backbenches went berserk. The Lambeth mailbag burst. Most letters were of the “stick to yer pulpit” variety (whatever that may mean), but some were truly ad hominem and offensive. In the poetic sense, you might say some Tory MPs hit the fan.
Imaginary outrage
It was almost a Pavlovian response. Press an imaginary outrage – in this instance archiepiscopal interference in politics – and the reward is avoidance of the real issues of political consequence.
It’s also an inversion of moral responsibility. If you can be morally distracted by something easy to manage, you don’t have to tackle the harder moral imperatives. We’re accustomed at church to welcoming those regular congregants, who sing, pray and apparently listen to the gospel. They then default to familiar moral positions for the rest of the week.
I’ve recently heard it expressed by one Sunday regular that it doesn’t matter if migrants drown in the channel as and when their flimsy boats are turned around, because they shouldn’t have embarked in them in the first place.
In this context, church is the distraction from a morally barren life in the public square. We saw that when President Donald Trump had pastors lay hands on him as he sat at his desk in the Oval Office.
It’s the same instinct in the UK that keeps a mop-haired rogue in debating territory that he understands – partying and social rule-breaking – rather than in the more challenging arena of policy-making. Even if it costs him his job. And even if it drives the rest of us to distraction.
George Pitcher is a visiting fellow at the LSE and an Anglican priest.