Not for the first time, Boris Johnson must envy Winston Churchill. There was a man who knew the privileges afforded to leadership in a crisis. When the country was tightening its belt with wartime rationing, Churchill suggested “a series of Cabinet banquets, a sort of Salute the Stomach week”. Nobody called for his resignation. Even the discovery that the great man had designated post-war rationing plans “not a bad meal” – overlooking the fact that they were meant to last a week – didn’t turn the public against him.
But Boris gets ambushed by one cake, and the whole world calls for his head. Are the people not aware that he’s the only thing standing between Vladimir Putin and Kyiv? Have they no gratitude for his leadership?
There are three observations worth making at this point. The first is that times have changed. What went in the 1940s will not do today. The second is that, no matter what he may think to the contrary, Boris Johnson is not actually Winston Churchill. And the third is that that particular line of argument begins to fall apart the more Boris is found to have broken the rules.
To be fined once could be considered misfortune. To be fined twice, ill-advised. To potentially face weeks of drip-drip-drip revelations about your conduct in the middle of a pandemic, evidence of a degree of shamelessness only those who had made the most cursory study of your career to date could have predicted.
It’s tempting to say that this is all priced in with Boris; voters knew they were getting a lovable rogue, and will turn a blind eye to a bit of mischief here and there. But it’s one thing to be in on the joke, and another to be its subject. Many people, even those who have supported him, will be deeply upset.
They just won’t be aggrieved enough for it to count. The pandemic, in the public mind, is over. Partygate reporting has dragged on for months, more than enough time for the eye to glaze over when tasked with reading yet another article on the choice of wine in the Downing Street garden. Boris will survive this.
Whether he should is an entirely different question. For the Prime Minister to break the law, any law, is not a small matter. To break a law known to be harsh to the point of unbearable while exhorting the country to continue to make sacrifices destroys his moral credibility. He is fortunate that this was not a quality he was known to rely on in the first place.
We would like the people who make the rules to be seen to respect them. But so long as enforcement is harsh for others, it is entirely possible to run a two tier system with little effect beyond degrading trust in politics as a whole – a price you suspect many politicians would be more than willing to pay.
Similarly, it does not really matter that the point of insisting our leaders are subject to the same rules as the rest of us is to prevent them from making laws they cannot abide by. The breach has already happened, the damage is already done. Retroactive punishment will not force the government into having adopted a more humane policy in 2020.
Perhaps more serious in the short term is the possibility that Boris has misled Parliament. Under the ministerial code, this would be a resigning matter. But again, the British constitution functions to an unusual degree on norms of behaviour. Many rules have no force other than history to demand obedience. This gives the system a significant degree of inbuilt flexibility. It also demands a careful guardian to uphold them.
Boris Johnson’s premiership has been marked by a cavalier approach to conventions. A little more damage is unlikely to overly concern him. We may find it disappointing that this approach has not been taken in the pursuit of a genuinely radical agenda for reshaping Britain so much as in the pursuit of holding on to office in order to occupy it, but that disappointment is ours rather than his.
Perversely, the most likely consequence of Boris’s fines will be to make things worse for others convicted of breaking the rules. We are still putting teenagers through court for lockdown breaches last January, landing them with fines they will struggle to pay, and criminal records which will damage their future prospects.
They will not have the financial resources or connections enjoyed by Boris Johnson to fall back on, or the security of a job where they decide whether they stay or go. It is entirely possible that they were convicted under rules which would never have been so harshly enforced if Downing Street was forced to abide by them. There is a clear moral imperative to right this wrong, clear the fines, and clear their names. This is now politically impossible.
