Britain is going to the dogs (and all dogs go to the poles!)

[Belle]

People said Johnson was shambolic and disorganized and sadly that reality has damaged the polity of the UK. Couple this with the fact that Johnson has a silly woke partner and it only gets worse.

Britain is about to wake up to the mess it’s in
MATTHEW PARRIS
COLUMNIST, THE TIMES

Britain is going to the dogs. We haven’t quite woken up to the mess we’re in yet, but we will. In the unconscious mind of the nation the dots are all there, waiting to be joined up. When the connections are made, and as his Marbella tan begins to peel, the aimless occupant of 10 Downing Street will be in for a shock.
Let me identify some of the dots. There is no other way but to hit you with a sample, but before I do, please understand this: I’m very well aware that at almost any point in the political cycle of almost any government, it would be possible to compile a depressing list of things going wrong. Things do. Some will be random, unrelated. Some will be, by any reasonable judgment, beyond the power of any prime minister to predict or control. Others will be trivial when taken in isolation. Many may be transient. But accumulated they paint a worrying picture. We’ve all of us in the sleepless hours made lists of problems and begun to feel overwhelmed by their weight. So may a nation. We add things up.

The first skill demanded of any effective leader is the talent to stop people adding things up; to raise our eyes to the longer term; a place we’re aiming for, a plan for getting there. Thatcher had it: bearings. Johnson lacks them.

Try this next time you’re in a lurching railway carriage: meander down the aisle - you’ll find yourself jolted off your balance. Now try striding fast, your eye fixed on the carriage’s end. The faster you walk, the straighter you’ll be able to go. It’s all about the stabilising force of momentum. It’s a truth of Newtonian physics.

It’s a truth of political leadership too. Watching The New Labour Revolution on TV I was struck by something Peter Mandelson said: “The single most important thing for a political party is for the dominating agenda to be the one you set.” Fail to set that goal and direction, and voters will start looking around themselves at the immediate. They will start adding things up.

Here’s a few. Petrol queues may have faded but future confidence in being able to fill up at any time and anywhere has been rocked. Motorists took fright. We feel it could happen again.

The new queues are of ships at ports such as Felixstowe. Pictures of acres of unfetched containers have put the wind up retailers and consumers alike as Christmas approaches. A first-world problem? First-world governments are elected to take first-world problems seriously. Johnson appears not to.

We’re short of up to 100,000 HGV drivers. Nobody knows how this may hit us in the months ahead and it doesn’t sound as if the PM does. Saying “pay them more” while failing to attract visa applications from the Continent looks pitiful.

What next? Groceries? The catering industry (already blighted by post-Brexit labour shortages)? Farmers? Factories? The courts system (60,000 cases awaiting trial)? Online retailers’ deliveries? Nobody knows which, how badly, or for how long. It spooks us.

So do gas prices: some say rising to as much as pounds 2,000 for the average household. Ministers have had to deny there may be power cuts. Will price rises feed through into inflation, mortgage costs? I’m old enough to remember both the anxieties and the animosities when some are clobbered by, others protected from, inflation.

And now Tory MPs are falling out over calls for government subsidy for hard-hit energy-hungry manufacturers. Most of our corporate suppliers of domestic gas and electricity face bankruptcy: 13 have gone under already. Meanwhile the Treasury calls the business secretary a liar for claiming the two were discussing state intervention. How is this looking for overseas investors?

We may be emerging from a nasty spat with the EU over the Northern Ireland protocol, leaving the European Court of Justice still at the apex of arbitration, a ridiculous fuss over sausages, and Johnson’s chief negotiator’s dangerous stoking up of sectarian tensions. The Democratic Unionist Party, foolishly marched to the top of the hill, are left to fume.

And the NHS! More than five million delayed operations, cancer services overwhelmed, and an uneasy feeling that the whole structure is in trouble, with GPs the latest in the firing line. Add that to the care homes sector, which (beyond their present critical shortage of staff) can find little in the prime minister’s long promised “plan”. Last year’s coronavirus deaths were kick-started in care homes. The wretched story of care for the elderly has only just begun.

There’s no space here to talk about a collapse in confidence in the police, the impending failure of the Cop26 conference in Glasgow, illegal immigrants crossing the Channel, the inability of the Home Office to keep track of migrants whose political asylum claims are refused, our chronic failure to process such claims with dispatch, the tension between “green” policy, energy security and the householder’s purse, the chill in the Anglo-US relationship, the breakdown of our relations with France, or the cupboard - still bare - of “great new trade deals around the world” ...

Suffice it to say we scent panic at the heart of government. Above the voters’ heads floats an unsettled sense of official confusion. Ministers seem to be making speeches, but pulling levers connected to nothing.

Fate created Boris Johnson to be a prime minister for good times. They are not good and getting worse. Stones will be thrown at government from all directions, but until the present widespread but diffusive feeling of public unease focuses into some kind of diagnosis of the core problem, Johnson may loiter, capering for the media, in Downing Street.

The core problem is him. Directionless and without momentum now Brexit is done and Covid survived, Johnson is a giggling impediment to the unifying sense of political momentum that Mandelson describes. It may be his insouciance itself that brings him down.

But who will inherit? Does Sir Keir Starmer display that all-consuming sense of purpose that Johnson lacks but Tony Blair (for instance) possessed? Hardly. Might Rishi Sunak restore to the Tories their Thatcherite pride in good housekeeping? Perhaps, but it feels old-fashioned now, inadequate to the hour.

A feeling persists that there’s an unoccupied place at the centre of our politics. “Levelling up” won’t hack it, and may soon attract the scorn that “the Big Society” finally invited. Politics abhors a vacuum. “Watch this space” is often a lazy way of ending a column, but this time there really is a space. Watch it.

The Times