EU Referendum


Politics: what will it take?


22/04/2021




Politics, says Johnny Mercer "is a question of integrity", referring to his former employment as: "the most distrustful, awful environment I've ever worked in".

This former army captain then declared: "Almost nobody tells the truth, is what I've worked out over the last 36 hours", adding: "I don't think anyone, really, can get on their high horse about trust and ethics and all the rest of it in politics, because, as far as I'm concerned, most of it is a bit of a cesspit", he added.

Until he left his post, Mercer may have been the last honourable man in politics, but one has to wonder whether he was not also one of the most naïve. He has been working for a prime minister who has made a career out of lying, and whose mores have quite evidently infected the entire body politic.

And he's only just worked out that politics is "a bit of a cesspit", where "almost nobody tells the truth"? Really?

Then, what of Mercer's brother in arms, Leo Docherty, the MP for Aldershot? Mercer had believed that the government's stance was "a gross betrayal of people who signed up to serve in the military". And, he said, "as everybody knows, I'm not having it".

But Docherty, a former captain in the Scots Guards, has agreed to step into Mercer's post as veterans minister. Ben Wallace, the defence secretary, said he was "delighted" to welcome Docherty to the department.

"He will be taking up one of the most important roles: championing our veterans and service personnel", Wallace said. "Leo comes with a wealth of experience both of the armed forces, having served in Afghanistan, and of politics. I know that he will do an excellent job".

As with thieves, it would seem, there is no honour amongst politicians – but then we already knew that.

But there is little point in dwelling on this. With Johnson, we knew exactly what we were getting, even down to the "sandpapering" quip he used yesterday on the BBC's Spotlight programme.

Yet, despite his deserved reputation as a pathological liar, the Vote Leave campaign chose this liar amongst liars to lead the leave campaign, to the dismay of many of us. And when this odious man did his level best to undermine the serving prime minister, Theresa May, he was rewarded for his treachery with the leadership of the Conservative Party, thence to become prime minister.

His performance yesterday on Spotlight was a disgrace, but no different to the way he handles everything else, only to walk away untouched.

Tory sleaze has become a cottage industry, but only at the margins, while this creature goes blundering on, apparently breaking every rule of politics, lacking trust and credibility with an increasing proportion of the population – yet maintaining his popularity with his fanbase.

It has come to the point, though, where this can't be put down to one man – not that it ever could. Johnson survives because of a peculiar set of circumstances. He was the man who was going to "get Brexit done" at a time when trust in parliament was at an all-time low, and many believed that MPs would backtrack on the referendum if they could. He came at a time when Labour was in disarray, led by a man so manifestly unfit for government that even Johnson looked vaguely credible – difficult though that is to believe.

But the treatment of Mercer illustrates just how vile Johnson's administration really is. Interviewed by the Telegraph, cheerleader of the Johnson fan club, Mercer says he had told Downing Street out of courtesy of his intention to resign over his frustration at the government's failure to offer legal protection to ex-soldiers facing prosecution over killings during the Troubles.

In response, he says, Number 10 leaked his planned resignation and then sacked him by text message. He says: "My experience in Government has been horrific, but I’m not going to tell tales out of school. I want to get this issue [of protecting veterans] over the line. It's safe to say I felt like I was treated like shit throughout, and the last act of leaking my resignation which I sent as a courtesy only to Number 10 so that I didn't ambush them, was a huge mistake".

"Any goodwill was lost", he says, "And then when I refused to resign I challenged the Chief Whip to look me in the eye and sack me. He couldn’t do it, I left and he texted me. That summed it up. What cowards". It is difficult to get much lower than that – grubby behaviour which would deserve a headline story in its own right.

As to the prosecution of veterans, of which Mercer complains, many are in their 70s and 80s and are being held to account for events which happened as long as 50 years ago. This, Mercer believes, is a "huge scandal" and an "appalling betrayal" for a government that had failed to stop it.

Nor is this an academic argument. On Monday two soldiers (identified only as A and C) will go on trial charged with the murder of Joe McCann, a former official IRA commander who died in Belfast in 1972.

Mercer says that he repeatedly came up against obstacles to his attempts to offer protection to the troops who served in Northern Ireland. And while a separate Bill, which does give protection from prosecution to servicemen and women in overseas conflicts, is being shepherded through parliament, Northern Ireland veterans are excluded from it.

In Mercer's view, "This is not about justice. It is about a group of lawyers and average politicians sucking at a firehouse of public money, trashing veterans in the process and dragging out the grief for the families".

"It's the sort of thing", he says, that "the Boris Johnson I know stands up against. But leadership is all about who you surround yourself with. If you surround yourself with desperately weak people who will endlessly tell you what you want to hear, driven by Spads who have that classic combination of over-confidence blended perfectly with total ineptitude, you will get surprises".

This mythical creature, the Boris Johnson that Mercer knows, clearly isn't one that has any existence in the real world. Principles and loyalty might as well be a foreign language to Johnson who has betrayed just about everybody who ever knew him.

Starmer, currently, is trying to make a dent over the Dyson affair, complaining that the prime minister had been "lobbied by a wealthy businessman and a close friend for a change in the tax rules", and had responded, "I'll fix it".

What is coming out from this is that Johnson has kept his personal telephone number, despite advice to discard it. He is, apparently, frequently contacted by businesses leaders, politicians and other individuals.

"He is constantly lobbied by phone", a Tory source said. "He may be running everything past private office but it could become a big issue". One adviser even said the Johnson had brought up in meetings that he had been texted by individuals offering advice on policy issues.

Starmer says that these texts raised serious concerns about preferential treatment for those with the prime minister’s personal number. "How many other people with the prime minister's personal number has he given preferential treatment to?"

He says that at the heart of the lobbying scandal, including the lobbying by David Cameron to Sunak on behalf of the now-collapsed Greensill Capital, were "people's jobs and wasted taxpayers' money".

Starmer avers that thousands of jobs at Liberty Steel were on the line in Hartlepool and Rotherham following Greensill's collapse. "The prime minister hasn't fixed that, in fact he's done nothing to help steel workers", he states, asking: "Is it now quite literally one rule for those that have a prime minister’s own number, and another for everybody else?"

But this is just par for the course with the Johnson administration. Clearly, Mercer didn't have the number, and the British public are not in the loop either. Sooner or later, this must end, but I'm beginning to wonder what it will take to bring this ghastly man down.

Also published on Turbulent Times.