Elections: broken politics

02/05/2021

Once again, the magnet of the Johnson psychodrama is exerting its influence on the English media, with the papers deeply engaged in the issue as the Sunday Times runs a lengthy article headed: "Can Boris Johnson afford to be prime minister?"

The short answer is: "he can't", despite a £157,372 annual salary, topped up by royalty cheques from his previous writings, and paying less Council tax on his Downing Street flat (£1,655 a year) than I do up in Bradford.

His relative penury, though, is largely due to the man's feckless approach to managing his own finances, on top of meeting the financial burden brought about by his sexual incontinence, plus the price he has to pay for sating the desires of his current paramour, now dubbed "Carrie Antoinette" – who is said to have "champagne tastes and a lemonade budget".

Much of the detail is the realms of the court gossip so beloved by the London-centric media, which need not trouble us here. But it does raise the question of how a man who can't even organise his own personal finances can claim to be competent enough to run the government.

But tucked into the detail is an account of the handling of the infamous "cash for curtains" payments which, if true, will set him on a collision course with Kathryn Stone, the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, and expose him to the risk of being suspended from the House of Commons.

On a parallel front, the Electoral Commission isn't messing about with its inquiry. Reportedly, Tory party staff have been given one week to hand over all information they have about Johnson's flat renovation – and have been warned that they could face criminal charges if they do not comply.

This came to them via an email sent from Alan Mabbutt, a senior official and registered legal officer, who said that materials must be handed over by 7 May. "You are put on notice that this is a criminal investigation", the email said, advising that staff who "knowingly falsify, conceal, destroy or otherwise dispose of information … could be committing a criminal offence of perverting the course of justice".

We are so inured to the machinations of the shambolic wreck at the centre of this affair that it takes a moment or two for the implications of this to sink in. Here is a matter where the prime minister glibly says "nothing to see here", where his own party's staff are being threatened with criminal prosecution if they don't spill the beans.

There can be little doubt, though, that this sort of compulsion is necessary. When the question was put to Conservative Party co-chairman, Amanda Milling, asking if she could guarantee that party money had not been spent on the flat, she adopted the same evasion strategy that we have seen from Johnson.

"Donations are absolutely focused on campaigning on the ground in seats like this in Hartlepool, but also the elections across the country", she said. "And from my point of view, I'm really enjoying getting out on the doorstep and talking to residents". In Milling's view, voters care who fills the potholes, who empties the bins, who keeps the streets safer - not Boris Johnson's flat.

This is the line assiduously taken by the Telegraph, which spent most of Saturday pushing out a series of articles giving aid and comfort to "their boy".

Pride of place was taken by an article written by Camilla Tominey, styled as an "associate editor", telling us that "Cummings isn't a genius" and that he was "a disaster in No 10". This, writes the breathless Camilla, indicates that suggestions that Johnson's paramour was the only person criticising Cummings ignores "his track record of woeful arrogance".

This is a significant turnaround from the article published in February 2020. This had Lord Blencathra, who as David Maclean was a Home Office minister in John Major's government, telling ministers to "shut up about Cummings".

"Not a single one of those whingeing about him would be ministers without him", he added. "We would not be out of the EU without him masterminding the Leave campaign, and we would not have won the General Election without his Get Brexit Done plan. He is a genius, and our majority is largely due to him".

When needs must, however, Cummings is to be thrown to the wolves to protect Johnson, while Janet Daley storms: "Labour has made a mistake: You don't accuse a PM of trivialities when he's trying to save lives". The opposition, Daley opined, "should learn that if they want to derail a government, don’t do it on technical grounds which few ordinary voters care about".

For a while also, the paper was relying on a YouGov poll which found that, despite widespread awareness and interest in the Johnson "scandal" stories, voting intention remained static. Last week, the company had estimated that voting intention for the Conservatives at 44 percent, with Labour on 34 percent. This week, it recorded 44 and 33 percent, respectively.

It's hard to look at the numbers and conclude anything but an apparently confusing and contradictory state of affairs, the company says. The public very much know what's going on, and know that a series of scandals currently surround the prime minister, but it has changed very few minds on the man himself or his party.

Timed at mid-afternoon on 30 April, this poll has since been trumped by a later effort from Opinium, triumphantly announced by the Observer.

Labour, it says, has slashed the Tories' poll lead in half "as more voters conclude that Boris Johnson is corrupt and dishonest ahead of this week's bumper set of local and devolved elections". In detail, the Conservative lead has fallen from 11 points to five, with Labour up four points compared with a week ago, on 37 percent, while the Tories had fallen two points to 42 percent.

Johnson's approval ratings have fallen back into negative territory (to -6 from +1 a week ago) while Starmer's have improved from +1 to +8. Some 42 percent of those surveyed viewed Johnson as "corrupt", up from 37 percent a week ago, while less than third (30 percent) regarded him as "clean". Only 15 percent of voters viewed Starmer as corrupt and 44 percent saw him as "clean".

As to the performance of the parties in this week's local election, YouGov has another poll which purports to shows that the Conservatives are set to benefit from collapse in UKIP support, and are projected to gain 90 extra councillors.

This is interesting, not least because pollsters and politicians have been reluctant to acknowledge the "UKIP effect", a term which I coined in 2005, and charted in the 2010 general election, when I calculated that it had cost Cameron a clear victory.

Now that UKIP is out of the picture, we at last see YouGov acknowledging the effect, as well it might. In the 2019 general election, the seat of Hartlepool – now the focus of a by-election on 6 May – went to incumbent Mike Hill, with 15,464 votes, representing 37 percent of the votes cast.

However, while the Conservatives came second, with 11,869 votes, Richard Tice of the Brexit Party came a close third, with 10,603 votes. Combined, the votes came to over 22,000, easily exceeding those cast for the winner – the embodiment of the "UKIP effect".

If one assumes that, in the absence of a viable replacement candidate for a UKIP-type party (this time, there is the Reform Party to deal with), the "insurgent" votes go to the Conservatives, then they are assured a clear victory in this by-election.

However, in these northern seats, Farage often maintained that he was pulling in Labour votes, in which case the votes could (mostly) return to the incumbent, giving the victory to Labour.

There is some support for this in a Sunday Times poll which predicts that Johnson's grip on the "red wall" appears to be loosening, with Labour narrowly ahead in the 43 red wall seats the Tories won in the December 2019 general election.

Tentatively, one might predict that this Thursday is not going to deliver Hartlepool to the Tories, nor cause any great electoral upsets – most likely on a much-reduced turnout as voters walk away from our broken politics, especially as Starmer (pictured) seems to have caught the hi-viz/hard hat dressing-up habit.

Also published on Turbulent Times.