Owen Paterson and Tory Corruption

It is a dark day for parliament. By 250 to 232 votes, the Tories rescinded Owen Paterson's 30 day suspension from the Commons and scrapped the (formally) independent parliamentary standards process. Under the successful Leadsom amendment, which the cringing lackey Lindsay Hoyle was well within his rights to reject, the Tories have seized control of standards by installing a committee on which they will have a majority to decide what the new system's going to be. Quite rightly, Labour and the SNP said they're going to boycott this farce. In the meantime Paterson will carry on, still on the payroll of Randox Laboratories free to lobby ministers and ask questions on their behalf. A disgraced MP flaunting his corruption in full public view.

This has to be considered in its full context. Answering the question 'is there a Johnsonism?', 18 months on the answer is a clear yes: a frontal assault on constitutional checks and balances governing the accountability and probity of ministers, and an entirely conscious effort to dilute the quality of parliamentary democracy so the Tories can pretty much do as they please. There is an obvious personal benefit to this: no Prime Minister has been as obviously corrupt, reckless with the lives of others, and as subversive of parliamentary norms as Boris Johnson. In a manner customary to self-styled presidents for life, the pins of the unwritten constitution are getting bowled away to the point where the meagre substance of liberal democracy is pure appearance, a gossamer thin negligée barely covering the indecent goings ons of Johnson's Tories. As a contrived, premeditated effort it's not as though there weren't any warnings.

This comes after repeated breaches of the ministerial code. The riotous writ of Dominic Cummings across government. Cressida Dick. Covid procurement. Bullying the BBC. Changing the rules to make Paul Dacre head of Ofcom. Scandals that would have brought down previous governments with larger majorities are weekly occurrences for this most degenerate of Tory administrations. Yet while 13 Tory MPs did find a backbone and voted against the government's three-line whip, this is the logical culmination of the statecraft Margaret Thatcher set in train over 40 years ago. Her principle was simple. To carry through her (counter) revolution the authority of the state was centralised in the executive. The story of the Thatcher years wasn't just one of bringing the labour movement to heel, but rooting out points of expert and administrative autonomy within the state's constellation of overlapping institutions and forcibly subordinating them to the authority of her government. A process that only expanded under John Major, Blair and Brown, and all the Tory governments since 2010 - despite many of these voices now being raised against Johnson's butchering of the constitution (more here).

Perhaps the immediate consequence of what the Tories have done is wake some people up. Keir Starmer's response was uncharacteristically sharp, at least by his standards. Maybe there's a belated realisation that doing some opposition is a good idea, instead of constantly appealing to the ref or telling the Prime Minister off for not having a grip. As for Johnson, he's doing this because he can. He's banking on the public, above all his voter coalition not being that fussed. Maybe. But the more authoritarian a government becomes, the greater its rigidity, and the more likely that political crises will accumulate to the point of explosion. This is what history tends to suggest. Hubris now, Nemesis later. In other words, what might look like a show of political strength will, in time, serve to sap it. But until that day comes, the question is how much more damage can Johnson do the public life and the institutions underpinning it. The answer is a hell of a lot.

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