Club Rules

No lives would have been saved if the notorious (actually, probably quite boring) Downing Street parties never took place, so to explicitly link the coincidental deaths of Covid-19 sufferers is just shroud-waving, particularly when you consider the excess deaths resulting from the delays in imposing lockdown or those who have died while on ever-lengthening NHS waiting lists. While the scandals over the award of PPE contracts and the test and trace programme have received some scrutiny, a decade of NHS underfunding is treated as mere background noise and the incompetence of the pandemic's management is marginalised in favour of the forensic media interrogation of white wine and Twiglets. In truth, disgust at naff parties in Number 10 is little different to outrage over BBC presenters not wearing poppies for a month before Remembrance Sunday, hence the emblematic importance of the lonely, grieving Queen. It is performative respect more concerned with tone (the wrong type of jacket at the Cenotaph, the frivolity of BYOB) than honouring the dead.

One of the more amusing sub-plots of "partygate" is that the poppy-loving press knew all about it from the off but have only now chosen to reveal the facts. Their reluctance hitherto owes a lot to their own compromised positions, notably James Slack, the current Deputy Editor of The Sun whose leaving party as Downing Street Director of Communications is now in the frame, but it also says something about the milieu. The anthropological insight this has given into the politico-media class - and the wider business elite, for that matter - is that they consider gardens behind Georgian buildings in central London as an extension of the workplace and the presence of alcohol and canapés as unremarkable. That Dominic Cummings chose to deliver the explanation for his Barnard Castle trip in the Downing Street rose garden wasn't an eccentric choice on his part, or ironic prefiguring for a later dramatisation starring Benedict Cumberbatch, but the answer to the question, "Where's the biggest usable space we've got to house the media for this?" 

One reason why it has taken so long for these revelations to come out, despite the plethora of witnesses, is that all those present or adjacent, including every lobby journalist, understand that the British establishment still conducts much of its business in private members clubs where drink is routinely served. While the popular image of clubland is of a stuffy Pall Mall establishment populated by the ancient and indolent, somewhere between and Around the World in Eighty Days and Yes Minister, the reality is a modern, elite environment integral to the commercial and political life of the capital that stretches from Marylebone to Shoreditch. The point is not merely that business and booze easily mix in this world, or that the norm of exclusivity encourages a belief that public rules do not apply, but that membership of the milieu entails a solidarity and omerta about relationships and behaviour. What's interesting is that the current revelations have taken on their own dynamic, moving from the sins of dispensable junior advisers and below the salt figures like Shaun Bailey to serious players like Slack. There's a point at which the pressure on Johnson could become dangerous for the press itself, and we may already have reached it.

So what is driving the media campaign? On BBC Newsnight on Wednesday, Jacob Rees-Mogg incidentally remarked that wine (no doubt a decent claret) was routinely available in the office when he worked in the City in the early 90s. This was accurate, albeit for a minority (partners, not employees), but what he didn't say is that the wider clampdown on drinking (and smoking) that started in the 1980s was not a self-denying ordinance by business leaders won over to sobriety. As drinking during the day was ruthlessley extirpated on the factory shop-floor and in open-plan offices as part of the neoliberal workplace regime (long hours, self-discipline, continuous improvement), it moved off-site for the executive class. Like so much else, it was outsourced. It reflected a persistent hierarchy but one that was now no longer bound by the physical limits that characterised industry before the 1980s, when you wouldn't find bottles of light ale in the staff canteen but there might be a drinks cabinet in the Managing Director's office (and you knew you had achieved class promotion when you got the key to the executive washroom). The implicit defence of this hierarchy provides a clue into the thinking of Rees-Mogg and his ilk.

The demand by Tory MPs that Johnson apologise for the latest party revelations springs from both fears of a bad press among conservative voters, particularly in Red Wall seats, and a desire to do away with the remaining pandemic restrictions. The subtext is: "These rules are too confusing and cause too many edge case breaches, so let's just bin the lot". The motivation is not some fear of the growth in the state's authoritarian power, certainly not among MPs who have voted for the current Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill. Rather it arises from a sense of privilege: that people like them should not be inconvenienced by public policy. There are no genuine libertarians in the Conservative parliamentary party. Indeed, you can't find any among the soi disant libertarians of the US, who originated much of the Tories' rhetoric on freedom. There the term is only employed because "liberal" is coded pro-black and pro-poor. In reality, the British and American right are classical liberals, though owing more to Locke than Mill. Their fundamental proposition is that liberty is the right of the propertied and that the unpropertied are not deserving of liberty. In this there is full agreement between Johnson and his backbenchers.

A good example of this mindset was provided by Nigel Farage's recent fawning over Novak Djokovic, the tennis player barred entry to Australia for not being vaccinated. To accuse Farage of hypocrisy is to believe that he has always been motivated by nothing more than racism. The apparent irony of his defence of the free movement of an Eastern European should put paid to that. In reality, what Farage is defending is the free movement of the rich and powerful. UKIP may have appealed to popular bigotry, but it never intended to implement a policy of "send them back", which is why Farage was never sympathetic to the BNP (even if he carefully avoided criticising their voters) and why he regularly clashed with UKIP's xenophobic true believers. The aim was always to use popular dissent to push the Conservative Party further to the right on a range of issues beyond the EU and immigration. In this context, Farage's criticism of pandemic measures is not simple opportunism but a logical continuation of his campaign against regulation and public spending.

The calls for Johnson to resign for "breaking the rules" are misguided, even if they play well with popular opinion. The Prime Minister's career has been built on shamelessly insisting that the rules don't apply to him. This is why he can insist on re-negotiating agreements that he previously signed with the EU, and why the belief that his lies and inconsistencies are going to "finally catch up with him" is probably premature. But there's also a structural dimension to this. If you're lower down on the social scale, you don't get to resign if you break the rules, you're summarily sacked. Likewise, the higher up you are the more egregious your behaviour has to be before a resignation becomes inevitable, such as bugging the campaign headquarters of an opposition party or seizing the Suez Canal on a pretext. Were Johnson to resign as Prime Minister over his attendance at a sedate garden party that makes the Spectator's annual bash look like a bacchanalian orgy, or because he failed to stop the kids sneaking in alcohol and breaking a swing when he was away from the house, it would be the most ridiculous outcome in political history. That said, such a bathetic result would not be out of character for either Johnson or the Conservative Party.