The weakness in the cabinet is perhaps deliberate. It allows Johnson to go unchallenged by a lot of acolytes who are only interested in themselves and their own pockets. The result is an inevitable descent into scandal and corruption.
Henry Mance in the FT had a piece this week entitled: British politics is morphing from delusion into sleaze, in which he says, rightly in my opinion, and in a sentence that captures it perfectly:
"This new era of sleaze is built upon Johnson’s personality, the winner-takes-all politics of Brexit, the denigration of the civil service, and the emergency of coronavirus, which distracts from malfeasance."
Johnson seems determined not to sack any minister regardless and to have as few constraints on him as possible. Hence, they all feel they can do as they like. And the standards are set from the top, they flow downwards from the man himself. The ethics tsar Alan Allen resigned last November over the PM backing Priti Patel even after Allen found she had bullied her staff at the Home Office and broken the ministerial code..
Over four months later there is no replacement for Allen and there appears no process to find one. Gove is coming under pressure about it, but it will make no difference and the likelihood is that the appointment will be a crony who is prepared to turn a blind eye anyway. Johnson thinks he's become untouchable. Gove is accused of misleading parliament into believing a selection procedure was underway when there is no sign of any job advert at all.
I used to think David Cameron was a reasonable prime minister. I’m talking about the 2010-15 coalition when he and Nick Clegg seemed to show how two parties could work together in government. Even the decision to hold a referendum, had it been successful, might have shut the euro sceptics up for ten years or more. We all know now it was disastrous, of course and for reasons I won't go into here.
But, I confess to being amazed and shocked at the revelations about Cameron's lobbying in 2018 for government funding on behalf of the Australian entrepreneur Lex Greensill, who’s empire collapsed recently. The FT report that Greensill even had a desk in Downing Street at one time:
"On March 3, the FT disclosed that Greensill was given an unpaid, and unannounced, role advising Cameron’s government. Officials were bemused that he had his own desk in Downing Street."
"The Australian was a friend of Jeremy Heywood, the cabinet secretary, having worked together at Morgan Stanley."
Johnson can’t be blamed for what Cameron did but he has now created an ethos where ministers think they can act with impunity.
We have had good men and women in government - not always, but for a majority of the time. Most were well meaning and I think did their best. From Wilson to Brown we had prime ministers who were generally thought competent but struggled to make a deep impression on the nation's long standing problems - mainly lack of productivity.
Cameron had the financial crash to cope with but he had Clegg as a moderating influence up to 2015.
Since Brexit we have had only chaos and muddle and now we have probably the least competent government ever, led by an amoral cheat and liar, facing what is fast becoming the greatest crisis in recent history. If they were by some miracle to make a success of Brexit it would send out a terrible signal about the future governance of this country.
Future historians might be writing of their shock at seeing Britain rising again as a great world power under a gang of inept, weak-minded, grasping idiots led by a congenital liar who looks like a scarecrow and frequently appears not to know his a**e from his elbow. How could that happen?
The answer of course, is that it can't and it won't.
There are a number of legal actions moving slowly ahead, including one on the PPE procurement scandal which I think many saw as an opportunity to make lots of money under cover of the pandemic. Another is looking at how senior appointments to various bodies were made, when the appointees were later found to be related to Tory donors or friends of the PM or Gove.
I think when Johnson is toppled it will be almost certainly be through sleaze.
