Gerry Hassan: Boris Johnson is overseeing the destruction of accountability

BORIS Johnson is an unapologetic kind of Tory. He is comfortable in his privilege, shameless in his belief in his own entitlement, and open about the fact that he should be paid much more money than the prime minister’s salary.

Johnson feels that the £157,000 public salary which comes with the PM’s post is not enough and that he needs at least £300,000 to keep his head above water: this being an amount nearly 10 times what the median full-time salary is in the UK.

Thus Johnson has reverted to a politics where his personal and professional lives have become blurred and private donors have contributed to his and his fiancee Carrie Symonds living the lifestyle they feel they have the right to. In so doing they have not only opened themselves up to possible conflicts of interest, but are returning to an older form of politics run by and for private suitors and donors. One which undermines not just public trust and public duty, but limits accountability and democracy, and which is in the spirit and ethos of what the academic Colin Crouch called “post-democracy” – namely the convergence of elites and vested interests in the corporate capitalist age.

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This past weekend it turned out that Johnson and Symonds had £27,000 of luxury food delivered to 10 Downing Street in a mere eight months – an average £3375 per month. This was all sent to someone called Alex – Johnson’s real first name – to keep it hush hush, with at least some of the food paid for by a Tory donor.

Then there is the Downing Street bill for refurbishing the Prime Minister’s flat above No 11 – which ran to an estimated £200,000. This when each PM has a public allocation of £30,000 funds per year which can be spent on such matters, but which was not good enough for Johnson and Symonds.

Instead, a Tory donor – believed to be Lord David Brownlow – contributed £58,000 to pay off the redecoration bill which Johnson explains by saying that “he repaid the bill in full” and “met all the costs”. Adding to this mix are the rumours that Johnson and Symond’s nanny costs at Downing Street are also being met by yet another private and as yet unnamed Tory donor; as well as that there is the personal trainer and the £15,000 holiday trip to Mustique at the end of 2019.

There is even more, with Johnson fearing that former adviser Dominic Cummings will allege this week that when the PM missed five critical Covid meetings at the start of the pandemic, Johnson had more pressing matters than the health and safety of the country on his mind. He was focused on finishing his book on William Shakespeare, which he had to do to get monies from the publishers to pay part of the divorce settlement to his second wife Marina Wheeler. Downing Street has denied such suggestions.

Here we have a part-time, unfocused PM in the midst of a murderous pandemic which has claimed the lives of thousands and which the UK Government has constantly taken its eye off of the ball on, been late and behind the curve on, craven to corporate interests and mates, and guilty of diminishing and corrupting the public realm.

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None of this is by accident – beyond the limits of Johnson’s shambolic leadership. The Tory party is now a political force with an ageing, declining membership, beholden to a web of financial interests in the City of London, hedge funds and offshore companies, and foreign oligarchs.

The Tories no longer believe in the principle of public duty and service. Instead they are content to preside over a Britain which harks back to the worst excesses of the Victorian era and earlier. This was a time when private money, power and interests defined politics. MPs did not receive a salary until 1911 and prime ministers until 1830 – £5000 per year, which was an immense amount then, but which did not change for a century. Before that date many PMs were bailed out by private donors.

Many Johnson apologists say his chaotic, disorganised style is proof that he is a one-off: a character in a sea of faceless political careerists. But it’s more than that. The very existence, purpose and success of government is being systematically tarnished and eroded in favour of what is presented as a return to amateurishness and the myth of the gifted gentleman in the form of the persona of ‘Boris’ Johnson. This spin cloaks something much more malign and dangerous.

Namely, that Boris Johnson and his Tory government are presiding over the collapse of due process and accountability, the diminishing of the importance of public service, and the taking over of the public realm by private monies and interests. It is a politics for the rich and privileged by the rich and privileged paid for by the self-interested members of the same class. It is shameless Tory class politics, all done in the name of populism and “levelling up”, while making the UK an even more divided, unequal and nasty place to live for the rest of us.