Dishonesty is the Second-Best Policy

by David Mitchell

  I’m loath to admit it, but it totally qualifies, doesn’t it? Nick Spencer of the theology thinktank Theos is more sceptical, warning that “If we’re all turned into rights bearers, my rights clashing with your rights, we end up having to appeal to the courts to sort out our differences and that can become oppressive for everybody.”

  Maybe so, but that’s an argument for changing the Equality Act. You can’t just hope no more groups assert themselves under it, or say that all the slots for belief systems are taken because otherwise we’ll have too many “rights bearers”. Ethical veganism is coherent, heartfelt and spreading – and, frankly, its adherents might need protecting from the prejudice of irritated meat-eaters like me.

  Ethics, practically speaking, are relative. Our ethical compasses are calibrated according to the norms of the time in which we live. So I eat dead animals because I was brought up to eat dead animals. It seemed like almost everyone did when I was younger, and the tiny minority who didn’t certainly had lots of cheese and eggs. It was normal, and it still is normal, just a bit less so.

  It’s not uncommon, in the history of human societies, for things once deemed normal to start being deemed wrong. Sometimes it’s something like homophobia, sometimes it’s something like openly criticising those in power – it depends on the time and the society. Maybe all these vegans are harbingers of such a change. It annoys me because it makes me worry that I’m becoming a victim of history, just like all the animals I’ve eaten.

  6

  Titans of the 21st Century

  According to the old-fashioned view, history is forged by great men. The slightly less old-fashioned view is that it’s forged by great men and women. A more academically respectable interpretation is that it’s forged by nebulous forces that can’t be encapsulated in a photograph.

  It’s hard to believe that, in the age of selfies and Instagram, such a view of the past can prevail for long. It’s simply too complicated and inconvenient. I mean, you can summon an immediate taxi through an app, so it’s frankly unacceptable that your smartphone shouldn’t also have access to a snap of whatever history’s the fault of.

  So, in the forthcoming spirit of the age, this section contains my thoughts and feelings, from various moments over the last few years, about some important people – a few of the big hitters. As you’d expect, they’re all white and they’re all rightwing. Worse than that, all but one of them is still alive.

  To be fair, I suppose, if we don’t like how history is going, it’s up to us to change it. A bad workman blames his tools. This chapter is all about those tools.

  David Cameron

  March 2015

  The other day David Cameron gave a straight answer to a straight question. That’s something most of us are desperate for politicians to do more often. We crave it, like children starved of love; we get driven mad by its perverse absence. “Just say what you think,” we implore, “just answer the question! Stop evading our inquiries and trying to work things round to some prearranged spin-doctor-approved set of phrases and priorities.

  “Please, just for a second, be like a normal human and talk to us, tell us what you think, tell us what you’re going to do!” This is what we inwardly beg as a politician is asked something on TV or radio, in the moment before the inevitable “I think the real issue here …”, or “The more important question we need to ask is …”, or “Hang on, ’cos, you know, we need to be clear about this …” crushes our hope once again.

  So when a journalist asked the question “Would you go for a third term?” and the prime minister simply said, “No,” you’d think that was worth a standing ovation. It’s so exactly what we slag off and hate politicians for not doing. The smart money was on a “I don’t think now’s the time to be thinking that far ahead,” or “That’s an issue that I’ll discuss with colleagues as and when the time comes,” or even a disingenuous “Gosh, I haven’t really given that a lot of thought.” But Cameron did what his lot stereotypically never do and answered the bloody question. In two letters. Bravo.

  But it did not go down at all well. A Liberal Democrat spokesman declared it “incredibly presumptuous … to be worrying about a third term as prime minister weeks before the general election”, while Douglas Alexander, Labour’s election strategy chief, said, “It is typically arrogant of David Cameron to presume a third Tory term in 2020, before the British public have been given the chance to have their say in this election. In the UK it is for the British people and not the prime minister to decide who stays in power.”

  I find both remarks infuriating. At least the Lib Dem had the grace to remain anonymous, but you’d have to hope Douglas Alexander, a privy counsellor and former cabinet minister, is now weeping over his statement while repeatedly wailing, “What have I become?!” He absolutely knows that Cameron isn’t presuming anything at all. The question was “Would you go for a third term?” – that’s “go for”, as in “put yourself forward for” or “apply for”. The exchange is quite clearly based on the premise that, for someone to be prime minister, it requires the electorate’s consent. But it also requires the consent of that someone, which is what the interviewer was inquiring about. Obviously. As Alexander fully understands.

  Yet he has chosen not only to ignore that fact, but to imply Cameron doesn’t even accept that “the British people … decide who stays in power”. So Cameron isn’t just arrogant, he’s an aspirant usurper. He’s flying in the face of democracy – simply by answering the question “Would you go for a third term?” with the word “No”. Though I doubt the word “Yes” would have appeased Alexander either. That, surely, would have seemed even more arrogant. So, basically, neither answer to the question would satisfy Douglas Alexander. What he’s saying, we must conclude, is that Cameron shouldn’t have answered the question at all. He should have evaded it. That, the Labour strategist has chosen to contend, would have been the proper course for a prime minister: to avoid answering perfectly reasonable questions.

  I can’t help wondering if it’s Alexander’s brand of “election strategy” that leads to gaffes such as Ed Miliband choosing to be filmed in a deeply depressing upstairs kitchenette – the sort of place a prostitute might make a Pot Noodle – in case his real kitchen blasted away the public’s trust with its sheer opulence: the mood-lit wine fridge, the live lobster tank, the unicorn-ivory worktops, or maybe just the fact that there’s an actual chair.

  Criticism of Cameron’s candour didn’t come only from other parties. Many Tories believe it was a strategic blunder – that he might now be seen as a “lame duck”. One anonymous former minister said: “This was peculiar and unnecessary. It does not help the prime minister’s authority,” while another Tory apparently remarked: “This was an ‘Oh fuck’ moment. The best you can say is David is straight and honest.” The implication seems to be that calling a prime minister honest is somehow damning with faint praise. I’m not at all sure that David Cameron is particularly honest, but I have no doubt he’d be more popular if everyone thought he was.

  This all culminated in a widely reported “damage limitation exercise”, in which Michaels Fallon and Gove went around saying how reasonable and straightforward the prime minister had been. Which was obviously true in this case. But, if there’s one thing that can make something reasonable and straightforward seem otherwise, it’s some oleaginous loyalists touring the media repeatedly saying it’s reasonable and straightforward. And it smacks of panic – as if a secret the-prime-minister-has-actually-answered-a-question alarm had gone off in Downing Street for the first time since Churchill brought up “blood, toil, tears and sweat” instead of hard-working families.

  This nasty little Westminster squall is a good illustration of what’s wrong with British politics at the moment: the tedious and irrelevant scrutiny of image and tactics that we’ve somehow adopted instead of a properly functioning political system. We get a tiny glimpse of openness and humanity, of the prime minister talking like a normal person, and it’s imme
diately stamped on.

  The other parties can’t restrain themselves from making political capital out of it, from attempting to twist Cameron’s completely apolitical remark into something that exemplifies what a bastard he is. They can’t just leave it alone and talk about policies instead. Similarly, the grumbling Tory backbenchers can’t suppress their anger that the prime minister has exercised his right to freedom of speech without running it by them first. So they complain that it’s a tactical cock-up.

  This kind of row feels so irrelevant to the issue of how best to govern a discontented and divided nation. It’s an insulting waste of the public’s time and attention, of interest only to politicians and politics nerds, and the likes of Douglas Alexander do further damage to our discredited system by resorting to it.

  January 2019

  David Cameron really loved organising votes for things, didn’t he? That was his answer to everything. I was reminded of this when I read that the elected police and crime commissioners, which his government introduced to oversee the constabularies of England and Wales, aren’t doing a very good job. According to the head of the National Crime Agency, they’re all about stopping speeding and burglary, and not so hot on organised crime, online child abuse and modern slavery.

  It’s not surprising. Making some local elected officials the overseers of the police is effectively putting the Neighbourhood Watch in charge of law enforcement strategy. They’re going to address the issues most noticeable to the very small percentage of people who might turn out to vote for them. If they were in charge of healthcare, all the money would go to treating RSI caused by overenergetic net-curtain twitching. Their best chance of arresting a mafia boss is if he plays the music too loudly at his Christmas party.

  But it’s odd that David Cameron was so keen on holding votes when his career as prime minister began with him failing to win an election. I’m surprised people don’t talk about that more, because it’s quite remarkable.

  It was 2010, and the world was reeling from the worst financial crisis in nearly a century and, by some reckonings, of all time. Britain is depressingly reliant on the financial services sector, so it was particularly scary here. The mood was not good. On top of that, the governing party had been in power for well over a decade, had started a disastrous war, and its charismatic twice re-elected leader had been replaced, just before the banking meltdown, by a better man but a markedly worse politician.

  Therefore, Cameron faced a sitting prime minister who, since he’d been chancellor of the exchequer for most of the Labour years, could hardly disassociate himself from the country’s economic woes but had never actually won an election as party leader – so the perfect combination of high perceived responsibility for what had gone wrong with low perceived democratic legitimacy – and who was also terrible at PR at the best of times and, 2010 being for him the worst of times, was breaking new records in his awfulness at PR, with the energetic help of the rightwing press. And, just to recap, the economy was screwed, the Middle East was screwed and the same bunch had been in power for a James Bond and a half.

  One could be forgiven for thinking that, under those circumstances, the opposition would win the general election even if it were led by a turd. I mean a literal turd, not the metaphorical turd that David Cameron turned out to be. Just an actual stick of excrement in a suit, maybe with a smile drawn on in Tippex and a slogan underneath saying “Vote Conservative” in Comic Sans, should have been enough to beat the Labour party in 2010.

  Actually, it was a bit like 1997, in that there was a huge groundswell in favour of a change of government. Except, to be fair, in 1997 the economy wasn’t in too bad a shape. And the other difference is that in 1997 the opposition swept to power with a parliamentary majority of 179, while in 2010 there was a hung parliament.

  There was a hung parliament! When led by David Cameron, the Tories, who are overwhelmingly the best at elections, couldn’t do better than a hung parliament as the country descended into penury and the exhausted grouchy old guy, who’d been grimly clutching the purse strings since the previous century, miserably trudged around calling people bigots. That’s quite a spectacular underperformance by the Conservatives. But that fact sort of got lost because, thanks to the Labour movement’s deep-rooted self-loathing, this notably mild setback was taken as justification to end the party’s whole experiment in electability. The great swaths of the centre ground Cameron failed to conquer, Labour has since abandoned to save the Tories the job. Well done, everyone.

  Still, you’d expect the experience of 2010 to make David Cameron a bit tentative about calling votes. But no, he really got a taste for them. It’s like they say about gambling addicts: he became hooked on the endorphin rush he felt when he lost. And, to be fair on him, he had to wait quite a while for his next fix. The AV referendum, the Scottish independence referendum and, most surprisingly of all, the 2015 general election all somehow went his way. He must have been absolutely gibbering for a honk on the disappointment pipe by the time he called the Brexit referendum – but then he massively overdosed on loss and, like when Obelix fell in the magic potion, it had a permanent effect, and so now he’ll be a total loser until the day he dies.

  A key advantage for politicians of holding lots of votes to decide what should be done is that it means that, arguably, nothing is their fault. It’s the “will of the people”, and they just obey it. Or rather the civil service obeys it, and the politicians pontificate about respecting democracy, as if they’ve accomplished anything other than proving themselves obsolete.

  At least it shows they’re not power-crazed, I suppose. Cameron’s worst enemy wouldn’t accuse him of that. Despite obviously wanting to be prime minister, he didn’t seem that keen to be in charge of anything. And nothing demonstrates that better than the elected police and crime commissioners.

  It was pretty ominous, really. What clearer sign could there be that the prime minister expected things to go badly, that government was going to retreat from its traditional duties and leave us to fate? He didn’t want control over how policing was done; he wanted whatever happened to be the fault of some amateurish local worthies. That way he could starve the police of resources without being blamed.

  You can’t have power without responsibility. But Cameron’s dream was to have neither and still be prime minister. That was the real message of the Big Society: “You do it!” Anything that goes right, he takes the credit. Anything that goes wrong … well, it’s the will of the people.

  Amber Rudd

  October 2016

  Home secretary Amber Rudd does not want to be called a racist. “Don’t call me a racist,” she said the other day. To be fair, very few people, including the majority of racists, like being called racist. You have to be really very racist not to mind the label. Racist voters, while they often like racist policies and racist politicians, don’t, in general, like them to actually call themselves racist. They’re not comfortable with it being openly proclaimed. For now. Things haven’t got that bad.

  I think maybe lots of racists don’t think they’re racist. I don’t think I’m racist, so maybe I’m racist. Maybe everyone is, to some extent. Maybe it’s a spectrum. But not thinking they’re racist is almost certainly an attribute that many non-racists and racists share. Then again, liberal guilt being what it is, some non-racists probably think they’re racist – as, obviously, do the more self-aware racists. So, whichever way you look at it, there’s loads of common ground.

  But is Amber Rudd racist? That’s the key question. Unless racism is a spectrum, in which case it’s “Is she too racist?” There would have to be a specific point on that spectrum beyond which the level of a person’s racism became unacceptable, and before which you’d sort of have to go along with it for practical reasons. In the end, it all just reverts to the binary. It’s a black-and-white issue.

  So is the home secretary racist? I feel like the more I ask the question, the more racist she seems. Well, it’s her fault for saying, �
�Don’t call me a racist.” She put it in our heads – it’s almost saucy. After all this, to conclude she’s not racist would feel like a bit of a shame. Like a whodunnit where the denouement is that it was natural causes.

  But I suppose we should look at the evidence. Where did all this talk of suspected racist Amber Rudd’s suspected racism come from? Well, she made a speech at the Conservative party conference. “Ah well, that explains it!” you’re probably thinking but, in fact, there’s even more to it than that. There was an issue with the contents of the speech.

  This is surprising as, having watched some of it, I found it very difficult to discern what the contents were. It’s the rhetorical equivalent of small print. She reads it in a sort of bland lilt, like a recorded voice in a lift. The actual words are extremely hard to grip on to. You can hear the audience dutifully applauding every so often, from which I concluded that a rather undramatic cricket match was being played at the other end of the hall.

  Nevertheless, someone managed to work out what the contents were. Perhaps they played a recording through a speech recognition app, printed the text out in bold, capitalised Zapf Chancery and then read it next to a blaring smoke alarm after an overdose of ProPlus. And what she apparently said was that firms should be forced to reveal what percentage of their workers are foreign – initially just non-EU but, post-Brexit, non-UK – and to make greater efforts to employ, or to train and employ, British workers, instead of recruiting abroad.

  This threat to “name and shame” companies that hire lots of foreigners went down very badly with many people. Labour said it would “fan the flames of xenophobia and hatred in our communities”, the SNP called it “the most disgraceful display of reactionary rightwing politics in living memory” and LBC’s James O’Brien said it was “enacting chapter two of Mein Kampf”.