But why do I hope it? Is it because Jeremy Hunt is the marginally more moderate of the two candidates? I don’t think so. They’re both at pains to prove their extreme Brexiteer no-deal-embracing credentials with every utterance, now that the hardcore leavers dominating their party have decided that anything less than catastrophically crashing out of the EU is a betrayal of 52% of voters who requested an ordered withdrawal. They’re desperate to be seen to respect what most of the 160,000 Tory members have decided that all 17 million leave voters really meant. Being more moderate in that frothing context profanes the very concept of moderation.
Is it because Jeremy Hunt is more honest? I’d say he is undoubtedly more honest than Boris Johnson. But if faint praise can be damning, that’s faint enough to consign him to an eternity in the lowest circle of hell. It means virtually nothing. And, bearing in mind that what Boris Johnson says he’s going to do if he wins is so nonsensical and destructive, the thought that he may be lying is relatively comforting.
Is it for sadistic reasons of my own? Partly, yes, I must admit. There’s no doubt that, if Johnson were somehow to lose the leadership election from here, it would be a hilarious pratfall in public life that would dwarf his previous attempts to amuse. After all his careless, self-interested opportunism, the pain and embarrassment that he’d feel would be a balm to soothe me through the first disastrous months of the Hunt administration.
Still, I don’t think that’s the main reason. My hunch is that this election will cause Johnson pain either way. He won’t be a good or happy prime minister because he doesn’t really want to do anything except show off. He’s pathologically dishonest and unfaithful, which is fine in show business, but it’s going to screw up his premiership, which will make him very angry because, at heart, he doesn’t believe anyone has the right to question his desires.
And look at the state of his life: professionally it’s going OK, but personally, he’s a middle-aged divorcé, living apart from all of his many children, shouting and spilling wine on the sofa in his girlfriend’s south London flat. It conjures up images of his socks over the radiator and his tablets and foot powder jostling for bathroom shelf space with a young woman’s cosmetics. It’s a bit grim. So I reckon I’ll get to watch him suffer either way.
Fundamentally, I think I hope Hunt wins because Johnson is in the uncanny valley. Hunt is the robot-like creature of politics. With no discernible charm or charisma, he’s the typical forgettable figure by which Westminster has been dominated in recent decades: Andy Burnham, the Milibands, Nick Clegg, Jeremy Hunt. The plausible men in plausible suits; platitude-spouting mediocrities, not real people.
Johnson has always seemed different – more fun, more charming, more human. To many – to me, for a while – this was preferable, more like recognisable flesh and blood. But then at some point, perhaps when he was blathering on about painting cardboard buses, something changed. Like a twinkle of LED behind the automaton’s human face, I glimpsed the icy contempt. The human warmth is fake, and its very similarity to the real thing is offensive and revolting.
On the 24 July 2019, Boris Johnson became prime minister.
9
Civilisation May Go Down As Well As Up
When the clocks went back, a joke was doing the rounds in various forms. They all went something like: “Don’t forget to turn the clocks back this weekend. Unless you voted for Brexit, in which case you’ve already turned them back 30 years.”
These obviously weren’t pro-Brexit jokes. The notion of turning the clock back is not supposed to connote a return to the good old days or a restoration of youth; it signifies regression, progress reversed, a deliberate worsening. So an obvious implication is that their writers think, and think that most people think, that in general things get better over time.
Well, milk doesn’t. And look at the natural world: things age and die and rot. Or grow and infest and destroy. And sometimes they germinate and bloom. They don’t necessarily get worse, I’m not saying that; but they don’t always improve either.
Technology confuses this, because that seems to be on a pretty steady upward graph, though it has its blips: in Europe, central heating had a chilly hiatus between the fourth and the 19th centuries. And this whole technological up-graph, from the discovery of fire onwards, may get retrospectively flipped into a huge down-blip in overall human fortunes if it transpires we were gradually making the planet uninhabitable. It’s possible that everything any of us has done since we first started scrabbling around for flint has been a mistake.
You may sense from the last sentence that I’m in a bad mood. When I recently expressed disquiet on Twitter at Donald Trump’s election victory, one respondent said: “You should have been afraid months ago, by now [you should be] slipping into misanthropic apathy.” It seemed like an excellent suggestion.
I’d been hoping Hillary Clinton would win, as you probably were, unless my evaluation of my readership has descended to pollster levels of accuracy. Though, for me, it was mainly a hope that Donald Trump would lose. I didn’t have strong feelings about his opponent. She seemed OK, but then people would darkly say things that began “Of course you realise …”, the end of which I never properly heard, focused as I was on avoiding the social embarrassment of looking like I didn’t realise whatever it was.
It’s like when I’m introduced to people – I never catch their name because I’m so anxious not to screw up the handshake. “Just look like you realise, for God’s sake!” my brain always hissed over the details. “Everyone else here seems to have realised. You’re an educated person who realises all the complicated stuff that needs to be realised. You can Google it later.”
I never Googled it later, which turns out to have been an efficient non-use of time. Nevertheless, I assembled a vague sense that Hillary wasn’t all that, but at least she hadn’t said that Mexicans are rapists. If there were terrible things about her, she had the grace to keep them secret rather than proclaim them from a podium. Which, under the circumstances, seemed to me a good enough reason to make her the most powerful person on Earth. Then I went back to watching Trump.
Trump is so watchable – that’s surely something his supporters and detractors can agree on. It’s not the hair, it’s not the extremist rhetoric; it’s the sheer magnetism of his self-satisfaction. The density of his self-joy is so great it drags your eyes towards it, like galactic debris to a black hole. When he puts on a statesmanlike face, you just know his inner monologue is delightedly singing, “My amazing face looks so statesmanlike right now!” This is what Ed Miliband never grasped: it’s not about being convincing, it’s about relishing the role.
If politics were just a reality-TV show (rather than mainly a reality-TV show), Trump would never get voted out. So perhaps it’s surprising that he polled fewer votes than Clinton – though not quite as surprising as the fact that he becomes president despite this.
Trump’s win hit me in several ways. First, it denied me his defeat scene. I wanted to see that. His character seemed designed expressly for that sort of comeuppance, as surely as the diner red-neck in Superman II. I was desperate to see him spun round on his bar stool, all scared. It really feels like a missed opportunity, for him as much as everyone else.
Second, it robbed me of a comforting certainty: he can’t win – he’s too awful. That’s the sentiment I’ve been vacuously exchanging with people for months. “Surely he can’t win,” one of us says. “I know,” says the other. I’ll miss that, even though I now regret every time it happened. “It would be a disaster,” was the consensus among me and other out-of-touch liberals, even more than over Brexit.
And third, I’ve started to look on the bright side, and it makes me despise myself. Because, frankly, “It would be a disaster” is much easier to live with than “It will be a disaster” or “This is a disaster”. So I fail to follow through on my certainty. A mixture of apathy and fear-avoidance extorts a sickly optimism from my brain.
Maybe he didn’t mean wha
t he said; maybe the Republican party will restrain him; politicians never get much done anyway; maybe it’ll all be fine. This either makes me an overdramatising hypocrite a few days ago or a reality-denying fool now. So I feel lazy, stupid and humiliated by the disturbance to my complacency, as if someone had burst in while I was eating a cream cake in the bath.
I am bewildered by everyone’s conviction that anyone who disagrees with them has been misinformed. Another response to my worried tweet mentioned an article about Trump in the New Yorker that I’d linked to: “That’s like reading about Obama on the KKK newsletter,” they told me.
Is it? I really don’t think it is. But they seemed so much surer that I’m wrong than I am that I’m right. I’m enough of a historian to understand the insecurity of the lines of communication between what I read has happened and what actually has, but not enough to know what to do. Should I go to that place in Kew?
Civilisations, like investments, can go down as well as up – that’s never been clearer. Trump has routed the Whig interpretation of history, along with the metropolitan liberal elite. Things don’t always get better over time. But I’m grateful to have lived through an era when it was still widely assumed that they did.
* * *
It’s counter-terrorism awareness week again. It seems to come round quicker every year. It’s not as upbeat as the US’s coincident Thanksgiving celebrations, but fear is a trendier emotion than gratitude, so it all leaves the so-called “new world” looking rather last millennium compared to us. In fact, perhaps the week’s timing is no coincidence after all? Perhaps the counter-terrorism agencies are using our former colonies as an example of what can happen if insurrection from within goes unchecked: “Be vigilant or someone will chuck all your tea in the sea!”
I wouldn’t mind being aware of counter-terrorism for seven days a year if I could forget about it for the other 51 weeks. But I don’t think that’s the idea at all. I think we’re supposed to be perpetually counter-terrorism aware, just like terrorists are. They’re the shining exemplars of counter-terrorism awareness – they think about it all the time. “Emulate terrorist levels of counter-terrorism awareness!” is the message. “If you can be as constantly aware of security issues in a public place as you would be if you were plotting to blow it up, then you’ll be a good citizen (provided you are not plotting to blow it up).”
But those weren’t the slogans the counter-terrorism-week planners went for. Instead, in a police leaflet handed out at transport hubs advising what to do in a “firearms and weapons attack”, they’ve gone with “Run. Hide. Tell.” When the blast of war blows in your ears, then imitate the action of the rat.
This is sensible advice if there’s an emergency. No one wants ordinary members of the public charging unto breaches without proper training. It could turn a terrorist atrocity into a health-and-safety nightmare, from which we wake to a litigation shitstorm for breakfast. So it’s a reasonable thing to say.
It’s also an unnecessary thing to say. If people hear gunfire and explosions in a railway station or airport, they don’t need to be told to run away, take cover or tell someone about the issue. Anyone who can read a leaflet, and the vast majority of the illiterate, would do those things instinctively. It’s like a poster telling people “Remember, if you let go of objects, they will fall to the ground!”
But the leaflet gives more detailed advice: “If you hear gunfire or a weapons attack, leave the area safely if you can. If this puts you in greater danger, find a safe place to take cover.” This raises more questions than it answers. How can you tell whether it’s safe to leave the area? How do you know when trying to flee would put you in greater danger than hiding? What sort of place would be safe to take cover in? You might say everyone would use their common sense. But the leaflet’s target demographic appears to be people who don’t have any.
There is nothing helpful about this document; it advocates doing what people would do anyway and provides no tips on how to do so more effectively. Campaigns like this usually make sense because the courses of action being promoted are counterintuitive – “grasp the nettle”, “don’t pour water on a fat fire”, “steer into a skid”. The sort of advice holidaymakers are given for encounters with bears, lions or snakes: whatever you do, don’t run, but make yourself look big, or back away slowly, or shout, or charge towards it, or get someone to piss on the sting.
I can’t actually remember the details of any such tips I’ve received because I try not to fill my life with anxious contemplation of the ways I could die. I don’t believe perpetual nervous anxiety to be a price worth paying for marginally increasing my statistical chances of survival if disaster strikes. How many people, as they expire, think, “If only I’d worried more!”? The tiny handful who have observed the wrong etiquette with an enraged cobra perhaps, but those who succumb to cancer, heart disease or being hit by a falling piano (and between them those three scourges kill most westerners) probably resent the time wasted learning anti-shark karate.
Which brings me to what I hate most about the leaflet. As well as its inane running and hiding suggestions, it also says: “Make a plan now and stay safe.” As in: make a plan for what to do if a terrorist sets off an explosion or goes mad with a gun while you’re on your way to work. As in: think about that eventuality in advance. A lot. Starting now.
No thanks. That doesn’t sound much fun. The chances of being killed, or nearly killed, in a terrorist outrage are really rather slight. I know home secretary Theresa May says that there could be one any minute – and that 40 have been foiled since 7/7. But even if we trust her – and I don’t trust her – that number is definitely a maximum. She’s got no incentive to underestimate, so no more than 40 will have been foiled. Even if they had all happened, and were all as bad as 7/7 and each killed 52 people, that’s only 2,080 dead in seven years. A tragic state of affairs, no doubt, but it would still leave terrorist attack as a more unusual way to die than falling down stairs. In terms of death-avoidance strategies, I’ll probably do myself more good keeping off the fags and trying to relax.
Some people may find it reassuring to plan for the worst – to fill a lock-up with fuel and tinned food, to work out how they’d kill and eat a cat, or burrow out of rubble, or treat radiation sickness, or swim through a tsunami of sewage – in anticipation of an anti-lottery win of bad fortune. Good luck to them. But I reckon they’re in the minority and, for most of us, this leaflet’s nebulous allusions to our potential demise are injurious to our mental wellbeing.
But this campaign isn’t really about doing us any collective good. It’s about an institution justifying and aggrandising its position. Those who are planning what they’d do in a firearms and weapons attack are not questioning police powers and funding, and are unlikely to oppose their increase. This superficially fatuous leaflet is, in truth, a political message: terror is lurking everywhere and only powerful, well-funded (and possibly armed) security services can protect you from it. The people behind this campaign are using fear to get what they want. I thought that was the kind of thing we didn’t give in to.
* * *
In the run-up to the 2015 general election …
When I saw people predicting that George Osborne was planning a giveaway budget – that he was going to fritter away a few billion at the 11th hour to make people vote Tory – I found it rather sweet. It was familiar, you see – like the smell of Vicks. Not actually pleasant, but it brought back memories from my youth. Chancellors probably shouldn’t frame last-minute vote-buying policies, but it’s happened many times before and we’re all still here, so I was comforted. It’s a nice, fond old annoyance, like drizzle, litter and the grocer’s apostrophe, rather than climate change, trolling and beheadings on YouTube.
Which isn’t to say he necessarily is planning a giveaway budget. But that doesn’t matter – his critics say he is. He will undoubtedly claim he isn’t. “Oh yes he is!” the opposition will retort, and this pantomime works both before and after
all the tedious details that actually make up a budget have been announced. It’s like the Bible – you can infer pretty much whatever you want from something that long. Henry VIII found a bit in Leviticus that led him to conclude that, now his wife had gone all middle-aged and barren, it was probably a lot holier all round if he started fucking someone else.
The prospect of this traditional fiscal quarrel warmed my heart like the sight of British road signs after a holiday abroad. Like many people, I’m frightened by novelty and crave the familiar, particularly in these unsettling times (I’m over 40). I suppose this fearfulness is what drives some voters to Ukip, the rise of which makes me, in turn, more fearful. It’s a chain reaction, in which fear of change changes people’s behaviour, which engenders more change for people to fear. If you can make fear your business model, then get ready for a boom. (The good sort, partly caused by fear of the bad sort.) Good news if you’ve got shares in Kevlar or the Daily Mail.
I’m particularly susceptible to a reassuring, cynical budget giveaway at the moment because the atmosphere of British politics is changing so fast and so nastily. A fortnight ago, I was really shocked and depressed, not by a slasher film set in a hospice, but by Prime Minister David Cameron. He seemed to be announcing policies that made life harder for the weak (the fat, poor, young or drug-addicted) in an odd spirit of righteous joy.
It’s getting worse. In the past few days, the Tories have been gleefully frothing with horrible new plans. On immigration, charities, universities and free speech, they’re proudly making clear that their vision of government is about shutting people up, cutting people off and keeping people out.
Dishonesty is the Second-Best Policy Page 22