There is no power vacuum | TheArticle

The Prime Minister’s been spending some of his convalescence watching films including, we are told, the excellent Withnail and I (set during the times when pubs were still a thing). Given

the Cabinet shenanigans that have been  reportedly taking place in his absence, he might also want to take the time to enjoy one of my own favourites, Kind Hearts and Coronets in which

Dennis Price’s character sets out on a campaign of systematic murder in order to seize the title.

For some reason I now find my thoughts turning ineluctably in the direction of Mr. Michael Gove.

I don’t know why but whenever I think of the Minister in charge of the Cabinet Office, I’m reminded of the class swot who insists he had no time last night to revise for this morning’s exam,

but then sits hunched over his work to prevent you copying him. The next week he pulls the same stunt again, and for some reason you still believe him. Gove has, apparently, found himself

uncomfortably placed in the Prime Minister’s temporary Cabinet pecking order: the chain of command which will be in place during the PM’s recuperation has him coming in to bat at number

four. According to recent Lobby speculation, he is not happy with this and is said to be “on manoeuvres” (think less General Montgomery, more Captain Mainwaring).

And he, we are led to believe, is not the only one tempted to turn the PM’s misfortune into a sort of distasteful job application. Or at the very least, to treat it as an opportunity for a

departmental (and therefore personal) power grab.

As with most things that emerge from the bizarro world of the commentariat, we should take all this with a pinch of salt. Our Prime Minister is still very unwell; it does not necessarily

follow that a “power vacuum” is created. That’s not how it works. Our non-codified constitutional arrangements are quite capable of generating nimble and effective ad hoc means of meeting

any current or future “crisis of leadership”. If there are big decisions to be made, and there are, then they will be made, for the simple reason that failing to make them would constitute a

decision in its own right. Stasis is not a logically available option right now.

Political journalists, who for some reason have been gifted the responsibility of covering a health crisis, like to think of the Downing Street operation as being a contemporary Medici

court, analysable in terms that are familiar from Machiavelli’s The Prince. The dynamics that interest them are invariably personal: who doesn’t get on with whom; who’s up, who’s down etc.

They project their professional cynicism onto the motives of those with the grown-up responsibilities of office.

But the more serious political players, the ones who have properly read their Machiavelli, know that you can’t just scheme your way to the top by what he called “conquest by virtues”, that

there is always an element of luck attached to the rise of any Prince. And those charged with responding to a dimly-understood viral pandemic are better placed than most of us to understand

just how deeply contingency is embedded in the nature of things. They know that you can plan for things all you want and then, as John Lennon said, life happens to you while you’re busy

doing it.

In any case I don’t buy the idea that Cabinet ministers are seeing Johnson’s plight as an opportunity for personal advancement. They are human like the rest of us, albeit with a touchingly

exaggerated sense of their overall usefulness. And they came pretty close to losing a friend. The press conference hazing of Dominic Raab by the Peston-Rigby-Kuenssberg axis of perpetual

recrimination was unseemly for just that reason. To Mr. Raab and his colleagues, last week’s scares were deeply personal.

Alastair Campbell, of this parish, argued here the other day that the media emphasis on the PM’s health has lacked balance. He may have a point. If so, what’s the cause of that

disproportionality? How about this: that over the last two decades or so the public has been sold this politics-as-soap-opera conception of national life. Politics has always been a source

of high drama; how could it not be? But since (let’s pick a date at random) 1997, the drama has become more and more demotic, increasingly trivial.

The Kuenssberg types not only see politics as soap opera, they are now muscling their way into the scriptwriters’ meetings. Hence the narrative of the “power vacuum” in which rivals “jostle

for position” with the consequence that “nothing is decided”. Meanwhile the Queen’s Business continues to be conducted, with those doing the real work rightly indifferent to the narratives

of crisis so beloved of the hacks.

Mr. Johnson is more charismatic than his contemporaries in the political and the media classes, and so the soap opera worldview seems conducive to his particular case. But whatever the

script assumes, power does not rest unconditionally in his hands but is distributed throughout all the various and competing institutions of the state. In the end Prime Ministerial power is

a bit like that of the Wizard of Oz: real enough, but in a form that’s difficult to describe, and to an extent that is more limited than widely assumed. The soap opera view of politics is at

best an abstracted account of the dynamic political order, and like all abstractions it leaves out much of the important stuff.

In other words: what was avoided last week was a specific personal tragedy, not a wider political crisis.

The PM is often accused of having no appetite for detail by those who can’t see that this is more strength than weakness. Johnson’s leadership style is “give direction and delegate with

confidence”. It is a style which will guarantee that he will be able to maintain some form of presence as he continues to recover.

And I hope that during that recovery he will treat himself, in the words of Withnail, to “tea, cake and the finest wines known to humanity”. He certainly deserves them.

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