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.