I have a confession to make. I still use a dictionary. Not the online, urban variety that suggests
‘summarise’ means ‘to get ready for warm weather’, but a real one; ‘The Concise
Oxford Dictionary of Current English’, Eighth Edition, published in 1990 and
printed on paper.
Occasionally, I’ll stumble upon a word that will see me plucking
it from the bookshelf and flicking through its 1,500 wafer thin pages to find
what has caused me to pause in my reading.
In March, a tweet from Stephen King
introduced me to the word ‘mendacious’[1]. It’s a sorry reflection on the current state
of our politics that I am now hearing it repeatedly.
Another tweet I saw asked the question “What do you miss
most about the past?” One respondent said,
“When getting caught lying meant a politician would resign.” It reminded me of how much we have seen the erosion
of honour in our political class and why Boris Johnson’s claim to want to
“restore trust in democracy” is so hollow.
There are few people who are less likely to achieve that aim.
We are accustomed to politicians obfuscating, it is what
they do. However, their deceits are
increasingly choreographed by their closest and most senior advisors. Tony Blair’s spin doctor, Alastair Campbell,
ushered in the realm of the celebrity advisor; he was brusque and brutish at
times, but seemingly pursued causes that were in the country’s best interests. Today’s current batch are considerably more
sinister, their dogma overshadowing what is good for society and nakedly
focusing on implementing their ideology and the interests of their self-serving
benefactors.
The Brexit Party, led by Nigel Farage, has Arron Banks’
financial and strategic input to thank for its rapid rise to prominence and its
disproportionate presence on mainstream media.
Mr Banks is allegedly a character of dubious moral standing. The Observer journalist, Carole Cadwalladr,
delivered an excellent TED talk in
June 2019 that exposed social media manipulation, in particular on Facebook,
during the EU Referendum campaign and her subsequent claim that Banks had a
“covert relationship” with, and had been offered money by, the Russian
Government has led him to bring a libel action against her. Banks is a bully. His action is designed to threaten and
intimidate Ms Cadwalladr and aims to cause her financial hardship. She is going to fight him, provided he
doesn’t bankrupt her in the process. Ms
Cadwalladr has launched a funding programme aimed at supporting her case. She can be supported
here.
Her claims may not be unsubstantiated. A British parliamentary committee report
concluded; “Arron Banks is believed to have donated £8.4m to the Leave
campaign, the largest political donation in British politics, but it is unclear
from where he obtained that amount of money”.
It goes on to state that “He failed to satisfy us that his own donations
had, in fact, come from sources within the UK.”
Banks also hired Goddard Gunster who he credits with the
Leave.EU campaign’s success, saying, “What [Gunster] said early on was ‘facts
don’t work’. The remain campaign
featured fact, fact, fact, fact, fact. It
just doesn’t work. You have got to connect with people emotionally. It’s the
Trump success.” In other words – lie.
Banks and Farage learnt much about their tactics from the US
where they enjoy access to Trump and the man who led his campaign, and possibly
the most famous advisory protagonist of them all, Steve Bannon. Bannon served as White House Chief Strategist
for the first seven months of Trump’s term before their relationship
deteriorated. He also serves on the
board of Cambridge Analytica, the data-analytics firm involved in the Facebook
data scandal that Cadwalladr suggests illicitly harvested the data of 87 million
people. He’s much cleverer than Banks
and considerably more dangerous, with a declared intention to become “the
infrastructure, globally, for the global populist movement”. I’m not sure how a person can become an
infrastructure for a movement, but if there’s anyone that could achieve it,
Bannon’s your man.
He has been described as a white nationalist but rejects the
description, however, he is advocating for a global shift towards nationalism
and actively supports extreme right-wing political parties in France, Hungary,
Italy, Germany, Poland, Sweden, Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, Spain
and Finland. He’s doing plenty to unite
Europeans in the collective goal of dividing Europeans.
His latest leader of choice to influence is our very own
Boris Johnson. Talking about Johnson’s
resignation speech as Foreign Secretary in July 2018, Bannon claimed, “I’ve been
talking to him all weekend about this speech.”
For his part, Prime Minister Johnson has denied any association with
Bannon, once describing the notion as “a lefty delusion.” Who to believe?
Whether Johnson needs Bannon’s input is moot. His poison pills are readily supplied by his own
senior advisor, Dominic Cummings, a man so contemptible that Parliament is
holding him in contempt after failing to appear before MPs investigating the
proliferation of false news stories during the EU referendum campaign.
He served as the campaign director of the Vote Leave
campaign and is said to have been the mind behind the bus message that falsely
claimed we send £350 million a week to the EU and the misleadingly claims that
Turkey was joining the EU.
Mr Cummings’ presence in Downing Street is troubling. He demonstrates a massive disdain for
politicians and the process of government.
Former Attorney General and Conservative MP for Beaconsfield, Dominic
Grieve QC, launched an attack on Mr Cummings this week that described him as “arrogant”
and “ignorant”. When asked what he
thought of the comments, Cummings brushed off the remarks telling Sky News, “I
don’t think I am arrogant”, unequivocally proving that Grieve was right on both
counts.
Mr Cummings has styled members of the ERG, a publicly funded
research support group for Conservative MPs that is focused on the UK’s
withdrawal from the EU, as “useful idiots”.
Jason Farrell of Sky News, one of the few people who has managed to interview
him, reported that Cummings told him that parliament consists of people who “to
a large extent are not particularly bright, are egomaniacs and they want to be
on TV”. He also claims that Cummings has
referred to Eurosceptic MPs as “particularly unbalanced” and that some of the
MPs he worked with during the campaign were “completely deranged”. His lack of respect for politicians led him
to tell Farrell that “99% of MPs are dreadful characters and if you want
anything professionally organised you've got to exclude them, which causes a
lot of trouble”.
This would lend credence to the suggestion that Mr Cummings
is attempting to subvert democracy and the parliamentary process. He appears to have no issue with forcing
through a no-deal Brexit against Parliament’s wishes through proroguing, the
shutting down of Parliament. MPs
wouldn’t have a say on proroguing, that power rests with the Queen, on the
advice of the prime minister, and Boris Johnson hasn’t ruled it out. This would potentially bring the Queen into the
heart of the dispute, having to decide whether to accept or deny the request. For a man who suggests he wants to restore
trust in democracy, it’s had to imagine something more undemocratic. The Vote Leave campaign focused on “taking
back control” from the EU. There is a rich
irony that by proroguing Parliament to achieve that aim, control must first be
removed from MPs.
Earlier in the week, Alastair Campbell wrote a scathing
article about Dominic Cummings in The New European. He cited the Channel 4 film ‘Brexit: The
Uncivil War’, in which Benedict Cumberbatch played the role of the Vote Leave
strategist. Campbell, who understands
these things better than most, thinks the portrayal may have gone to Cummings’
head. He talks about his own time as the
‘power behind [Tony Blair’s] throne’ writing, “I always had enough awareness
both of myself and of my boss, Tony Blair, to know that the reports and
portrayals [of Campbell being ‘the prime minister's brain’] were wildly
exaggerated. Cummings, I suspect, has no
such regard for Johnson, yet an infinitely large regard for himself and his own
abilities.”
Campbell also suggests that the portrayal by Cumberbatch of
Cummings as “a wild genius who single-handedly persuaded a country to vote for
something you suspected would harm it” may have led him to believe his own
legend and that he is “capable of doing other things no other man could - like
delivering a no-deal Brexit without the government, the party of government, or
the country imploding? And if Cumberbatch has helped to show the world that you
could bend figures as varied as Johnson and Gove, Nigel Farage and Arron Banks
and much of the media to your will, why on earth should you worry about 27
presidents and prime ministers and their European governments, the Queen, the
civil service, 650 MPs and the rather inconvenient fact of a single digit,
single vote majority in the House of Commons?”
Let us not forget that Cummings is the man who advised Michael Gove on
the ill-informed reforms in education and is now belligerently advising Boris
Johnson and his Cabinet colleagues on a catastrophic course of action.
Tom Peck, the Independent’s Political Sketch Writer, was no
less erudite, and somewhat more irreverant in his assessment of Cummings,
writing, “the latest self-appointed genius to run 10 Downing Street, is the
most deluded of them all”. Whilst his
piece is amusing, it makes a little too light of the demagogue that Johnson has
installed, although his phrase, “The world is burning, and the government is
being run by an arsonist” rings far too true.
Lord Adonis, in The New European, also commented on Cummings
calling him the ‘joint prime minister’ and saying, “Cummings is intent on
jeopardising our entire political system”.
He suggests Cummings has an obsession with Otto von Bismarck, reminding
us that “Bismarck's motto was ‘blood and iron’.
He hated not just socialists and the French but liberalism and European
co-operation on any basis of human rights and conciliation.” It is worrying that Bismarck is the
inspiration of the man who has the ear of our Prime Minister.
Cummings is also reported as having briefed the special
advisers to cabinet ministers of a “one strike and you’re out” policy in
relation to his ban on leaks (unless they make him and the government look good,
preferably in that order), reportedly warning them that “if you leak you are
gone” and adding that “my worth to journalists is greater than yours. For the
right story they will rat you out”. It
seems to have worked, almost 10 minutes passed before his briefing was shared
with the press.
Further proving that he is a bully and indifferent to employment
law, The Telegraph’s Chief Political Correspondent, Christopher Hope, reported
that he also told the group that “if any of them tried to take him to an
employment tribunal “you will be dead to me””.
Cummings has the ear of a man who he probably disdains, but
who is Machiavellian enough to want him around – for now, but who will no doubt
be as loyal to him as he has been to his previous two wives. As Trump did for Bannon, Johnson is likely to
do for Cummings, discarding him when he has served his useful purpose and he
starts to become too embarrassing to protect.
The trouble is, between now and then, Mr Cummings is likely
to do and cause a great deal of damage.
Twitter: @GOMinTraining
Copyright © Craig Brown, 2019
9 August 2019
Copyright © Craig Brown, 2019
9 August 2019
[1]
If, like me, ‘mendacious’ is new to you, allow me to save you the trouble of
reaching for the dictionary. The OED
says: mendacious /mɛnˈdeɪʃəs/ adj. lying,
untruthful.
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