In last Sunday's World This Weekend radio programme, presenter James Naughtie introduced a discussion on the implications of the latest Johnson episode.
It raises questions about parliamentary behaviour, honours lists and their place in our democracy and maybe the whole system of checks and balances that are effectively our alternative to a written constitution.
The veteran (born 1953) Conservative MP, Sir Geoffrey Clinton-Brown, agreed with Naughtie that:
It demeans and reduces the status of parliament and members of parliament. It is clearly a very bad thing.
Naughtie turned to Dame Margaret Beckett, the woman MP with the longest overall service in the Commons, for a description of the saga's effect on parliament and public debate.
Funnily enough, I was having a conversation with a colleague about it in a different context the other day and we were talking about, in the future, how do you get a better balance of responsibilities and where blame is shared, if any, and so on. Part-way through the conversation we suddenly realised that actually the easiest and best way to do it would be this way, relatively light touch and then we realised the only reason we are not discussing doing it that way is because of Boris Johnson and the way he's behaved ever since he became prime minister, because no longer can people kind of say "well, of course, nobody would do that, you know it would be unprecedented, it would be outrageous", and then you realise that Boris has destroyed all those comfortable assumptions.
Studio guest Gus O'Donnell (70), former head of the civil service, was asked by Naughtie to speak on behalf of the Establishment, which Johnson had railed against in his resignation message. Lord O'Donnell was more sanguine about our system:
When you look at the US, Congress and the Republican party are really struggling with how to handle Donald Trump. In the UK, we've had a situation where we have a prime minister, who hasn't behaved well, but the checks and balances in our system for prime ministers, you know, it's their party. So it's Tory MPs that decided they didn't want Boris Johnson as their leader. As Mr Johnson the MP has behaved badly in parliament, it's parliament that's done this. .... Conservatives have to ask themselves, constitutionally do you want to put something above our sovereign parliament to second-guess it when it doesn't give you the answers you want?
Asked about Johnson's characterisation of the civil service as The Blob, Lord O'Donnell said:
Effective government is all about civil service and government working together which works at its best when government is very clear what it wants to do, and the civil service is there in its role to test that and ask challenging questions, but once government has decided what to do, to get on and deliver it.
In the last few years, he admitted, that view of the world:
has struggled, to be perfectly honest, because you've had prime ministers, you've had special advisers, who've abused the system and that's becoming more and more obvious ... I think the current prime minister is beginning to rebuild that trust in our government, in our institutions ... it is sad, because I see my former civil service losing a lot of talent - people are somewhat disillusioned and we need to attract them back.
[...]
The only time you find parliament struggling is when you get an executive - the government - saying to parliament "please do things which are not in line with the law". Parliament's job - and this is what the House of Lords has been doing a lot of - is to say "if you want to do that, go ahead by all means, but change the law first and get that through parliament but you can't do it under the law as it exists"
Naughtie and O'Donnell agreed that the deal which enabled our system of government to function without a written constitution, an understanding across party political boundaries, labelled the "good chaps" theory by Peter Hennessy , is under unprecedented strain. Lord O'Donnell however remained optimistic, the checks and balances of party and parliamentary committee having worked in the case of Boris Johnson.
A later guest, the decade-younger Danny Finkelstein, was not so sure. He saw Johnson and his allies taking the fight outside parliament and was not certain that it would be unsuccessful.
Clifton-Brown, Beckett, O'Donnell and Hennessy are roughly all of the generation which, growing up, saw the reestablishment of the rule of law in nations devastated by the actions of dictators who had overridden it - not to mention the removal in |Britain of the restrictions on civil liberties imposed by a wartime government. Where are the younger people prepared to defend publicly our system of government? I exempt the millennials from criticism. Young adults have always been more exercised about specific causes before developing more of a world view. I am more concerned about the generation between us, "Thatcher's children" if you like. Adam Smith, Walter Bagehot and John Stuart Mill were in their late forties or early fifties when they wrote the books for which they are most famous. Where are the middle-aged defenders of liberal government today?
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