When the Tories won a historic fourth term in December 2019, the party and many pundits hailed it as proof of a new kind of Toryism. Galvinised by Brexit, ‘Red Wall’ Labour seats and Boris Johnson’s popular touch, all of this would aid a very different Toryism, one where the party’s appeal to working-class voters would see it embrace a sensitivity and championing of public spending, ‘levelling up’ and the North of England.
Two and a half years after that election victory, fuelled by the twin drivers of Brexit and Jeremy Corbyn â and coming up to the anniversary of three years of Johnson as Prime Minster â no such new, popular Toryism of the working class is visible anywhere.
Instead, the current state of the Tory Party is both familiar and yet shocking in its scale and extent. Terms like Tory sleaze and corruption recall misbehaving Tory individuals like Cecil Parkinson and Neil Hamilton, and the degeneration of John Major’s Government in the 1990s, whereas the current misbehaviour of senior Tories is altogether different.
The defining characteristic of this Tory Government is of drift, chaos, incompetence and an inability to tell the truth on issues both serious and mundane. None of this should be of any surprise to anyone who has paid any attention to Boris Johnson, who is a man with no real principles or commitment to serious government and administration.
Yet the scale of rot, dissembling and disregard for any decency in public standards and office is truly shocking and off the scale compared to Tory Governments in the 1980s and 1990s. UK Chancellor Rishi Sunak, once seen as a safe pair of hands and a smooth operator, has now shown he is nothing of the sort. A ‘Spring Statement’, which was shocking in its emptiness as the cost of living crisis has mounted, has been added to by the scandal of how the Sunak family arrange their finances to maximise tax avoidance.
Sunak’s wife, Akshata Murthy, it turns out is a non-dom, meaning she has registered to not pay tax on her global income in the UK (hence avoiding at least £20m taxation in the UK). She has asserted that the UK is not her permanent home, despite living until last week in the taxpayer-funded flat over Downing Street with her husband and two children (once all this became public, a hasty declaration was made by Murthy, saying that she would no longer be a non-dom).
Add to this that Sunak has had US Green Card status for the entire period he has been a Tory MP and minister, which necessitates that he has declared that the US rather than the UK is his permanent home.
Tory apologists tried to muddy the water concerning Sunak’s wife, claiming that her Indian citizenship was the reason for her non-dom status: a typically disingenuous defence mixing up nationality and tax residency.
Anyone thinking that these might be isolated examples would have been shocked when Sajid Javid, current Health Secretary, admitted that he too had also been a non-dom for a period of six years. This means that of the four Tory Chancellors in the past 12 years of Tory rule â Osborne, Hammond, Javid, Sunak â two have been affected by non-dom status.
Non-dom status is a bizarre relic and throwback to the days of Empire. It was introduced in 1799 to allow colonial traders, slave owners and plantation owners to organise their tax arrangements in such a way that they would not be liable for tax in the UK domestically.
As the money adviser, Martin Lewis, put it: ‘Non-dom status goes back to the first year of income tax, 1799/1800, when people in the UK who could claim domicile outside it did not pay the new tax on their foreign earnings, protecting their income from plantations and slavery. Using it is a choice’. Over 200 years later, it has become a tax avoidance scheme for the super-rich to minimise tax and something that 238,000 people in the UK utilise, 93% of whom were born abroad and 7% born in the UK (16,600).
Alongside all this, the serial evasions and deceptions of Boris Johnson rumble on, rotting and corroding everything they come into contact with. Partygate’s first and second set of fines have been issued, which has included fines for Johnson and Sunak: the two most senior figures in government. Meanwhile, Tory MPs and ministers reproduce the lies of Johnson: that he apologised (when he hasn’t), that he has not misled the Commons (when he has repeatedly), and that if he misled the Commons, he thought at the time it was the truth and was only stating what officials told him. This last point suggests that Johnson is a gullible idiot who doesn’t know what constitutes a party or work meeting unless someone tells him.
Tory scandals bubble about everywhere. There is the £37bn of PPE contracts given to Tory crony pals; the scandal of the VIP lane, and the misuse of public contracts by the likes of Matt Hancock and Michelle Mone. Then there is the case of Evgeny Lebedev, Baron of Siberia (yes, that is his real title) who, despite security agency warnings, was given a seat in the House of Lords making him a legislator for life, although he rarely, if ever, attends.
The scale of Russian penetration of the Tory Party with millions of pounds of Russian oligarch money funnelled into the Tories, including from sources close to Putin, is jaw-dropping. The infamous Downing Street ‘presidential-style’ press conference room which cost £2.6m in public monies (and has been barely used) was built by a Russian company close to Putin â Megahertz â a Moscow-based company owned by Okno-TV, with close ties to the Putin propaganda channel Russia Today.
British Toryism and the corrosive effect of ‘the Big Lie’
Such is the state of disarray of Boris Johnson’s Toryism. Although much of this is down to the amorality of Johnson, there is a longer story about the debasement of British Toryism as it has broken free of the constraints which used to define it, such as respect for authority, tradition and the rule of law.
Pivotal in this were the Tory years of David Cameron and George Osborne that were zealous about cutting back the state, careless about the cost of Tory austerity, and blasé about rising poverty and hardship. Comfortable relationships with the super-rich meant that Osborne saw no part of the UK as off-limits to foreign purchase and ownership, including nuclear power stations and parts of the UK national security network.
The Tories have long prided themselves on being the self-proclaimed advocates of economic prosperity, freedom and patriotism, but their record on each has increasingly fallen short of their rhetoric. There was no ‘Thatcher economic miracle’ in the 1980s, one of the central pillars of Tory orthodoxy since the rise of Thatcherism. Instead, there was economic growth fuelled by North Sea oil, privatisation and tax cuts, underpinning an explosion in consumer spending which saw household debt explode.
British politics post-Thatcherism under Labour and Tory governments have paid homage to the mirage of the 1980’s ‘economic miracle’, pretending that its legacy can provide economic prosperity in a UK of endemic low growth, of curtailed state spending pre-Covid, a brutal welfare state not worthy of the name, and rising inequality and absolute poverty.
Contemporary Toryism is completely divorced from reality. Funded by foreign monies and the City, it is used to getting its way after 12 years in office, regarding Labour and other opposition as nothing but an irritant.
How else can one describe the defence of Rishi Sunak launched over the weekend in The Times. His allies called Sunak â a multi-millionaire â as someone who ‘doesn’t live a lavish lifestyle’ and is ‘not interested in wealth acquisition’. It is almost comic in its lack of connection to reality or the concerns of voters. This about the richest man ever to hold the office of UK Chancellor.
The current UK Government is slowly and inexorably trashing what were once viewed as the standards of public life. Lying used to matter in politics. Lying in particular to the House of Commons used to carry with it the implication of resignation and disgrace: think of Profumo or Anthony Eden, who as PM lied to the Commons over Suez and had to resign under the cover of ill-health.
Democracy dies when standards in public life no longer matter, when lying is normalised and the ruling party can say what it likes and get away with it. Boris Johnson’s Toryism is in this dangerous territory, and large parts of the media and public discourse are happy to pretend that none of this is happening.
In Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951, she made the case that the death of democracy is defined by a slow, creeping contempt for facts and truth, and those who stand by this. This is related to a growing sense that truth is founded on the power of those who say it is whatever they want to maintain their self-interest. If we live in a world without any commonly agreed idea of reality and what we agree is truth, these become traduced to whichever vested interest and group is the most venal and shameless.
Arendt wrote: ‘Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty’.
She believed that the ideal subject of a totalitarian regime was not a true believer and ideological dogmatist. Rather, Arendt contended, it was someone for whom ‘the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist’.
No-one would suggest that Boris Johnson’s Toryism and the present UK is like living in a dictatorship. But every day that this government, Prime Minister and Toryism remain in office, a little part of what was once decent about Britain dies.
The frightening part of all this is that it looks set to continue long into the future as British democracy and accountability slowly wither and weaken. Once they have become nearly completely dysfunctional, as happens all over the world, people will look back and ask: how on earth did this fall from grace and honour happen?
They will ask why no-one warned them, not noticing that the culture of lies, disinformation and dissembling had taken years and the efforts of many to build. It may be too late but Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak’s lies matter and we must never stop remembering that.