One of the benefits of having been around for a few decades is that you have plenty of experience of the way in which society operates and, importantly, the ability of politicians to read the mood and do ‘the right thing’.
I first became aware of the interaction of forces that shift opinion in the 1970s which was a peculiar decade. If you’ve never read it, Francis Wheen’s Strange Days Indeed: The Golden Age of Paranoia, published by Fourth Estate in 2010, is a great overview of what went on in the 1970s when, if nothing else, style and elegance sometimes seemed forgotten.
Wheen draws particular attention to the way in which political leaders were, it seemed, beset by problems which conspired to make their challenges even greater than they might otherwise have been. In the case of leader of the Labour Party, Harold Wilson, there’s strong suspicion he was being actively undermined by the security services who considering him to be a Soviet mole.
This still seems like a strange sentence to write.
The notion that some within the ‘deep state’ might seek to undermine the position of a democratically elected Prime Minister feels wrong, ven . ludicrous.
A decade after Harold Wilson’s sudden resignation in March 1976, the publication of Spycatcher: The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer, written by former MI5 officer Peter Wright and co-author Paul Greengrass, told us much about the way in which the security services operate.
If Wilson, whose health has been deteriorating due to stress and was losing his enthusiasm for the ‘top job’, had suspicions of what the spooks were up to, he was right.
If only a fraction of what Spycatcher contained is true, Wright’s book showed that there are no limits to the willingness of the security services/establishment in interfering in the day-to-day running of the country by democratically elected government if it suits their agenda.
The 1970s seems like a long time ago.
One television reviewer of the time travel series, Life on Mars, shown between 9th January 2006 and 10th April 2007in which police detective Sam Tyler is transported back to the early 1970s, wrote that the series it looked like it was filmed in a different country.
Much has changed in the last 13 years.
We’ve now got a democratically elected government which, unlike any previous administration, came to power openly eschewing the ‘establishment’ and proclaiming their desire to work on behalf of communities ‘left behind’ through ‘levelling up’.
As we’re discovering on a daily basis, this is a government not averse to taking money from the hedge fund investors who backed the campaign for the UK to leave Europe. This campaign was explicitly based on the referendum being a way for the ‘common people’ to show their distaste of the metropolitan elite being ‘supplicants’ to the overweening power of the EU.
It’s also worth recalling that sometimes, it’s not just the security services you need to worry about.
Jeremy Corbyn would be justified if he rues on the fact that he didn’t become PM in 2017 because of the efforts of officials within his own party. This recent revelation is amazing and, in the fullness of time will hopefully be fully investigated.
In the meantime, however, the population can reflect on the fact that Theresa May, having lost her majority, and having vainly tried to achieve a compromise deal on Brexit, was forced to resign paving the route to power for, arguably, the most narcissistic and self-serving PM we’ve ever had the misfortune to live under.
As events involving the trip to Durham and Barnard Castle by Johnson’s chief advisor demonstrated, we have a PM with no strategy and who is utterly dependent on Dominic Cummings.
This is dangerous and indicates contempt for the ‘little people’ as well as the establishment the duumvirate running this country claimed that electing the Conservative Party back in December would seek to reform.
What is profoundly worrying is the fact that Johnson appears to have chosen his cabinet on the basis that, in large part, they display a level of obsequiousness that would make the vast majority of hang our heads in shame.
The daily chaos we’re currently experiencing is the consequence of the cabinet being, sadly, witless fools who demonstrate little to no evidence of integrity or intelligence.
As a result, things will get worse. Much worse.
What we are going to experience economically in terms of employment will potentially make the 1980s look benign.
I wish I could be more optimistic.
I do wonder what the establishment make of what is going on?
Surely they, like the rest us, they must be horrified?