YOU may, if you’re old enough, remember that the reasoning behind Tony Hancock’s decision to give blood – “A pint? That’s very nearly an armful!” – in the celebrated Half-Hour episode was: “It was either that or join the Young Conservatives.”
I wonder if his namesake Matt feels that, had he signed up for the needle in the arm and the Rich Tea biscuit instead of political rough and tumble, he might be a happier man today. For even by the brutal standards of ministerial scandals and subsequent resignations, this is a bloody affair.
Even someone sympathetic to Mr Hancock – not, I would guess, a lengthy list – would admit it is all his own fault. The chief thing for him, no doubt, will be the break-up of his marriage (and that of his lover and senior aide, Gina Coladangelo), the humiliation of having his private life splashed across the front pages, and losing his job.
But those aren’t – or for the most part, shouldn’t be – what preoccupies the rest of us. Public reaction to the story moved rapidly from the jokes that greet any political sex scandal to noticeable anger. It was entirely predictable that it would, and therefore politically utterly pointless to mount any kind of defence of the Health Secretary.
Leaving aside all the rights and wrongs of the matter, this is another instance that shows the government as tin-eared on strategy and reading the public mood. It’s true that Boris Johnson is generally disinclined to get rid of ministers, even when they foul up, and that, given his own track record, he would be on especially shaky ground if he were to sack people for having affairs.
But here it was obvious that the public would not be forgiving – not because the rules were being broken, which they might deplore but let slide, but because they were being broken by the man making them. Staunch Tory activists were queuing up to demand Mr Hancock’s resignation (almost 80 per cent of members in some constituencies, according to backbench MPs).
So it was a waste of time and political capital sending out ministers to defend him. Any small credit he might have got for resigning at once – or that the PM might have accrued by sacking him at once – was lost by clinging on for 36 hours.
One argument being advanced yesterday by Robert Buckland, the Lord Chancellor sent out to firefight around the studios, was that the Prime Minister and the government remain popular. This bizarre line is one that, if you had any sense, you would use only privately, for the reassurance of Conservative loyalists, rather than being daft enough to say it out loud. It is, though Mr Johnson’s dedicated opponents and most of the Scottish electorate may find it hard to credit, undoubtedly true. But that is down to the almost total uselessness of the opposition, sheer luck and the Prime Minister’s peculiar qualities: it can’t be counted on forever.
And when it wanes, as all political popularity eventually does, incidents such as this one will be dragged up and flung out as accumulated ammunition. People are still doing it with the trip to Barnard Castle by Mr Hancock’s great enemy, Dominic Cummings, who actually did survive (for a while).
As I argued at the time, hanging on to Mr Cummings (who at least claimed to be trying to look after his family, rather than dumping them for a girlfriend who’d been given a taxpayer-funded job) did more damage than immediately cutting him loose. It turned out that the PM could manage without him; indeed, it’s allowed him to replace Mr Hancock with Sajid Javid, another object of Mr Cummings’ contempt.
Meanwhile, the government’s opponents are trying to drum up interest in related questions about Mr Hancock’s staff appointments, procurement, and the use of private email rather than his official address. All of these are of a piece with the accusations of cronyism, carelessness and corruption in which, naturally enough, those who already hate the government hold as articles of faith.
The trouble for them (and which seems to baffle them) is that, for now, these accusations are not “cutting through”, as the analysts usually put it, and as Mr Buckland undiplomatically let slip. Part of this is that it’s more boring to follow the ins and outs of procurement deals, or the propriety of circumventing civil service bureaucracy, than it is to see that ministers are failing to follow rules that they’ve imposed on the rest of us. People are, for now, angrier about Fifa officials being excused quarantine than whether a lot of Test and Trace money was wasted.
I suspect that in some quarters there will also be the attitude that, in the midst of an emergency, it’s understandable – some may even think it desirable – for corners to be cut and money to be wasted, as long as we get results. And, though you may put it down to luck rather than the government’s cavalier disregard for red tape and normal practice, that’s the current position. It accounts for the public – for the moment – being more censorious about Mr Hancock’s lack of social distancing than whether he handed out contracts to his pals.
That won’t last. When Covid, and the restrictions it has prompted, no longer overwhelm all other matters of policy and practice, people will start to care about this sort of stuff again. It is the bread and butter of politics in normal circumstances, and even Mr Johnson’s freewheeling manner may not be enough to sweep it aside with an airy wave of the hand. The post-mortems that will be conducted on the pandemic will drag all this up again – almost certainly along with a raft of issues that have yet to come to light.
The sensible thing, from the government’s point of view, would be to react to obvious failings with a combination of humility and ruthlessness, rather than squander the public’s current willingness to make allowances on indefensible positions. If it can’t distinguish between things cranks and committed political enemies bring up that can safely be ignored, and the kind of stuff that unites the pub in condemnation, what can now be dismissed as a smear will eventually be – as the blood donor put it – a matter of life and death.
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