Do the ends justify the means? That is the key question at the moment. Martin Bashir thought they did, when he used fake bank statements to help persuade Diana, Princess of Wales, to do an interview with him for Panorama. He must have convinced himself that the interview was so important that it was worth breaking the rules to get it. Even now, he is trying to explain away the fraud on the grounds that she was happy with the outcome. But the fact that she wrote to Bashir after the broadcast to thank him for giving her back her “wings” does not right the wrong about the way the interview was secured.
At Westminster, too, the defining issue is whether victory “by any means necessary,” as Malcolm X put it, is the right approach. Dominic Cummings, the prime minister’s former adviser, certainly believes it is. At the Department for Education, he encouraged Michael Gove to hang pictures of revolutionaries including Vladimir Lenin and Malcolm X on his office wall precisely to make the point that political goals must be achieved at any cost. “The worse the better,” Cummings used to say, quoting Lenin to argue that out of chaos comes reform.
When he appears before MPs this week to discuss the government’s handling of Covid-19, Cummings will use any tools at his disposal to damage Boris Johnson, whom he has come to view as “unethical” and falling “below the standards of competence and integrity the country deserves.” Whatever private messages or confidential documents he has will be deployed. His approach to politics has always been to seek victory at any cost.
That is why Cummings has always been such a superb campaigner. During the Brexit referendum, he was willing to bend the truth and push ethical boundaries for the sake of what he saw as a bigger, noble cause. The false claims that voting leave would mean an extra £350m for the NHS and that Turkey was joining the EU were driven as much by revolutionary zeal as cynicism.
Cummings’s single-minded focus and purity of purpose can be extraordinarily effective—as it was when he engineered a general election in 2019 that the Tories then won with an 80 seat majority. But it also meant pushing the boundaries of constitutional norms by proroguing parliament, purging moderate MPs and going to war with the judiciary. Compromise is for wimps; rules are for little people who do not have a mission to complete. That approach is also why he proved less adept in government, where success depends on building alliances rather than burning bridges to bring about change.
One Whitehall grandee told me recently when I was writing a profile of Cummings for the Times that it is impossible not to admire his idealism. “The interesting thing about him is he is really committed to doing what he believes is the right thing, but he does believe that the ends justify the means, therefore he will engage in some pretty low tactics. He’s highly principled in the sense that he doesn’t just do things to keep power, be in office or get the perks—it’s about trying to achieve an agenda. With all his techniques, if he is right you can just about justify them, if he’s wrong it’s really dangerous because the checks and balances are not there.”
That is the problem. The idea that, as Leon Trotsky put it, “the end may justify the means as long as there is something that justifies the end” is the mantra of radicals everywhere on left and right who favour creative destruction, as well as careerists who will do anything for power. Johnson is just as willing to bend the rules to his own ambition. As a journalist he was fired for making up quotes, and as a politician he will do whatever it takes to protect his position. He ignored his own ethics adviser’s ruling that Priti Patel was a bully, causing Alex Allen to resign, and threatened repeatedly to break international law. Truth and decency are sacrificed for the sake of power, which, in the mind of the man whose childhood dream was to be “world king,” is a greater cause.
But it is the integrity of the process itself which keeps politicians honest, and ensures they remain accountable to the voters. The institutions which are so loathed by the Brexiteer populists—the civil service, the judiciary, and yes, at its best, the BBC—are the guardians of procedure. That is why so many traditional Conservatives are aghast at the prime minister’s cavalier approach. Democracy is based on the essential truth that the means are always as important as the ends.
