“Just imagine Johnson having to face going to her to explain why he’s not going to resign even though it now does appear that he did lie to parliament. He’s in the presence of a woman who has never once put one inch of her court shoe over the constitutional line since February 1952. The famous raised eyebrow, the head tilted back. That should be enough—don’t you think?”
Speaking at the turn of the year, Peter Hennessy, Britain’s most celebrated constitutionalist and postwar historian, sounded less like he was asking me that question than reassuring himself. He nurses a deep affection for and gentle faith in our shambling way of running things: one of his books is called “muddling through.” And yet we were soon drawn into a dark hypothetical in which our embattled prime minister is caught breaching the most fundamental tenet of our constitution and still refuses to accept the game is up. How do you “muddle through” then?
The fortnight after our first conversation rendered the sentimental scenario where the Queen would somehow save the day eerily prescient. Some of Johnson’s previous statements to parliament on Downing Street parties were indeed looking wilfully false. Then, in what might have been the fateful twist of the partygate saga, he was forced to apologise to the Queen over two No 10 knees-ups on the eve of her husband’s lockdown-compliant funeral. At this point, even the tabloid Metro was hunting out historical clues about when a monarch can give the PM the boot, with reference to William IV’s 1834 dismissal of Lord Melbourne. When I rang Hennessy again and ask him what he made of it all, he sighed. “For someone like me, who has looked at the constitution for a very long time, it’s just madness that the premiership could turn on all this linguistic stuff about whether a garden is part of an office, or whether a party animal PM knows he is at a ‘party.’”
The Hennessy ethos is an engaging and warm moderation. He knows everybody—mandarins, spies and politicians on all sides—and sees the best in them all. He understands that the constitution can get out of kilter, but has, at least until now, always maintained that the “knicker elastic” of code and convention will eventually snap back into place if stretched too far. The question tormenting him is whether we can still rely on that after the precedents set by the one political leader in whom he struggles to see any virtue.
The people person and the pragmatic constitutionalist combine in Hennessy’s “good chap theory of government,” the idea that the letter of the rules is less important than the system being run by players who understand their spirit. It may sound British to the point of parochial, but Linda Colley, author of a brilliant history of constitutions worldwide, shares the underlying thought. Fundamental laws are, she writes, “the frail paper creations of fallible human beings… they only function well to the degree that politicians, the lawyers and populations concerned are able and willing to put sustained effort into thinking about them… and making them work.”
Women can be good “chaps” too. Despite some distasteful policies, Theresa May “had decent instincts... the alarm bells rang in the right place about proper procedure.” Yes, the brevity of her tenure reduced the danger of being corrupted by office, but on the available evidence “she’s in the tradition of decency of most British prime ministers in not abusing the powers” of No 10.
Hennessy admires most of those who have got there. The impeccably proper Attlee is close to his heart. Macmillan was “a very class act, a very, very substantial prime minister”; even Cameron was “attractive” in his Macmillanite way of “wearing his responsibilities lightly.” Callaghan was a model, in underpinning his toughest decisions with exhaustive Cabinet discussions, and Hennessy is a “great fan” of John Major, whose company he has come to enjoy.
He doesn’t pretend that providence has provided us with an unbroken line of good chaps. Anthony Eden had a seriously “bad moment” in his fateful pronouncements over Suez in December 1956. Two more recent names also raise concerns, and for almost opposite reasons. Margaret Thatcher “was not above wielding a handbag at parts of the constitution; she’d start a meeting by saying ‘you know, I’ve only got time to explode and have my way this morning.’ So I worried about her, but on the other hand she loved argument,” the fuel on which Cabinet government runs. Tony Blair, by contrast, “didn’t like argument at all, and didn’t like process,” so there “was a danger there of an imperial premiership.”
Today’s head of government is, however, something else: “Johnson has more disdain for the constitution than any other PM… he has outshone them all.”
“I still think that this peculiar bundle of conventions, laws and codes can do wonders…” With the country in a “terribly ratty state” through Brexit, there was elastic-stretching on all sides. (Hennessy decries the precedent-defying decisions of the Remainer Speaker, John Bercow, as much as the government’s arm-chancing). But ultimately things snapped back into place; the “constitution held.” We found a way, however scrappy, to muddle out of Europe.
But the real “trouble” lies in the consequences of “a prime minister who is absolutely tone deaf to all the niceties of this. He hasn’t got a single feel for either proper behaviour, proper procedure, not a single nerve end. He has got no sense of the restraints you need to make this work. If a bit of it annoys him or gets in his way, he tries to cast it aside, like proroguing parliament, like the Standards Committee, [when he said] ‘we don’t just refuse to accept what you’ve said about our friend Owen Paterson, we want you to be entirely rejigged next week as well.’”
In light of the parties, Hennessy adds that whereas Johnson’s threats to the “decencies on which our constitution rests were there in black-and-white before Christmas, in January they were seen in technicolour.” Johnson has shamelessly shifted from denying fact, to denying knowledge and then, when that defence collapsed too, quibbling over definitions. It matters, because “accountable government has to be credible.”
Still, Hennessy knows that few people worry about procedure for its own sake. He is convinced, however, that playing fast and loose with it ultimately warps the bread-and-butter issues he has made his own in his new book A Duty of Care, a passionate call for a new social settlement covering everything from elderly care to vocational training.
A few days before the first lockdown in March 2020, my ear caught one of those rare lines on the radio that sticks with you: Hennessy was boldly predicting that British history would soon be divided into Before Covid and After Covid. With the echo of BC and AD, it could become as natural a chronological break as that between the pre-war and post-war worlds. Shielding as a vulnerable septuagenarian, Hennessy’s expectation—or hope—was that the exigencies of surviving the virus would instil a new solidarity to match the Dunkirk spirit which inspired the welfare state. Forget Bevan’s famous dropped bed pans: what should now echo through Whitehall corridors were the saucepans we all banged for the NHS on Thursday evenings.
Will that collectivist mood really stick? Hennessy concedes we could lapse back to the old ways: Covid is not “total war.” But it is, he insists, “the nearest that we’ve come” since 1945, as the headlines reach into every front room. The tentacles of public policy have grown to match. Early on in the diary he kept throughout the crisis, Hennessy looked at the furlough scheme, the Universal Credit uplift and effective rail nationalisation and marvelled at “a new political economy in a week.”
The crisis has also laid bare many pre-existing frailties: witness official Covid death rates that are more than twice as high in poor than affluent areas. So the challenge for our own politicians, like those of the 1940s, is to seize this mercurial moment and forge lasting change.
Will it happen? Again, the conversation rapidly comes back to Johnson. With all the PM’s energy and optimism, I had thought Hennessy might judge him less harshly on social policy. I was wrong. Steeped in forensic Lords committees, he calls the PM out on points of policy that have passed under the radar, such as the abandonment in 2020 of the May-era industrial strategy, a potential disaster for “levelling up.” What about social care? Hasn’t Johnson at least got something done, after decades of drift, by sticking his neck out to raise revenues for reforms? Hennessy is again unimpressed. The main problem Johnson has concentrated on—capping catastrophic costs—has receded in salience during the crisis, whereas he has relegated urgent questions about the workforce and quality. Worse, the post-dating of the cheque until after the NHS backlog has been cleared creates doubt about whether the money will ever come through.
All these substantive shortcomings, Hennessy thinks, go back to Johnson’s style. The “besetting fault” of his government has been “a failure to think things through.” Frustratingly, he had a rare “chance for it to be better,” to move beyond “recrimination as usual.” His “great moment” came after his own brush with death in spring 2020; “for a few weeks” he really “did work with all the devolved administrations… Nicholas Soames [Churchill’s grandson] said he wouldn’t want to go back to being a scrappy party politician now he’s been a national leader. But he did.” Within weeks, Johnson was back “on autopilot.” The “hacks were briefed about his ‘roadmap,’ so Mrs Sturgeon read about it for the first time in the Sunday Times.”
Starting with the indulgence of Dominic Cummings’s rule-breaking road trip, and now more emphatically with the No 10 parties, the Johnson premiership has “created a deep-set belief that ‘it’s one law for you, and one for the rest of us.’” Hennessy is even more shaken by Cummings’s—telling, if disputed—claim that Johnson positively welcomed the convulsions of Britain’s pandemic, because amid chaos “everyone will stick to the king—which is me.”
Time and again, the PM is distracted from sustained deployment of “the Whitehall apparatus” you need for serious reform, by “a cunning plan or a wheeze to get him through the next few weeks or even days, but not beyond.” Time and again, he falls back on his old tricks: “to bedazzle with language, to boff and bash… His whole way of operating cuts against the grain of what is needed at this time.”
As early as the autumn, Hennessy was emboldened by signs of his “good chaps” fighting back—like the five living former Cabinet secretaries who wrote to the Times making a stand for propriety during the Paterson row. As January ground on, he was heartened, too, by the growing band of Tories telling the PM to go, not just out of “selfish” calculation, but because they reasonably “want a leader who behaves with dignity and predictability.” More than anything, though, he was heartened by the PM’s by-election battering in Paterson’s North Shropshire seat, because that showed that “we’re still shockable as a people”: bad behaviour can’t just be shrugged off.
No longer believed, the PM has “gone through a one-way valve.” Even if too many Tory MPs balk at regicide, this now “has the feel of Macmillan after the Night of the Long Knives,” a reshuffle made the year before he was out: “everything he touches goes wrong.” Though speaking before any confidence vote is triggered, Hennessy deems it “likely” Johnson will be out this year.
But he is sufficiently worried about the Johnson experience to start rethinking some core beliefs. He is still an “unwritten constitution man,” but only in his “aversion” to “trying to write everything down.” Whereas “I was born into a world where the unwritten constitution seemed to fit as comfortably as an old cardigan,” today it leaves “everybody cross, anxious… and rather resentful.” It might be time to write some things down.
The Owen Paterson row shows we’re still shockable as a people
Hennessy still winces at the alien thought of a comprehensive “constitutional convention”: “we couldn’t start off with ‘we hold these truths to be self-evident,’” because “none of us hold any truth to be self-evident.” To be true to ourselves we must continue to improvise, but we might, perhaps, learn to improvise with a pen in our hand. Hennessy would start by enshrining many rules about standards and watchdog appointments in statute, to guard against the sort of capricious threats in the air amid the Paterson affair.
He fondly imagines the next PM on the steps of Downing Street instigating a return to rule-bound governance by drawing a conscious contrast with Johnson with a few well-chosen words, in the same way that Major did with Thatcher in his inaugural remarks about a “society at ease with itself.”
All that is for the future, however, at least as we speak. If Johnson’s own MPs falter, the question is whether anything in the broader constitution can fell him while he cheerfully defies its conventions, specifically “that bit of the Ministerial Code which talks about ministers having knowingly lied to the Commons having to tender their resignation.” It should be curtains—automatically.
But Johnson has already stripped the Ministerial Code of force, by salvaging his bullying home secretary, Priti Patel. Moreover, its bite on the PM as opposed to his team is especially dubious, since the PM himself is the only judge of whether a breach warrants dismissal.
Could proven mendacious contempt for parliament soon become just one more thing that a prime minister can brazen out? Hennessy’s mood darkens. “Being him, the fear is that he won’t accept it… the fear is that because it is him, he’ll defy it.”
Which is how we got on to whether the Queen’s raised eyebrow could do the trick. What, though, if it doesn’t? Would we then be looking at a political crisis to match Trump’s final days?
Here at last I get a (slight) softening of the judgment on Johnson. Many politicians, he says, write their “autobiography in their heads,” obsessively refining “the history of their own glories.” Some leaders resist that temptation, but Hennessy knows first-hand how such thoughts can weigh on leaders. Cameron once sprung upon him and said “I’ve read your books, and I’d like to be a chapter in one some day,” and later traded notes about the criteria for rating his premiership. Johnson, Hennesy thinks, is even more obsessively self-aware: he’s “a classic example of that,” so much of him is “refracted through that.”
In the end, the “saving grace for all of us” could be a desire for the final page of the Boris Johnson story to be a “noble, not an ignoble one.” The PM may have done for the good chap theory of British governance. But Hennessy still looks for salvation from what we might call the good chapter theory.
Peter Hennessy’s “A Duty of Care” (Allen Lane) is out in March
