The better sort of political scandal must be easy to understand. It should not centre on matters of public policy, because that runs the risk of everything becoming complicated. Rather it must be about base human frailties, the sort everyone can relate to: hypocrisy, deceit, greed, lust. Bonus points for more than one.
Ideally, the story will emerge slowly, bit-by-bit. Initial allegations might seem relatively minor, the sort of thing that can be brushed off. But as more details emerge, a storm will build until it is all-consuming. It is not essential that the details fit together coherently or logically—“back to basics,” which did so much damage to John Major, was an absolute ragbag of different issues—but there should be at least one jaw-dropping revelation.
There will be a tipping point, after which the details of further allegations become less important than the general sense of momentum. Things that might have been dodged initially just pile on, allegation on top of allegation, until they crush those involved.
A good scandal should reveal staggering levels of recklessness on the part of those involved—how on earth did they think they would get away with that?—and it is important that those in the firing line try desperately to cling on to office. It is no fun when people do the decent thing and resign straight away, although the good news is that, human nature being what it is, that’s rare.
The issue at the heart of the scandal doesn’t need to be all that important in the grand scheme of things. It will involve wrongdoing of some sort (it may even be criminal wrongdoing, although that is optional) and there may be a lot of pearl-clutching to try to play up its importance, but the crux of the issue is almost always more prosaic. People made out that Profumo involved national security, but it fascinates so much because it was about shagging and fibbing.
The cast list involved needs to include some rum characters and the result is usually to torpedo one or more careers. Periodically someone will write an article asking us all to remember that there are human beings involved—if not the individual at the heart of the story then their partners, children and so on—but to little avail. Anyway, those brought down by scandal do not necessarily need to be the worst offenders. I am still struck by the almost random way in which the MPs’ expenses scandal ended some careers, while others—on the face of it, much more egregious sinners—got off almost scot-free.
To top things off, there should be an image or phrase that makes things easy to remember—duck houses, envelopes full of cash, Chelsea shirt—and the very best scandals might also be revelatory about the people or institutions involved.
Not all scandals follow this pattern (many are, alas, much more run of the mill), but what is notable about the problems currently embroiling the prime minister is that they contain almost all the elements listed above.
Maybe the various Downing Street events were criminal (some of them certainly look that way to me, but then I’m not a lawyer) but they were certainly wrong, for reasons that are very easy to grasp. There have been attempts to make public policy links—what if all of this had become known at the time? What would it have done for people’s compliance?—but this is all secondary to the more fundamental hypocrisy involved. Everyone can grasp that while most of the British public were following strict rules on how to behave—rules that for many involved painful sacrifice—those who set the rules in Downing Street were not.
The story has dribbled out, which has had the effect of making it harder to draw a line under, as well as getting the prime minister in more trouble as initial explanations collapse under later revelations. We are now at the stage where claims that could have been swerved at the beginning—drinks parties which there is no evidence the prime minister attended or knew about, for example—are adding to his misery. And I bet there is still more to come.
We also have the recklessness, the symbolic image (the suitcase of booze or the bereaved monarch sitting alone, just after Downing Street went on the razz), and the random nature of the casualty list: to date, the only person to have actually resigned over the events in Number 10 is someone—Allegra Stratton—who, as far as we know, didn’t actually go to, or organise, any party. We even have the wider character arc you can imagine in a television drama: the flaws foreshadowed in series one of the Bafta-winning Boris—his long-strained relationship with the truth and the belief that rules do not apply to him—being the ones to get him into deep water in series four.
True, it might be said that we lack the colourful cast list of something like the Profumo or Jeremy Thorpe affairs—but then in the prime minister, who contains multitudes, we have a one-man exotic dramatis personae.
And, at heart, we even have the triviality. While the broader issue of Covid is one of the most significant public policy challenges for a generation—if not the most—the actual offences here are arguably relatively minor (albeit things for which others were getting their collars felt by the police). It is not to understate the public anger or the difficulties facing the prime minister to note that losing office for a couple of glasses of lukewarm Chablis would be a poor way to go.
When you think about some of the things Lloyd George got away with—or even Churchill’s approach to his finances—it seems strange to be discussing the defenestration of a prime minister over a drinks party. Indeed, we don’t even have to think about other prime ministers; we just have to think about some of the things this one has previously got away with to think it curious that this is what gets him into so much trouble.
But then it was taxes that brought down Al Capone, not the gangster stuff. There’s no point complaining about this. There was a reason the Conservative MP Julian Critchley entitled his autobiography A Bag of Boiled Sweets. It was, he said, the only safe pleasure for a politician.
