It is deeply revealing of the modern freemasonry ruling Britain today that Boris Johnson’s chief critics—Dominic Cummings and Max Hastings—are the people who created him in the first place. And they are champions of the same incestuous Tory public school elitism which continues to advance and protect him.
This freemasonry extends to the media, particularly the establishment outlets of the BBC, the Times and the Telegraph, as I can attest from my modest attempt to expose its hypocrisy in the past week.
It began with an article in the Times last week by Hastings, on his hobby horse of how dreadful Johnson is. He writes polemics of this kind every few months, striking a pose as the sword of truth and shield of virtue in a world where, as he knows, everyone in the establishment media likes to have a pop at Boris so long as he and the Tory Party aren’t actually evicted from office.
However, the truth is that no one apart from Cummings did more than Hastings himself to create “Boris” as Tory politician and populist, who rules today.
My profile of Johnson in the current issue of Prospect—“The Prime Etonian”—sets out how Hastings, as editor of the Daily Telegraph in the 1980s, not only recruited “Boris” to be EU correspondent which made his name as Brussels-basher-in-chief, but did so after he had been sacked by the Times for inventing quotes and sources. He then advanced Johnson to become the paper’s star political columnist, from whence he became editor of the Spectator, a Tory MP and ultimately prime minister.
Hastings did all this despite the scandal of Johnson and his Etonian friend Darius Guppy being recorded planning an assault on a journalist who was on the trail of Guppy’s criminal proclivities, which not long afterwards landed Guppy in jail for major fraud. Hastings wasn’t only aware of this: the tape was sent to him personally, yet he chose to take no action. Instead, he promoted Johnson. As he put it in a memoir of his Telegraph editorship published in 2002, as Boris’s political career was taking off, the Bertie Wooster class act was “among our best bylines.”
So when, last week, Hastings did his latest “how I despise Boris” number in the Times, under the headline “Cummings is right: we deserve better leaders,” I wrote to the editor to point out the hypocrisy.
“It is not just that Cummings was largely responsible for the Boris Johnson premiership, through Vote Leave in 2016,” I wrote. “There is also the inconvenient fact that Hastings himself is largely responsible for Johnson’s ascent in the first place.” I gave chapter and verse, ending: “But for Hastings, we might well have had better leaders.”
The editor of the Times declined to publish my letter. This wasn’t for shortage of space. Over three days he published a string of missives in praise of Hastings’s supposed insights into the systemic problems of modern politics in producing good leaders. One was from an aged Tory peer who suggested it was all the fault of the new-fangled practice of parliament meeting during the day, rather than at night, a claim the same Lord Cormack also made in response to a proposal of mine last month that the House of Lords should start its sittings at 1pm rather than in mid-afternoon, which he deplored because it would prevent him from having a lengthy lunch each day in the Lords dining room.
The Times, it seems, is happy to blame everyone and everything for Johnson and his ilk, except the people actually to blame. To do that would destroy the credibility of the Times’s own writer, which would never do.
And therein lies the real problem. Grand commentators bemoan so much that doesn’t work in modern Britain, including our deeply unequal education system, our populist media, our grossly irresponsible political leaders and political advisers and the increasing evidence of political corruption emanating from all the above. In other words, all the things that brought us Brexit and the mishandling of Covid-19. But they will gladly criticise the government only so long as nothing meaningful happens to threaten the freemasonry which keeps this failing in perpetual motion, overseen by leaders like Boris.
It is time for this country to have decent leadership from outside this closed elite.
