Help of £15bn is welcome, even from Johnson’s government of charlatans
Things have reached a pretty pass when, in order to divert attention from their own decadence, Boris Johnson and his lickspittle party have decided to make a big thing of the cost-of-living crisis – a crisis, mark you, aggravated by the cumulative impact on food and other prices that is the direct consequence of Brexit.
The worst cost-of-living crisis in most people’s memory seen as coming to Johnson’s rescue? The chance to claim you are mitigating it with measures extracted reluctantly from a chancellor who has previously made a point of cutting the real value of social benefits? “Moving on”? Yes, that is the nadir of the British polity to which we have been brought by the charlatan who “got Brexit done”.
Nevertheless, credit where credit is due. Chancellor Sunak has been listening to thinktanks such as the Institute for Fiscal Studies and the Resolution Foundation, to numerous charities and, not least, to Labour’s shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves. His £15bn package of financial help for the bulk of the population hit by the energy crisis is to be welcomed, even if it is a temporary expedient to keep the show on the road.
The list of charges against Johnson, however, stretches out of the courtroom and along the corridor. As a classical scholar he knows, with Seneca, that his entire career in first journalism then politics has been conducted contra bonum morem, “against good custom”.
The historian Lord Hennessy lamented in the Financial Times last week that under Johnson there has been a “bonfire of the decencies” in public life. Ruth Davidson, the former leader of the Scottish Conservatives, has put it thus: “We didn’t – and shouldn’t – need the Metropolitan police or Sue Gray to tell us the difference between right and
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