In Iceland, electing an iceberg as President is apparently possible, if not probable. According to its campaign website, Snæfellsjökull – the glacier on the Snæfellsnes peninsula – meets eligibility criteria: over 35, has no criminal record, and has mustered 1,500–3,000 signatures from citizens in all four corners of Iceland supporting the nomination of the symbol of Icelandic resilience. “It’s time to elect a leader whose wisdom supports our interdependence and sustainability”, they propose. Could the politically beleaguered United Kingdom learn something from this?
Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice
Juvenal can’t help wondering if the UK would be better off being ruled by an iceberg than our current chaotic government. After all, appalling behaviour seems to have become the hallmark of what marks a special sort of MP out from the merely ineffectual crowd.
It could be argued that the rot started with David Cameron’s 2016 gamble that a majority of Britons would vote yes to remaining in the EU, blowing apart his pre-2015 promise to offer “stability and strong government” rather than “chaos with Ed Miliband”.
His resignation after he lost the referendum began the inevitable slide down a slippery slope to rule by the ‘Brexit Bandits’, when in 2019, Johnson finally wrested the premiership from a beleaguered Theresa May, the Tory equivalent to saying ‘Beetlejuice’ for the third time.
Chaos with Johnson
Beetlejuice Johnson’s ‘showtime’ began with the insistence that every candidate who stood for the Conservative Party in his consequent general election pledged to support his clearly flawed Brexit deal, which he gaslighted a majority of voters into believing was “oven-ready”.
As our Davis Downside Dossier shows, for anyone with an ounce of political nous, the huge gaps in the rhetoric were glaringly obvious. Therefore, any aspiring Member of Parliament agreeing to sign up to this rancid document would surely have to be severely lacking in grey matter, or so power-hungry they didn’t care what they signed to get their bum on a seat in the Commons, or both. The die was cast.
After the goldrush…
And now, after four and a half chaotic years of one of the most scandal-ridden British governments of all time, we have some very good evidence that there’s ‘nowt between t’ears’ of far too many of our MPs. The average Briton finds themself, as Neil Young sings,
Lying in a burned-out basement
With a full moon in my eyes
Hoping for a replacement…
Johnson himself didn’t last three full years. Starting with the gold wallpapering of No 10 Downing Street after sneering at the John Lewis revamp undertaken by his predecessor, moving through the despotic arrogance of ‘PartyGate’ to be eventually brought down by his casual attitude to one of the myriad sex scandals that emerged from the Conservative class of 2019. Johnson’s downfall was thence directly caused by the biggest mass ministerial resignation in history.
Since that time, the list of Tory scandals has continued to mushroom, leaving the government with an unprecedentedly large cluster of non-party affiliated MPs in the Commons, as a flow of ongoing scandals causes them to ‘relinquish’ the whip or have it forcibly withdrawn, depriving their constituents of representation in parliament by a member of the party for which the majority had voted. Some, including Johnson himself, resigned from the government altogether, triggering a parade of by-elections.
Replaced by an (iceberg?) lettuce
The smell of rotten politics has continued to rise under Johnson’s subsequent replacements. The first, Liz ‘Dizzie Lizzie’ Truss, didn’t last as long as a supermarket lettuce (it is unclear whether this was, in fact, an iceberg) but still sits on the back benches in parliament, whilst starting a splinter Conservative group to challenge mainstream Conservative policies and attending MAGA events in the US.
Given such an outflux, the Tory Lords might be able to assist in the creation and definition of policy and ensure party unity. After all, Cameron has recently been politically regenerated by Rishi Sunak as Lord Cameron, Britain’s current foreign secretary. And then, there’s Johnson’s surprise honours nominee Charlotte Owen who might be unleashed to use her vast experience of politics, moving from intern to peer in five years, to become the leading voice for the party.
She could draw on Truss’s recently published whimsical reflection on her inexplicable rise and rise in the party, before being felled by (she claims) the left-wingers in the Treasury and the Bank of England, rather than by her own crashing of the British economy and the consequent rise in mortgage rates.
An exploding lettuce?
As David Gauke mildly writes in the New Statesman “The lesson that might have been learnt from the mini-Budget is that governments must maintain market credibility. Truss appears to take the opposite view… a politician with a simplistic mindset and a reckless temperament”. Perhaps in just this one instance, we should have paid more attention to Dominic Cummings’s more scathing, prophetic assessment, expounded on his blog in 2022:
“I gave Truss the nickname the human hand grenade … Truss is the only minister I shouted at in No 10. The reason was her compulsive pathological leaking … this routinely caused chaos and often damaged the UK.”
Cummings says that he suggested she focus on her “real job … where you’re failing to grip your department”. Her response, he says, was “what do you mean, the real job?” This tendency clearly followed through to the most important political role in the nation. How she actually got there will no doubt be a topic worked over and over in PhDs, retrospectives and political memoirs to the dawn of the next century and beyond.
Cummings additionally proposes that Johnson only backed Truss because should he be replaced by her, she would be so inept, that he would be able to make a comeback. It’s an interesting theory, which will no doubt be relentlessly examined and re-examined as time goes by.
Scandalous liaisons
The second Johnson replacement, Rishi ‘Rishi Rich’ Sunak, perceived by many of the population as a smug rich kid, clings to power with his fingernails as his colleagues fall into scandal all around him.
One of the major issues that has dogged the Tory government from Johnson onwards has been a stream of MPs driven by their baser urges to experience pleasures of a certain sort and to set aside codes of decent conduct to indulge in the pursuit of peaks of earthly delight. Some of these have added insult to injury as they laboured under the misapprehension that it is the public or party purses’ role to buy them out of any ensuing problems, in the case of Mark Menzies via late-night calls to aides for immediate cash.
The argument over what he did or didn’t do in this respect has led to his pledge to stand down at the next election, along with 62 of his colleagues, one of whom is former Health Secretary Matt Hancock, most famous for his very public extra-marital affair, and more recently, looking more spritely on TikTok after his sojourn in the I’m a celebrity, get me out of here jungle and alleged visit to Turkey for dentistry and hair implants.
A phenomenal list of scandals
The list of Tory scandals goes on and on, from the frankly bizarre ‘Tractorgate’ through various sleazy lobbying and bullying scandals, unlawful PPE ‘fast-track contracts, insider appointments at the BBC and other public bodies, alleged ‘client journalists’ in the mainstream media and the crony-fuelled honours lists submitted by Johnson and Truss after they had left their jobs in disgrace, the latter after just over a month in office.
While Sunak himself has managed to stay out of the scandal limelight to the present time, his wife’s tax affairs have created some waves for him, and his lack of connection to how ordinary people in the country actually live, including his obsession with flying everywhere, has caused irritation.
In the name of God, go!
Politico reports that some of the young Conservative MPs standing down at the next election are concerned about being unemployable because “people don’t like MPs”. Considering what so many members of this chaotic government have done to make them unlikeable, it’s unlikely that the British public will have much sympathy, particularly given the recent doubling of payoffs to exiting MPs.
When the history of the Brexit period is written, perhaps the closest parallel that can be drawn is to the English Civil War; the bitter divisions that bumbling rulers created within the population, the unpopularity of the regime that installed itself after the removal of the monarchy, and the leadership turmoil that followed, which lasted over 45 years.
It isn’t clear how long the current turmoil will continue after this government is gone. What is clear is that it reached the end of its usefulness a long time ago, if indeed it ever had any merit. The best message that can be sent to it is the one that Oliver Cromwell gave to the Rump Parliament in 1643: “You have sat too long for any good you have been doing… In the name of God, go!”.
If we could turn back time
Many Britons have long been fantasising about a ‘Dallas moment’ where they could wake up in 2015 to, rather than Bobby Ewing stepping out of the shower, an announcement that Ed Miliband’s Labour had won the election and was about to unleash chaos on the nation. Whatever such chaos consisted of, it surely couldn’t be worse than the decade of ineptitude we have had to endure.
But we cannot turn back the clock. Perhaps, indeed, the iceberg might do better than Johnson’s fatally nobbled class of 2019; who knows? It wouldn’t have rowdy parties whilst ordering the rest of the population to ‘stay at home’ in lockdown, crash the economy in less than a week, become a profligate frequent flyer or indulge in rabid sexting. Given the current state of the British government, rather than vote for more of the same, a significant number of British voters would probably be willing to give it a try.
