© Provided by The GuardianPhotograph: Reuters
Dominic Cummings offering a lecture on integrity in government is like a cannibal telling you how to be a good vegan. When his subject matter is Boris Johnson, it is nevertheless worth paying attention. Few possess a more detailed map of where the prime minister's skeletons are secreted than the man who was once his most senior aide. Few have had a better perch for observing the way Mr Johnson behaves when he thinks the world can't see what he is up to.
Related: No 10 refurb row: Grieve calls Boris Johnson 'vacuum of integrity'
The blog posted by Mr Cummings on Friday night was an incendiary counterblast provoked by Number 10's claims that he had been behind leaks embarrassing to the Tory leader. This is revenge served spicy hot. Of the stink bombs he has thrown through Number 10's letterbox, the accusation most likely to cut through to the typical voter is that Mr Johnson hatched a plan to have Tory donors secretly pay for the renovation of the Downing Street flat, which was "unethical, foolish, possibly illegal and almost certainly broke the rules on proper disclosure of political donations".
The allegation that will most horrify Whitehall is that the prime minister sought to impede an official inquiry into a leak about lockdown timing that compromised the response to the pandemic. According to Mr Cummings, Mr Johnson wanted that inquiry shut down because the finger of suspicion was pointing at one of his fiancee's close friends. His final shot is the faux-lachrymose remark: "It is sad to see the PM and his office fall so below the standards of competence and integrity the country deserves." I cannot recall a previous example of a former senior aide turning so savagely on the prime minister he used to work with.
Apologists for Mr Johnson are saying that this is bile from a bitter and twisted man who lost a power struggle within Number 10 at the end of last year. That can be true while also being true that what he says about his erstwhile boon companion in the Brexit campaign and Downing Street is correct. It is scarcely novel, the accusation that the PM is a serial sleaze, a habitual liar and a relentless rule-breaker who knows ethics only as a county to the east of London. But the charge gains significant force in coming from a witness who was his most senior aide for 16 months and claims to have more to expose and detailed records to back up his allegations.
This capped a week that began with the release of WhatsApp exchanges between the prime minister and Sir James Dyson in which Mr Johnson promised to "fix" a tax issue for the Brexit-supporting vacuum cleaner salesman. Rather than confess to any regret about this revelation that you can directly negotiate tax policy with the head of government if you are a billionaire fortunate enough to possess the prime minister's phone number, Mr Johnson declares that he will make "absolutely no apologies" for agreeing a tax waiver to engage Sir James's company in the project to build more hospital ventilators. This anything-goes-in-an-emergency defence may sound familiar because it is not the first time it has been deployed as a shield against charges of special favours for friends of the prime minister and his party. That alibi was also used when we found out that a hefty chunk of lucrative Covid-related contracts ended up in the hands of chums of Tory ministers, MPs and peers who were granted access to a "VIP lane".
© Photograph: Reuters'The PM is a serial sleaze, a habitual liar and a relentless rule-breaker who knows ethics only as a county to the east of London.'
An investigation by the National Audit Office found that bids using this privileged priority channel, which I have previously dubbed the crony express, were 10 times likelier to win business. Safeguards against abuse were relaxed and more than £10bn of contracts were awarded without competitive tender. The respected monitoring group, Transparency International, has just published an analysis that concludes that one in five of the Covid contracts signed between February and November 2020 raised one or more red flags for potential corruption.
The identity of many of the beneficiaries remains hidden because the government refuses to name the companies that received a great deal of public money, which is an eccentric way to behave if there is nothing to hide. As in the Dyson case, the suspension of the normal rules has been repeatedly justified by ministers on the grounds that the pandemic created an urgent need to secure critical equipment. Yet we are now learning that the "VIP lane" had the opposite effect. It didn't lubricate the swift delivery of vital supplies - it gummed up the pipeline. Evidence in a case brought by the Good Law Project being heard in the high court has turned up an email from an official on the team tasked with sourcing protective equipment. The unnamed civil servant complains that officials were "drowning in VIP requests and high priority contacts" that "do not hold the right certification or do not pass due diligence". Far from expediting the supply of desperately needed equipment, the reserved lane for Tory mates undermined that life-or-death endeavour.
Labour is hammering the theme of "Tory sleaze" in the hope of making it ring in the ears of the voters, but there is a view that this will not damage the government as much as it ought to. The argument goes that Mr Johnson won't be much hurt because an expectation that he will behave badly is already "in the price". Those who voted to confirm him as prime minister in 2019 knew that they were electing a rogue, not a saint. I hear this view expressed both by blase Tory MPs, who blithely think that their leader is lacquered with a Teflon coating that makes him invulnerable to any scandal, however appalling. I also hear it from some Labour MPs who despair, in the words of one, "however hard we throw it, nothing seems to really stick".
There is some supporting evidence for this from polling. The Opinium poll we publish today has more people agreeing that the prime minister is mostly or completely corrupt than thinking him clean and honest, but the Conservatives nevertheless enjoy a double-digit lead over Labour. This is because context matters. History suggests that voters are generally more tolerant of sleaze when they are feeling good about their own lives and much less forgiving when they are miserable. The intensity of public outrage over the abuse of parliamentary expenses was magnified because that scandal erupted at a time when many voters were suffering the consequences of the financial crisis of 2008 and subsequent recession.
At the moment, the accumulating heap of stories about cronyism and corruption is in a context that is sufficiently favourable to Mr Johnson that a significant chunk of swing voters are either not too exercised or are willing to give him a pass. As more jabs go into more people's arms, he continues to enjoy a lift from the "vaccine bounce". The hope that the country is emerging from its last lockdown is another component of the recent rise in the government's popularity.
This context will change and become more menacing for the government when vaccine euphoria wears off, business and job support schemes are unwound and ministers implement some excruciatingly tough choices about how to pay the bill for the pandemic.
What won't fundamentally alter is the character of Mr Johnson's government. If you've missed the latest sleaze story, don't worry, another one will be along in a minute. As I like to remark from time to time, the personality of institutions is hugely influenced by the example set by the person at the top. When the prime minister is a man with a lifelong contempt for the norms of decent behaviour and a career history of behaving as if he can get away with anything, the government is going to reflect his amoral character. Never forget that Mr Cummings was not sacked when he went for his lockdown-busting excursions around Durham, an example of "one rule for them" that mightily cut through to the public. They only parted company months later when the svengali fell out with the prime minister's fiancee.
A culture of impunity in which unethical behaviour, however outrageous, never goes punished, is pretty much a guarantee of even worse to come in the future. I cannot tell you how the Johnson government will end or when, but it will surely not be a happily ever after. Sleaze may not catch up with the Tories tomorrow or next week or next month or even next year, but there will be a day of reckoning. To paraphrase Ernest Hemingway, governments become bankrupt in the eyes of the voters gradually, then suddenly.
. Andrew Rawnsley is Chief Political Commentator of the Observer