Even after the recent Downing Street Scandals and bean-spilling by Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson remains PM. After multiple allegations of cronyism, lying, dodgy loans and his then fiancé Cary Simons plucking someone from the crosshairs of an enquiry because she was best friends with him, plus a story about her dog taking up the PM’s time, he hangs on. As Hasit Shah at Quartz rightly bemoans, “These days, it’s difficult to [self] sabotage a political career.”
Meantime, though Matt Hancock was the principle target of Cummings’s sniper fire, there is a good chance that he too will wiggle free, at least long enough for him to finish his important task of wrecking the NHS and killing people through practiced incompetence.
And it is not just Boris and Matt, or even just UK MPs and peers. This kind of Teflon politics infects corporations and institutions, extending its ironically non-stick tentacles globally to every country and every government. Politicians and the wealthy may well frequently find themselves confronted with allegations of serious wrong doing, yet in proportionate comparison to the general population it is only rarely, exceedingly rarely, for allegations to stick and a conviction to result, perhaps with a deserved spell of prison time.
How do we explain the disparity, ceteris paribus, between the conversion rate of allegation-to-criminal conviction among the ruling and wealth elite on the one hand, and the conversion rate among the general population on the other? In other words, after accounting for possible factors (for example, political motivation for levelling a false allegation), would we not expect that within any sector of society roughly the same percentage of allegations would result in successful conviction? To maintain otherwise would beg an even bigger question; why are this lot more moral than that lot? A very apt question to ask about ruling and wealth elites, who seem strangely immune to this kind of social accounting.
That could be the subject of fruitful social science research, but we do not need to go that far here.
It is enough to note the utterly obvious: where convictions have resulted it has been when solid evidence was available. This raises another obvious question: is conviction among ruling elites only scarce because solid evidence is scarce, and not because they are somehow more moral? Less given to lying, cheating, fiddling expenses, cronyism and so on. (Which on Plato’s “logic of Cephalus” they should be, since they are supposedly buffered by wealth and privilege from the desperations that might even drive otherwise good, ordinary men to crime. [1])
It is almost certain that this is the case. Had a camera been rolling at the time when Cummings claims Boris said “let the bodies pile up!” the matter would have been open and shut in a jiffy, and Boris either booted out equally as fast, or his position strengthened depending on what the evidence showed. [2]
The problem then is not so much lack of accountability, which is the usual lament. What there is a lack of are records that provide the evidence that underpins accountability. In today’s modern parlance this translates into a lack of surveillance. We speak of cameras, microphones, and hell, even umpire-style observers strategically placed along corridors, and in ministerial and corporate offices as well as Cabinet and boardrooms. Such mechanisms would provide critical data when it came down to one honourable gentleman’s word against another, though the downside is we would be deprived of the theatre witnessed these last few days.
Likely we should install all three, so that if cameras and microphones malfunction or are tampered with we have the human back up; and, vice versa, should the human temporarily stop working or fall asleep we can rely on the tech backup. Naturally, when it comes to genuine matters of security such as a nuclear war for example, the human observers (sitting on comfy chairs during, say, 2 hour shifts, and wearing something like a Black Rod outfit to distinguish them) would be sworn to secrecy… or else. And when we were confronted with the kind of disputes and word jousting we have seen during the spectacular dust-up between Cummings and his former pal and meal-ticket to power, Boris, the umpires would nonchalantly rise and give evidence that would swiftly either condemn or exonerate.
Such care to make sure that everything is not only clear but clearly remembered would pay untold dividends. It would save tax payers huge sums, save lives in some cases, and also free up ministerial energies and focus – the latter already in short supply – for important stuff such as actually fighting a pandemic rather than arguing about it.
Agreeing to tight, blanket surveillance of our beloved rulers would of course be a pre-requisite of running for office, and so no one would be pressured into it. They would acquiesce in the knowledge that it would provide a near failsafe method for nailing down data that could be useful during an enquiry into misconduct that could potentially have disastrous effects. Though a few might still get away, it would not be anywhere near the mass dodging of public scrutiny that we see now.
We should all be in favour of surveillance. It is a very decent and patriotic thing to ascent to. Only so far it is probably the wrong people who have been publicly surveilled: the ordinary folk who at most pick pockets, park in the wrong place, perhaps hit each other over the head on a Saturday night, and OK, occasionally shoot each other.
None of that kind of petty misconduct is going to drastically affect the course of a nation. But Matt Hancock, who single handed may have helped the coronavirus kill 10s of thousands more than it would have done alone, is still in his job even whilst these gruesome allegations hang over him. At the very least he should take a holiday whilst it is being sorted out, since if it is true, he may yet kill 10s of thousands more before we get to the bottom of it.
Lights, action and roll the cameras.
1. “The great blessing of riches, I do not say to every man, but to a good man, is, that he has had no occasion to deceive or to defraud others.” Cephalus, Plato’s Republic.
2. There are countless other scandals that have erupted, even just considering the period in which technology for good surveillance already abounded. From the banal and apparently trivial (e.g., Andrew Mitchell’s Plebgate and Priti Patel bullying civil servants) to the potentially genocidal (Tony Blair’s part in the war on Iraq.) We are probably talking hundreds of instances in which public money and time might have been saved and redirected at issues of substance, to say nothing of lives saved.
Updated 23 August 2021
