The week of the three downfalls has been an interesting one. Boris Johnson resigning from parliament, Donald Trump going to court to face serious charges, Nicola Sturgeon arrested as part of a probe into SNP finances. I wouldn’t like to prejudge any of these cases, for I am – secretly – a fair-minded person.
Of course, had Sturgeon not been involved, various leftist writers would now be penning articles claiming a great linkage between these events. Probably about the downfall of ‘populism’. But since Saint Nicola is involved this will not happen. Because as I have noted here before, our age sees all nationalism as poison, except for the Scottish and Irish varieties, which are inexplicably progressive and just.
Imagine we had been discussing at any point in recent decades how Boris Johnson’s political career might end. Most people would have said that it would likely implode amid a blizzard of fibs. Perhaps not one great big Watergate-sized lie. But a set of mini-lies that builds until nobody around him believes him any more because he has lied to everyone and run out of friends.
Johnson’s problem is that the matters under investigation all seem like things he might be involved in
Johnson is currently railing against the Commons Privileges Committee that censured him, and I have some sympathy with his anger. There is something off in Parliament these days where powerful committees and investigations can be set up by the most second-rate bureaucrats and effectively end the careers of democratically elected politicians. So I don’t blame Boris for having a go at the injustice of the thing.
His problem is that the matters under investigation – parties at Downing Street involving wine and, on at least one occasion, a sponge cake – all seem like things Johnson might be involved in. Although the rule-breaking was hardly on a mobster level, he had instituted insanely draconian lockdown measures on everybody in this country. And knowing him and some of the people around him, it just does ring horribly true that they might have felt that the rules didn’t apply to them. Once they were caught then of course a lie or two would have seemed the best recourse. The Conservative-dominated committee may have been a stitch-up, but its conclusions also sound like the truth.
It is the same with Trump. I don’t know whether he is the sort of man who pushes a woman into a changing room in a Manhattan apartment store and sexually assaults her. That was the last court charge he had to answer. And his claim that Bergdorf Goodman isn’t the place where he pushes himself onto women may or may not be true. But when it comes to the Mar-a-Lago document stash it does simply feel as though, yes, this is something Trump would do. Since some details of the cache of misappropriated documents emerged last weekend the case against him has begun to look rather strong.
Trump himself says that this is yet another witch hunt against him, like the Russia hoax theory that dogged his presidency and was cooked up and pushed by some very shady sources. For all his flaws, it was never remotely proved that he colluded with the Russians. Trump is also right to grouse that other politicians, notably Joe Biden, have taken classified documents when leaving office and have not been prosecuted. It is a fair point.
But the crux of this latest prosecution hinges on an unfair point: that Trump seems precisely the kind of person who, while leaving office ungraciously, might decide to take with him a trove of documents that could somehow be useful post-presidency. I haven’t heard the tape which is alleged to exist of him boasting to an associate about the top secret papers he had in his Florida castle. But can anyone honestly say that this doesn’t sound like him?
It’s pure New York real estate behaviour. You always, everywhere, take everything you can. You use everything you’ve got. You put away little nuggets of information – or sometimes quite large ones – that could benefit you one day. It’s a type of person, and Donald Trump is just such a person.
Which brings me to the lowest-grade end of this accidental triumvirate: Nicola Sturgeon. Again, I do not know (and for legal reasons would not like to say) whether she and her husband misappropriated or otherwise lost £600,000 of SNP funds. But then comes the matter of the luxury camper van, costing over £100,000. Hitherto I had no idea that a camper van could cost such a princely sum.
But I watched with fascination earlier this year when Sturgeon spoke to the press outside her hideous house in Glasgow. Generally I do not like to judge other peoples’ houses in public, and we should keep in mind that nobody has built an attractive house in Scotland for centuries. For despite being a people of considerable artistry, violence and taste, the only thing the Scots seem to pay no attention to in this world is the sightliness of their homes. Their lack of interest in beautiful architecture rises almost to the heroic.
Nicola and her husband raked in hundreds of thousands of pounds a year in salaries. Yet they live in a horrid modern Glasgow redbrick. And so, I am afraid, the following conversation becomes imaginable. ‘Oh Peter, what would you not give to have a luxury motor home of our own which we could drive around this bonnie land. One with a chemical flush. Imagine! Next year in Ullapool.’ The possibility that a modern luxury-living camper van may have been the apex of the Sturgeons’ worldly wishes – the Achilles heel in their financial affairs – seems at least conceivable.
I don’t know if it is. But it feels as if it might be. And for Nicola – like this week’s other falling skittles – that might in political terms be the most insurmountable problem of all.
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