Alex Massie Alex Massie

The government’s political capital is waning

Upon how many fronts can a government fight at any one time? Political capital has a short-enough half-life as it is without the risk of it being diluted through simultaneous multiple battles. Concentration of political firepower matters.

At a rough count, Boris Johnson’s ministry is currently fighting the civil service, the media, the European Union and now, of course, a looming public health emergency from a likely coronavirus epidemic. There is also the small matter of a budget and the government’s actual – or, if you prefer, notional – plans for ‘levelling-up’ the United Kingdom.

Some of these are more significant problems than others, and some of them required no super-forecasting skills to foresee. The Home Office may be as dysfunctional a department as it has ever been but installing Priti Patel as Home secretary always seemed a curious way of fixing that.

This is a government that will not enjoy much of a honeymoon, even if it is fortunate to enjoy no opposition in parliament worth the name.

But then this is a government that prides itself on muscular disruption and sundry other fashionable nostrums. The business of government, however, is not a business. Continuity and incremental change is never as interesting as blowing things up and starting again but this, nevertheless, is what government is charged with managing. Sweeping into office and grandly declaring everything and everyone as useless is doubtless very pleasing but rarely delivers the kind of change it screams is so very necessary. It is, moreover, a vainglorious stance wholly unbecoming of a so-called conservative government.

There is also something remarkable, even by the standards of the present day, about the spectacle of loyal, nodding, Tory backbench MPs lining up to defend the Home secretary against what appear, at first blush anyway, to be wholly plausible accusations of bullying, intimidation and general dreadfulness so very soon after many Tory MPs – many of the same Tory MPs –joyfully pointed out accusations of bullying, intimidation and general dreadfulness made against John Bercow.

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