All the World’s a Stage: Dominic Cummings and the Hypocrisy of Politics
If you’ve been following the UK news recently, you’ll be hard put to have missed the dominating headline: the fall from grace of Dominic Cummings — Chief Adviser to Prime Minister Boris Johnson — seemingly breaking the rules his own party set on social distancing during the coronavirus lockdown. He now faces bays for blood, not least from his own party, since 39 Tory MPs have asked for his resignation.
Cummings’ story is a tough one to defend. Despite his party’s ‘Stay Home’ message, there for all to follow, he — as a key government figure — decided to flout such rules to drive from London to Durham for the sake of his children. To add to this, before driving back, he decided to ‘test his eyesight’ by driving to a local beauty spot — the now-infamous Barnard Castle — to make sure he was fit to take on the longer journey. Unfortunately, he happened to decide to take both his wife and child with him on this test drive, which happened to occur on his wife’s birthday.
Now, reading this may make you angry, the may it has irked countless others who forsook their own liberties because they believed they were part of a greater cause. Even if what he did is justifiable, given he was mostly looking out for his family, this doesn’t change the fact that what most are angry about is not the act itself, but the sheer hypocrisy of the situation.
‘Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.’ said François La Rochefoucauld. It seems that despite supporting, and perhaps playing a major part in engineering the ‘Stay at Home’ message, Cummings believed that this message did not apply to him. He was inadvertently acting both against and in support of others who might have done the same. Unfortunately, the public, and by extension Parliament, don’t take favourably to those who decide to show that they are, in fact, capable of being unsure.
Politics thrives on strong messages. Everyone needs to have a set of opinions and stick by them to preserve an image of an unbroken champion of a certain set of ideals. Often, these ideals are based more on the views of the voters themselves, than on their own critical reasoning. Votes in a democratic country are, after all, what entitle you to stay in office. Everyone is vying for them, and the gain of them is a major motivator to take action, or express a point of view. We saw it in the Brexit campaign, we are seeing it in the response to the Coronavirus crisis, in fact it’s been round ever since democracy became a thing. The phrase ‘mounting pressure’, used so often by newspapers, aptly describes the motivating forces behind government decision making; decisions are made not due to internal belief, but due to external forces that ultimately derive themselves from public opinion.
There has also been talk of ‘political capital’ — the fickle and immaterial commodity that Boris Johnson and his cabinet are now at risk of losing. Political capital provides fuel for a party’s popularity, and thus their grip on power. It, like pawns on a chessboard, can be traded in the short term for Get Out of Jail Free cards. Indeed, the value of political capital is so great, that sometimes lambs must be sacrificed to the Gods to preserve it. To paraphrase Yes Minister, when the pack is “baying for blood”, there does need to be the occasional “human sacrifice”.
The fallout from Cummings’ faux pas is just a snapshot of the inner world of the eggshells of power, pretense, and public opinion that politicians tread on a daily basis. To politicians, hypocrisy is anathema. A politician’s livelihood is based mostly on towing the party line — following that broad message, usually expressible in a single line, which won them their seats. Perhaps we in Britain are more subtle about it than ‘Make America Great Again’, but at the very heart of every successful political party is a message that reminds people why they are supporting the policies they are, even if those policies don’t really have much to do with said ideals at all.
The media is the mouthpiece of political parties and is big business. It relies on the broad sympathies of certain groups of individuals towards certain ideals. Policies, proposals, and manifesto points are then framed in a context where they look to be supporting those ideals, in order to gain support from those people. For example, let us look at the Furlough Scheme. This is a policy that the conservatives want their supporters to see as a way to keep the economy going. They seem to have mostly dodged the uncomfortable point however, that Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘magic money tree’ has suddenly taken root and flourished in the midst of a party who only months ago denied its very existence. Thankfully for the Tories, the gradual sway of conservative opinion on what does and doesn't constitute a ‘conservative policy’ amid a viral pandemic has managed to move such conflicting questions out of the limelight and stop hypocrisy from rearing its ugly head on this point.
In effect, politics is a stage, and all the politicians are players. Each round of government is a new run, a new contract for these actors. They need to keep the audience satisfied, at least enough of the audience to peer pressure the rest into applause, or at least into staying silent. Sometimes, that doesn’t mean a majority — but just means employing smaller groups who have been vehemently convinced that the play was a marvellous success, sometimes even before it started, by a supportive media who will clap and whoop so loudly that those around them will sheepishly clap along.
At this time, MPs in the Conservative Party will look at Cummings and see not a man, but a starkly visible poison, tainting the very source of the stream of their power and influence that trickles down from the cabinet office itself. Many have realised that if they stay associated with him too long, they and their leader will be irreparably, visibly scarred in the eyes of the public.
The irony — the great hypocrisy — is that the stream need only look good on the surface, however. Like the ‘Blue Lagoon’ in Derbyshire, people will not be put off by dangerous, yet invisible, pH levels. They will only turn away when the colour of the water changes. So long as the pollutant is one which cannot be seen, things can continue as normal, and the people will continue to bathe. So long as the audience keeps on clapping, it doesn’t matter what happens. The job of the politician is to keep up the illusion that work is being done, that progress is being made, that targets are being set, and kept to. Politics is about being hypocritical while maintaining an ostensible hatred of hypocrisy. This hatred of hypocrisy is the greatest hypocrisy of all.
