Opinion

For years, the Tories have banked on impunity. Is their luck finally running out?

The party has clung to power by flouting political norms, but in the Cummings affair it faces an angry and contemptuous public

Will the Tories get away with it? In many ways, it’s been the central question in our politics since they squeaked back into government in 2010. Ever since they used the power vacuum after that year’s hung-parliament election to quickly cobble together a coalition with the Lib Dems, the Tories have been careering from one narrow scrape to the next.

Calling and losing the Brexit referendum, conducting a failed austerity experiment, constructing a Brexit deal out of U-turns and procrastination, and now trying to bluff their way through coronavirus, the Conservatives have taken huge, often disastrous risks, and yet have remained in office throughout. They have maintained that ascendancy, in large part, by ignoring the usual rules of political accountability. They’ve succeeded by being shameless.

Conventionally, British governments are thought to be answerable to a shifting but powerful combination of institutions and interest groups: parliament, the main political parties, the courts, the media, business, Whitehall’s codes and conventions, and public opinion. All governments try to ignore some of these, some of the time. Government is difficult, especially in an old, quarrelsome country such as Britain, and being held to account for your inevitable mistakes can be lethal.

But few British governments have worked as hard to avoid accountability as the Tories since 2010. From the Fixed-term Parliaments Act of 2011, which prevented David Cameron’s controversial coalition from being judged in an early election, to Theresa May’s attempts to stop MPs debating her Brexit deal, to Boris Johnson’s illegal suspension of parliament last year, the Conservatives have hidden from scrutiny ever more blatantly. Even the language Johnson uses – on the rare occasions he appears in public – seems designed to minimise accountability, with its clouds of vague adjectival phrases (“vast progress”, “world-beating”) and as few verifiable facts as possible. 

This week, this contempt for accountability reached its logical conclusion, in a way, with Johnson’s refusal to sack the unelected Dominic Cummings for clearly breaking their own government’s lockdown rules, or even to respond to many of the allegations against him. For anyone brought up on the idea that British politicians are scared of the press, Cummings’ performance in the Downing Street garden on Monday was quite an education. When a reporter from the Daily Mail – usually believed to be the most influential paper of all – asked Cummings whether he had offered to resign, he didn’t even look up from the written statement he had just given. “No. I have not offered to resign,” he said flatly, continuing to scribble on his papers. “I have not considered it.”

For Cummings and Johnson, like other populists, the only authority to whom politicians should be accountable is the usefully nebulous one of “the people”. Defending Cummings’ behaviour during lockdown, Johnson and his ministers have been saying all week: “People will make up their own minds.” Repeating stock answers, regardless of the question asked, is another way of avoiding accountability, and is the government’s main communications strategy.

One obvious advantage of answering only to “the people” is that – in theory, at least – it need happen only occasionally, in general elections. And between such contests, a government with a strong majority, such as the current one, can do a great deal in a single term in centralised Britain, as radical prime ministers from Clement Attlee to Margaret Thatcher have demonstrated.

Arguably, it was Thatcher’s fall in 1990, and the 20 years of often anxious, closely scrutinised governments that followed, that established the model of accountability from which Johnson and Cummings are trying to escape. Thatcher was dumped as Tory leader and premier despite having handsomely won her third election in a row only three years earlier, largely because of an unproven suspicion in parts of her party and the media that she was no longer a winner. She was held to account by the Westminster establishment, and found wanting.

Her successor, John Major, led a government that effectively imploded under the weight of hostile scrutiny. Scandals far smaller than the Cummings one led to a stream of ministerial resignations. Newspaper editors felt, sometimes correctly, that they could push the prime minister around. The then editor of the News of the World, Piers Morgan, wrote in his diary: “Major’s brought all these exposes on himself, with that ludicrous ‘Back to Basics’ speech”, which had called for a return to “traditional values.” Half in jest, Morgan worried that if his paper kept exposing Tory “sexual shenanigans”, “there will be literally nobody left to run the country”. If only exposing Tory hypocrisy had a similar effect now.

After Major came Tony Blair, with his crushing majorities. But even he governed as if he was perpetually on trial before the tabloids, big business, swing voters and other rightwing or centrist interest groups. New Labour was often too worried about being accountable to be radical.

Since 2010, the Tories certainly haven’t made that mistake. They’ve reshaped the country and its relations with the outside world almost regardless of what anyone else thinks. And when they’ve been too weak or short of ideas to enact many policies – as they were from the 2017 election to the Brexit stalemate last autumn – they’ve just clung on, ignoring regular Commons humiliations and the declarations of commentators that they lacked the authority to govern.

The stubborn, tunnel-vision quality of modern Conservative government can be disorientating for Westminster journalists, many of whom absorbed a lot of their assumptions about how politics works during the 90s and 00s. Towards the end of Cummings’ long, repetitive press conference, a reporter asked almost desperately: “How can you not feel apologetic?”

Yet even the very limited accountability that populists do accept can be dangerous for governments in between elections, in some circumstances, such as during a national emergency. The polls show that a growing majority of people are outraged by Cummings’ lockdown breaches – and this anger is fast eating into the government’s popularity.

Many voters may have been vaguely aware for years that a seam of hypocrisy has run through the Conservative governments since 2010, which behind their rhetoric of national sacrifice has indulged the rich and powerful. But the Cummings affair has brought this hypocrisy to the surface of public life, and crystallised it into a compelling, easily digestible anecdote.

As Major discovered when his administration was characterised as “sleazy”, once warning labels are attached to a government they are almost impossible to peel off. Whether Cummings eventually resigns, or is sacked, or not, what many voters think about the government may this week have shifted for good. Reporters will be looking for more hypocrites in Johnson’s administration. It may become a zombie government: stumbling on in office for years more, as Major did after his scandals, but widely discredited and mocked.

However hard populists try to limit it, political accountability comes in many forms. Having to govern before a contemptuous public can be the most painful of all.

• Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist