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As Julian Lewis has discovered, crossing the prime minister is political disaster
If a leader wants to rule as if he is ruling a one-party state, the first institution he needs to bend to his will is not the judiciary, civil service or free press but the ruling party. The party gave him power and could take it away. He must turn it into the equivalent of Vladimir Putin’s United Russia or Donald Trump’s Republicans and fill it with politicians too venal and frightened to challenge the boss. Boris Johnson may not know much but he knows about power. God help Conservative MPs who injure his bottomless vanity. They all now know they will not just lose the chance of a job in his cabinet or a retirement home in the House of Lords. Johnson will attempt to destroy them.
At first sight, his failure to impose the hopeless Chris Grayling as chair of parliament’s intelligence and security committee is one of the few merry moments 2020 has given us. “Only Chris Grayling could lose a rigged election,” said the Westminster wags. Johnson did not realise until it was too late that a politician who could not park a car in an empty field would be outmanoeuvred. Say what you like about Julian Lewis, the Conservative MP who manoeuvred his way to the prize, but he understands defence and intelligence and is not a creature of Downing Street. His knowledge ought to have been a recommendation, given that the quid pro quo for granting the intelligence services more powers was granting the committee the power to scrutinise them. Continue reading...