by PATRICK COCKBURN
Describing the atmosphere in 10 Downing Street last summer, Sir Jeremy Farrar, the infectious disease expert who heads the Wellcome Trust, speaks of a government “vulnerable to what looked like racketeering”. When he sat down at a meeting chaired by Boris Johnson, he was struck by the presence of snake oil salesmen looking for contracts for Covid-19 rapid testing that everyone knew was useless.
“It sometimes felt,” he writes in his memoir Spike, “as if I had strayed on a set for The Third Man, that fantastic Carol Reed film of a Graham Greene novel, which features a black market for penicillin.”
The analogy is telling because Greene’s post-war Vienna and the Johnson government convey the same sense of pervasive sleaze. Furthermore, Johnson’s personality has much in common with that of Harry Lime, the anti-hero played by Orson Welles, who exudes bonhomie but is entirely egocentric and dangerous to anybody who gets in his way.
Optimists may convince themselves that the racketeers saw their opportunity to profit from the chaos at the height of the pandemic, but hope the same will not happen in more normal times. But, as scandal succeeds scandal, I wonder if we are not entering a more corrupt era in British political life. The situation feels more and more like that in 18th century Britain or in the resource-rich states of the Middle East, where those without the right connections know that they stand no chance of doing profitable business.
My impression was confirmed by the revelations over the last week about the secretive “advisory board” within the Conservative Party that brings together wealthy donors in an exclusive club that some members have paid £250,000 a year to join. The club, which is acknowledged nowhere in party publications, brings with it the advantage of regular meetings with Johnson and Rishi Sunak.
What these super-rich donors reportedly have in common is that they are Thatcherite free marketeers, hostile to regulation and state intervention. They include the people who have long supported Johnson during his rise to power and presumably expect their money to win them access and influence. Denials by the Tories that the donors benefit in any material way from their largesse is incredible.
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