Some things still matter
Scandals, by-elections and reasons for sticking to the rules
In a couple of weeks, I will be driving to Ukraine. I’ll be part of a convoy delivering vehicles for medical evacuations at the front line. I’ll be driving across Europe, from the UK to Lviv.
I’m currently fundraising for the trip - aiming to raise £12,000. This money will purchase the vehicle, fund modifications, and cover the costs of getting it there. Any surplus will fund other equipment, like drone detectors and medical equipment.
Any support is hugely appreciated and will make a difference. You can donate here.
Thank you!
It has been a week of legal trouble for the far right. In France, Marine Le Pen was found guilty of embezzlement by an appeal court. The judgment will allow her to run for the 2027 Presidential election (though this may be changed on subsequent appeal), but she is likely to do so wearing an electronic tag. In Britain, the net of parliamentary standards has closed around Farage. His latest gambit, calling a by-election before he was pushed, will buy him time, but also see him spending the summer in an electoral contest with a bin.
In each case, a broader debate has emerged on the effectiveness of scrutiny and enforcement against political insurgencies. Farage has sought to frame this as a battle between himself and an establishment determined to use any means – foul or fair – to stand in his way. Given Clacton’s demographics and the mainstream parties’ withdrawal from the contest, he is likely to be returned as an MP. He will use this to assert his vindication and to delegitimise the parliamentary investigation that will resume when he’s back in parliament.
This approach leads to a certain defeatist nihilism among opponents of the far right. There is a widespread view that these scandals never harm but only embolden insurgent political movements. The idea is that, rather than making people think twice about Farage, they make his fans feel even more like an embattled minority who must embrace him even more. Simple psychology aligns with this. People often double down rather than admit they are wrong – think of the scam victim who keeps sending money to their conman, the cult member who goes deeper in when challenged, or the friend who defends their obviously awful partner.
Yet this line of thinking risks being too clever by half. Caring about and policing impropriety is one of the few weapons we have against those who don’t care for it at all. Abandoning the principle that the rules matter, hands them a victory they do not even have to fight for. It hastens their political advance, but also yields to the nihilism and insincerity that are the hallmarks of the worst movements. While fighting these impulses on every point doesn’t necessarily win, it is better than being in constant, cynical retreat.
Politics is often a depressing place for those who think rules, morals, and decency matter. Those who disregard them often seem to rise regardless. Their supporters rally despite every dubious excuse, half-truth and obfuscation. Often, it feels like nothing matters. It is easy to give up in the face of that. It is, however, a mistake. Just because that reaction isn’t universal doesn’t mean it is not felt somewhere. Drawing attention to misdeeds and bad behaviour chips away at a politician’s support and can eventually cause it to collapse.
A decade ago, Boris Johnson was the archetype of a Teflon politician. His routine dishonesty, self-aggrandising and general unfitness for office seemed no bar to his rise or his popularity. He drew crowds of public support, and that built his stock within the Conservative Party until he became the inevitable choice for leader. Yet even then, he was limited by his behaviour. In the 2019 election, I met many Tories who were only begrudgingly behind him, most of them out of fear of what a Corbyn government would mean.
This, of course, accelerated in office. Johnson’s inability to serve as Prime Minister became apparent, leading to numerous policy blunders that would undermine the Conservatives. His repeated scandals, however, were the real thing that brought his downfall, crystallising around Partygate. Perhaps emboldened by how many times he got away with it, Johnson fell into the ultimate scandal. It wasn’t just that he had disobeyed the rules, but he did so when so many had paid a high psychological cost for doing so. He became a lightning rod for the post-COVID anger. Suddenly, the scandals mattered, the latent anger coalescing around this one thing. I doubt any Tory activist will forget the upset and fury you encountered on the doorstep after that, even two years later during the general election campaign. The morality of it mattered.
For sure, Johnson should have paid a price for his character long before. The other scandals should have mattered. People who are dishonest, self-interested, and contemptuous of the rules when they are out of office rarely find their moral compass when they are in office. Voters should be more wary, and these things should do more to damage political careers. But even if they don’t, it is important to mark them and push for some sort of accountability. You never know which scandal will spark public anger or prompt a reckoning, so you must pursue anything genuine. There is a risk of crying wolf – like the impotent attempts to make “Sir Beer Korma” dent the rise of Labour – but where there is a proper case to answer, it might just cut through. Even if it doesn’t, when the one big bad thing does land, the long list of priors makes it harder to wriggle out of.
The alternative appears to be backing off, avoiding the narrative of an elite pressuring an insurgent candidate. There is, however, no evidence that this works either. If people are going to back a person even when there is a stench of the horrible about them, there is no real reason they would be less drawn in when everyone else acts like they are fine. In any case, we have already seen this approach fail spectacularly. The inability to bring Trump to trial over Jan 6 and the attempts to overturn the 2020 election before 2024 meant everything rested on beating him at the ballot box. When that contest was lost, it allowed perhaps the most corrupt administration in history to recapture all the organs of the state. The other institutions might have ultimately failed to stop him, but there was still good reason to try.
Across the far right, this really matters. The ideology is intertwined with grift and with the idea that some spirit of populism can revoke the rule of law. We have seen this in Hungary, where Orbán’s government was corrupt on a huge scale and for a long time. It can be seen in America, where Trump has subverted the Presidency as the ultimate tool of personal gain. Across Europe, and here, we see a huge streak of personal aggrandisement and self-enrichment at the core of the movement. Farage’s £5 million gift is probably larger than all other political personal enrichment scandals in the UK combined – even the expenses furore involved only £1.3 million of improperly claimed money. They are surrounded by chancers, have no care for propriety, and happily help themselves to vast sums. For a political culture used to thinking “they are all as bad as each other”, we need to remember that no, these guys are way worse.
Populism is itself built on a concept that rules and procedures don’t matter. Like Farage and his self-induced by-election, it focuses on the conceit that the only thing that counts is the support of a sufficient plurality and a nebulous will of the people that overrides all else. If the voters of Clacton don’t care, the rules don’t matter. This isn’t how representative democracy is meant to work. Acting as though it only empowers these people to focus on their misdeeds is not just defeatist but also concedes this point to them. It accepts that if enough of their coalition don’t care, it doesn’t matter.
Instead, we need to focus on rebuilding trust in institutions so that as many people as possible continue to see the value of the rules. This includes the other mainstream parties policing themselves appropriately and not shirking scrutiny. It also means expanding the transparency of parliamentary investigations and procedures, making them clearer for the occasional observer. Lots of Farage fans will believe he does no wrong, or that it doesn’t matter anyway, but we should fight to make that group as small as possible and reignite the hope for those who think rules do matter.
Every scandal pressed is a small argument that propriety still counts for something. Many of these fights will be lost, and the charming politician will remain popular with their side. But the day we stop having them is the day we concede that the will of a sufficient crowd is the only law there is, and hand these people the one victory they could never take by force. They do not have to beat the rules. They only need us to decide the rules were never worth defending.
