No.74 - At Last a Litmus Test for you James: Boris Johnson or Sir John Major?

Dear James,

I’ve been pondering long and hard about how my MP, in such a short span of time, can travel, with apparently so little remorse or self-examination, the massive distance from a 2016 Remainer to a 2019 Parliament Suspending Brexiteer and exposer of our nation to a crippling no-deal Brexit. What kind of moral compass does that suggest I wonder? I am by nature prepared to give any person the benefit of the doubt but our nation is in a real crisis and I would genuinely like to understand how that journey could take place. So I’ve come up with a simple test in the form of a question. It is a question addressed to you James to reveal who you would trust in a court of law? Who would it be? Boris Johnson or Sir John Major? They don’t come more politically honest than Sir John and yesterday morning, during the third day of Supreme Court hearings to test the lawfulness of Boris’s prorogation of parliament, Sir John’s barrister accused Boris of suspending parliament to avoid its scrutiny. That is some charge! And you would be an accessory after the fact!

To avoid embarrassment James, let’s keep your answer to my question in abeyance. You represent me, along with my fellow constituents,in parliament. I did not vote for you but you still have a responsibility to me. OK, we disagree on many political issues – that is only to be expected – but, as my MP, you should provide a stable and principled position upon a proper moral base . Edmund Burke once defined the role of a ‘party’ as, ”a body of men united, for promoting by their joint endeavours the national interest, upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed.” James, today your party is neither united, nor operating in the national interest. Its fundamental principle is to survive. Its ultimate principle, shared by anyone entering Parliament, should be that Parliament is sovereign but today your party is almost unrecognizeable from your party of 2016. How can such a tragedy happen James? It has left many of your supporters without a political home and with you becoming a fully paid up member of Boris’s rag tag team of rule breakers and ideological fanatics, they have been left swinging in the breeze. Despite the daily pratfalls and blank responses to the countless public encounters faced by your poor leader in recent weeks - to coin a phrase - they have not left your party. Your party has left them!

But you James, have hung on. Willingly or unwillingly you have ‘gone with the flow’ of a government without legitimacy, pursuing a reckless policy which is not subject to the basic principle of our democracy. That principle, established in our 1689 Bill of Rights, is that Parliament is sovereign and that the Executive is subject to the scrutiny of Parliament. Our parliament has been suspended by an Executive that has no right to do that without the permission of the highest constitutional body in the land i.e. Parliament itself. That is what is being argued this week in the Supreme Court. How can Parliament scrutinize if it is suspended? The answer is that it cannot and the reason for that is that, no matter what the Supreme Court decides in legal terms, Boris has pulled off a constitutional coup. 

His justification of this five-week suspension is that it gives the government time to prepare a Queen’s Speech for the government’s ‘extensive domestic programme’. What nonsense! Preparation for the Queen’s Speech usually takes a week. Your political agenda is no more than a list of carefully placed ‘bribes’ carried on a vehicle of lies, half truths, whimsy, fantasy and downright obfuscation, that could be presented in a day. So the suspension of parliament would have been only for a week and a bit. What happened to the extra four weeks?

We are forced back to consider your position as my MP. Your party has shifted dramatically in terms of principle and in my view the moral underpinning of those principles. You have followed this political earthquake blindly and slavishly. From being a broad party pursuing the national interest on the basis of your Tory principles, you have become a narrow party pursuing the interests of a narrow group within your party i.e the ERG. Such a massive shift of ‘principle’ should have caused you to consider your position. It clearly did not. Or, if it did, I am afraid that you have revealed yourself as a ‘survivor at all costs’. 

In recent years we have seen the gradual degradation of trust in our political affairs. The search for truth has been replaced by subterfuge, manipulation and intrigue. And you James seem to have become a party to that democratic blockage. I come back to the question I asked before. Would you trust Sir John or Boris? 

Privately, I think I know your answer. It is such a pity that you cannot express that answer in your public role as my MP. 

Kind regards

BH - Your Concerned Constituent