The UK's first spoilt brat PM

It may seem a strange thing to say but wealth, privilege and an elite education can have a very infantilising effect - on males particularly. A perfect example of this phenomenon is Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. As a child, he declared that his ambition was become president of the world. He was educated at Eton College and Oxford; at the former he is said to have expected to receive perks and privileges without having to do anything to earn them. Clearly his sense of entitlement developed at an early age. 

It is perhaps not very surprising that at university he became president of the Oxford Union, and even less so that he joined the Bullingdon Club, described by Wikipedia as "a private all-male dining club for Oxford University students. It is known for its wealthy members, grand banquets, boisterous rituals, and occasionally bad behaviour, including vandalism of restaurants and students' rooms." They always got away with trashing restaurants because their rich daddies reached for their cheque books; less privileged young men would undoubtedly have ended up in court.

By the time he left Oxford, he was clearly of the view that what was most important to him was obtaining what he wanted, irrespective of the cost or consequences, a pattern of behaviour that persists today.

Like Trump, he is a serial liar, but there's a difference: Trump cannot tell the difference between the truth and his own thought processes, while Johnson regards the truth as acceptable collateral damage in order to achieve whatever end he has set his sights upon. He was sacked from The Times in 1988 for making up a quote in an article, and he lost his job in 2004 as shadow arts minister of the Tory Party for allegedly lying about an extra-marital affair.

As Kirsty Major wrote in The Independent in 2016:

"As Mayor of London he promised to totally eradicate rough sleeping by 2012; it doubled under his leadership. His 2008 manifesto promised there would be manned ticket offices at every station; he closed all of London's ticket offices. He aimed to reduce transport fares; they increased by 4.2 per cent."

It's obvious that he was prepared to say absolutely anything to be elected, and having won, he made little effort to keep his promises. On the contrary, he was more interested in his pet vanity projects, cutting what he saw as unnecessary public sector costs, and helping his rich friends in business. He automatically upheld all appeals to him against refusals by local authorities to grant planning permission for developments. He was so irritated by a London Assembly member demanding an explanation how fire safety could be improved while fire brigade staffing levels were being cut and fire stations closed that he dismissively blurted out: "Get stuffed!" While this was before the Grenfell disaster, it was nonetheless a wholly unacceptable response, and it typifies his impatience with any questioning of his decisions, which is surely what the Assembly is for. This aversion to accountability has been a defining characteristic of his political career. 

His notorious Garden Bridge project cost £53 million, including £43 million of public money, despite never even being started. To date, I have't heard a word of apology for such a waste of public money. As a trade union rep, I represented one of my members who had been wrongly accused of deliberately misspending public money, a matter of little more than £100; if I'd lost the case, he would have been sacked. Johnson's squandering of millions of pounds hasn't earned him so much as a slap on the wrist.

He bought two water cannons, even though it is illegal to use them in the UK; presumably he either didn't know they couldn't be used because of his habitual inattention to detail, or in his breezy and ill-informed self-confidence he believed he could obtain permission to use them. Either way, his successor was unable to sell them and they were scrapped at a loss of more than £300,000. Who pays? The taxpayer, obviously.

As PM, during the worst pandemic to hit the UK for a century, he considered it important to spend nearly a million pounds repainting an aeroplane in patriotic livery so show Britain is ... well, I'm not actually sure what!
 
These projects derive from Johnson's self image as the man whose destiny post-EU is to recreate an image of UK greatness in the eyes of the world - not unlike Trump's mantra 'Make America Great Again'. That he fails time and again doesn't seem to dent this self-belief.

A fine example is when he managed to get himself infected with COVID19 by deliberately shaking hands with everyone, including patients suffering from the virus, that he'd met during a tour of a hospital, a foolish activity that he boasted about on television. My view is that he felt it showed him as a fearless leader and a man of decisive action during a crisis, but the reality is that, as well as making himself ill, he probably spread the disease further, both in the hospital and elsewhere. It is not impossible that his stupidity caused deaths. He was acting with the same sense of personal invincibility as reckless teenage youths performing stupid and dangerous stunts. 

The breezy and jokey persona that he has applied to his progression down the path to prime minister, the post he feels he was born to hold, has proved wholly unsuited to dealing with a dangerous pandemic. Faced with this disaster, he decided to exploit it to show that, unshackled from the EU, Britain could now be 'world-beating', leading the world in pandemic reduction.

Instead of simply purchasing effective ventilators, he set British industrialists the task of devising a superior, British, 'world-beating' version. Some of them were disgusted when he joked that it could be called 'Operation Last Gasp'. There's a time and place for humour, but a cheap gag about people dying when you're ostensibly in charge of overseeing a pandemic is extremely difficult to excuse.

He wasted around £11 million on a 'world-beating' track & trace system which didn't work and was abandoned - more public money squandered on yet another failed, 'world-beating', vanity project. The pattern just keeps on repeating itself.

Referring to the possible introduction of local lockdowns, he used the analogy of an amusement arcade game, Whack-A-Mole. Such a frivolous comparison is scarcely appropriate to describe a method of tackling a virus that has so far killed close to 50,000 of his fellow British citizens, but is quite typical of his inability to treat a very serious situation with the gravity it deserves.

Extraordinarily, he has recently been boasting about his government's overall approach to CV19, even though the UK's rate of excess deaths is the highest, especially in England, which is particularly significant because it is the only UK nation without an elected assembly of its own and is therefore subject to direct rule by Johnson's government.

Johnson has the sense of entitlement of a rich, spoilt brat who expects to receive what he desires without any need to earn it. His personal life has been a series of self-indulgent affairs that has left an unknown number of children - six at least - in its wake. He is a philanderer with a sociopathically under-developed sense of self-restraint. Like most such males, he would probably assert that he loves women, but in reality such behaviour is closer to exploitation than affection - he wants it, he takes it, and then flees.

It is signally unfortunate that, at a time of a national crisis that is killing tens of thousands of Britons, seriously damaging the economy and destroying hundreds of thousands of jobs, we are led by an immature, vain liar with an overweening sense of entitlement and the mindset of a spoilt, lazy, public schoolboy who has been granted far too much of his own way.

► P.S. Since writing this post earlier today, I have learned that Johnson has launched an - in the words of the official government website - "independent panel to look at judicial review. A panel of experts will examine if there is a need to reform the judicial review process after an independent review was launched by government today (31 July)".

This government has had a number of setbacks because of judicial reviews, most humiliatingly when it was ruled that Johnson had broken the law last year by advising the head of state to suspend Parliament, which he did to close down parliamentary scrutiny of his embarrassing performance during the Brexit crisis. This high-handed action was quite typical of his sense that he is entitled to get whatever he wants.

However, because the Supreme Court blocked this shabby tactic, he has predictably responded by trying to have the rules changed. I say 'predictably' because simply accepting the judgment and moving on could be interpreted as an admission that he was wrong, something his self-importance could never tolerate. I am certain that he intends to ensure that future legal challenges to any similar overbearing actions by his government will become much more difficult to win, if not downright impossible. I'd like to be wrong, but with Johnson's record, it seems unlikely I shall be.

► This is a follow-up to a previous post: 

The USA's first toddler president.

Universal Credit = social control

I joined the DHSS in July 1980, just over a year after Thatcher had won her first general election. Her onslaught upon the welfare state and her tearing up of the post-war consensus had yet to begin, so the benefits system I initially worked within was the one developed over the 1960s and 1970s.

I was assigned to work on Supplementary Benefit, a means-tested benefit that to some extent could be tailored to suit a claimant's individual circumstances. One feature was that Supp Ben, as we called it, was paid in advance. For example, if you were finished from work with, say, two weeks pay, you would receive your first payment on the 15th day. If there was no final income whatsoever that needed to be taken into account, the first payment was due on the actual day the claim was made without any waiting period at all. Approximately 90% of new and repeat claims were assessed on the day they were received in our office and appropriate payments authorised.

This was the system in operation at the time of the TV series 'Boys From The Blackstuff', not noted for depicting the DHSS in a positive light, and subsequently during the 1980s the benefit system was increasingly characterised as a heartless and bureaucratic branch of an oppressive welfare state to the extent that some staff were reluctant to tell outsiders where they worked. The irony is that the benefit system of that time seems almost benevolent when compared to the current one.

Things became worse when the Thatcher regime turned its 'reforming' zeal towards benefits, replacing Supp Ben by Income Support which did not include any of the old special additions, and which was paid in arrears. Grants for essential household equipment were replaced by budgeting loans, and if there was a gap between your final income and your first benefit payment, and there usually was, you could claim a crisis loan. All such loans were subsequently deducted in instalments from your benefit.

That system, introduced by a Tory government, is the one now being dismantled by another Tory government with the introduction of Universal Credit. One feature of UC is that you can claim it whether you are in or out of work with your benefit progressively reducing the more hours you work and money you earn - for every extra £1 you earn after tax, you will lose 63p in benefits. In theory this is an improvement on previous rigid earnings rules that had meant that your means-tested benefits would be stopped completely if you worked for 16 hours or more.

However cuts to UC have made it significantly less generous. To give one example: the work allowance has been cut so your benefit begins to reduce after you have earned a smaller amount of money. Another feature is that UC is paid in arrears and you have wait five weeks before you receive your first payment. The official excuse for this is that the world of benefits should as far as possible mirror the world of employment. You can claim an advance to cover those five weeks but it is then deducted from your money over the following year, thus leaving you with even less to live on.

Switching from the old benefits to UC has both winners and losers, with those on the lowest incomes standing to lose the most. Transitional arrangements were put in place to ensure no one lost out during the switchover, but this protection doesn't cover either new claimants or people who come off UC and then reapply.

There are also various tripwires that make it incredibly easy to be sanctioned, thus causing UC to be stopped, for failing to comply with the stringent conditions. Appeals against decisions can take months – one example I heard of was 50 weeks – during which you have no money. People can end up with huge debts, and the number of evictions of people on UC is significantly higher than for those on the old benefits. Food bank usage also escalates in areas when UC is rolled out.

UC is a benefit that has changed the purpose of the benefits system from providing support to coercing people into minimum wage, or even zero hours, employment. It is easy to see how a system that produces large numbers of demoralised workers who are obliged to accept poorly-paid, often unsuitable, jobs would appeal to a government consisting of extremely wealthy business people.

Nothing I have written here should be interpreted as an attack on the hard-pressed staff who have to deliver the system as instructed. Calls for staff to be more flexible miss the point that in the civil service you have to do the job as you are told, or you will be in trouble.

I can give an example of this from my own time. One DSS job I had for a while was on the now-scrapped system of crisis loans. I was explaining how they worked to a social worker friend, who simply stated, “Well, I'd pay them all”. I told her that she wouldn't because the monthly budget was strictly limited and if it was all spent too soon, everyone would have to be refused for the rest of the month, irrespective of circumstances. If you persistently blew the budget, you'd be done for inefficiency and in the long run could be dismissed. I expect that UC staff today are under even more stringent restrictions; there is virtually no room in the system for them to manoeuvre.

Indeed, anyone who has watched the recent BBC programmes, 'Universal Credit: Inside the Welfare State' (currently available on iPlayer) will have heard a DWP staff member point out that some of her colleagues are on UC. Such staff will have been subjected to precisely the same UC regime as the claimants that they deal with in the course of their duties. This refutes the perception that I sometimes used to come across that DWP staff are well-paid and consequently cannot empathise with their public; to put it bluntly, they are not paid to empathise, but to administer the system according to instructions that are based in law, often with inadequate staffing levels and sometimes on low pay themselves.

My opinion is that UC has been designed by very wealthy politicians who are utterly incapable of comprehending that some people can be in situations in which they have absolutely no money or resources to fall back on and nowhere to turn to for help. This complete failure of empathy by ministers for the financially more vulnerable members of our society provides a revealing view of the dysfunctional mindset of many of those at the highest levels of government.

But what else could we expect from a government that deliberately developed a hostile environment for migrants and who treated the Windrush generation with such uncaring contempt? I'm just glad I got out of the DWP before the UC rollout had begun.

How to insult 145 million people - all at once

I once read that diplomacy is the art of telling people to go to hell in such a way that they actually look forward to the journey. On that basis, it is clear that our Foreign Secretary is about as diplomatic as a heavy metal band in a Trappist monastery. His comparison of Russia holding the football World Cup with Hitler's 1936 Berlin Olympic Games is crass, undiplomatic and deeply offensive.

In the UK, we have a judicial system based on the principle that an accused person is innocent until proven guilty. I am not an uncritical supporter of our Establishment, but this is one idea that I tend to support. Our government has repeatedly stated that Russia is probably responsible for the poison attacks in Salisbury, but they haven't produced a shred of evidence. Not only that, they haven't even claimed that they do have evidence but must withhold it on the grounds of national security. While I wouldn't necessarily be convinced by such an assertion, the fact that they have made no claim to holding any evidence whatsoever makes me very suspicious. I therefore conclude that it is highly probable that they have none.

I am not a Putin apologist, and I am not saying that his government is innocent of the attack; I am simply stating that our government's assertions would not stand up in a British court of law.

Boris Johnson' comparison with Hitler is deeply offensive as well as being quite inaccurate. This doesn't surprise me: the last senior Tory politician who had any true historical understanding was Winston Churchill. Hitler intended the Olympic Games to demonstrate the innate superiority of the Aryan Master Race, a doctrine ultimately derived from a distorted view of the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. We all know what Hitler did to the various peoples whom he regarded as inferior. Putin is no Hitler, he has no comparable philosophy of racial superiority and he has initiated no holocausts. He quite deliberately appeals to the patriotism of the Russian people, but then so do national leaders everywhere, to varying degrees. Every country that hosts world sporting events likes to show itself in the best possible light: the UK certainly tried with the 2012 Olympics, and I see nothing remiss in Russia trying to do the same with the World Cup.

The Hitler comparison demonstrates how Johnson has little or no understanding of Russian history and the sensibilities that to this day derive from that history. The USSR suffered at least 25 million deaths as a direct result of the Second World War; this terrible statistic still resonates with Russians today. To put it in perspective, 25 million would have represented more than half the UK population at the time. Total UK deaths from the war were 265,000, which means the USSR lost 94 people for every one the UK lost. At that time, the population of the USSR was at most four times the UK population. *

As those 25 million Soviet lives were lost resisting and, ultimately, defeating Hitler, it not hard to see that the Russian anger generated by Johnson's crass comments is not the synthetic indignation of diplomats. No, a country that suffered greatly - still just about within living memory - has been compared to the Nazi monster who caused all that grief.

I have watched RT, the Russian TV channel, and Johnson's comments have, unsurprisingly, been extensively reported. I have little doubt that they will have caused some Putin detractors to rally behind him in the face of such a slur against their country. If Johnson has any understanding of what the term 'diplomacy' means, he should realise he has just scored a massive own goal, but instead he has stated that he stands behind what he said.

Johnson should be sacked, but he won't be because Theresa May is a lame duck prime minister whose survival depends on keeping all the potential leadership challengers in her Cabinet. A PM who was forced to give the magic money tree to the DUP will not jeopardise her government by doing anything to alienate Johnson - not even a reprimand.

The Russians have just re-elected Putin as president. Whatever you think their leader, the Russian people do not deserve the vile insult that Johnson hurled at them.

* Source of casualty statistics: The Guinness Book of Answers,