Dishonesty is the Second-Best Policy

by David Mitchell

  But Theresa May is the first person, as far as I know, to suggest that people’s activities should be restricted in order actually to facilitate the security services’ surveillance – to claim not only that it’s permissible for the police to snoop on everything we do and say, but also that we should be discouraged or prevented from doing things the police might have trouble keeping track of.

  “Come off it!” some of you may be thinking. “She can’t be the first!” And of course you’re right – I’m exaggerating. She’s certainly not the first person ever – throughout history her point has frequently been made. In fact, the states of the former communist bloc were entirely predicated on this principle, as were most fascist regimes. It’s one of the issues over which Lenin and Tsar Nicholas II would probably find common ground if they got stuck with each other at an awkward drinks party in hell.

  Like Theresa May, many totalitarian governments have noticed how tricky it is to monitor millions. It’s even harder than keeping count of a flock of sheep, because not only do humans move around even more than livestock, some of them actively don’t want to be counted. Only terrorists and criminals, of course – Ms May is clearly convinced of that. So much so that she believes the undoubted convenience to customers of being able to use more than one phone network – this clear and beneficial correction to the market – should be sacrificed because it would play havoc with spies’ admin. It would make it harder to snoop on everyone.

  But there are so many other things people do that make surveillance harder. We move house whenever we want, we travel wherever we like – at the drop of a hat, without telling anyone. What honest person needs to do that? Why not register our movements – submit them to a brief and streamlined vetting process – just to help the security services keep us safe? What’s the harm? Why the need for secrecy? Other than the security services’ secrecy, of course – which is vital to national security and in all of our best interests. Why would anyone want to whisper unless they had something to hide? So let’s speak up loud and clear into our trustworthy guardians’ microphones.

  Politicians are always having to resign – for shagging the wrong person, for lying about their expenses, for texting a photo of their cock (there’s never a not-spot when you need one). Fair enough. But it is a worrying indication of the national mood that Theresa May’s position remains completely secure in the aftermath of her frightening remarks. The priorities she reveals in her letter are truly shocking and, much more than the worst excesses of dishonesty, infidelity and ineptitude that we’ve seen from our leaders in recent years, make her utterly unfit for government.

  August 2017

  Theresa May briefly had my sympathy last week. She was in Portsmouth to celebrate the fact that Britain’s new £3bn floating table had made it all the way round from Scotland without sinking or chipping a bit off Kent or being towed away by the Russians. It was supposed to be a happy event – a lovely huge weapon of war. Of course, we all hope it’ll never have to be used to kill people. It works out a lot cheaper if you just use it to threaten to kill them.

  “What on earth am I going to say,” she must have asked herself and her aides, “about what Donald Trump said about the events in Charlottesville? People are going to insist I say something about that. We need to think long and hard to find a form of words that will keep me out of trouble, without sounding like they’ve been thought long and hard about to keep me out of trouble.”

  A tricky position, I’m sure you’ll agree. Actually, I’m not sure you’ll agree. You may believe politicians should just say what they think. Enough of the spin, enough of the evasion: out with it. In which case you may be a fan of Donald Trump, because that’s what he does.

  Apart from a brief interlude in which he glumly read out something about Nazis being bad, Trump’s response to the violence caused by an extreme rightwing rally has been to share the blame equally between the KKK-sympathising, neo-Nazi, antisemitic-slogan-chanting torch-wielders and those who protested against them. It’s broadly equivalent to making the occupants of the World Trade Center accept half the responsibility for 9/11 on the basis that they got in the way.

  This is difficult stuff to agree with, even for Theresa May, whose mouth spouts so much horseshit you’d think her anus gobbled oats. Obviously, she wants to agree with Donald Trump – before she’s heard what he’s said, that must always be what she hopes she’ll be able to do. He’s in charge of the world’s most powerful country, and Britain, having just alienated history’s most powerful continent, needs friends. And Theresa May, having just screwed up her party’s political position with a horrendously misjudged and mismanaged election, also needs friends.

  And he’s held her hand, and he’s coming on a state visit, and he says he’ll do us a lovely trade deal, and he’s also a deeply vain, hypersensitive megalomaniac who takes all slights extremely personally. So it would be really good to be able to just agree with him. Then they can be like Thatcher and Reagan – or at least like the people who might play Thatcher and Reagan in a low-budget TV movie. Or preferably on the radio.

  But Trump has said something with which nobody reasonable could agree. Literally the only people who agree are white supremacists. So she can’t agree with him, and – please excuse a bit of moist-eyed romanticism – I suspect she genuinely doesn’t agree with him. No one would say Theresa May was overburdened with integrity, but I do reckon she’s sincerely anti-Nazi. When she went into politics, she probably didn’t expect her anti-Nazi views to place many limits on her political career. How times change.

  So she said she disagreed with him. Sort of. She stood on our one measly aircraftless aircraft carrier and contradicted the horrible man who’s commander-in-chief of at least 10. “I see no equivalence between those who propound fascist views and those who oppose them. I think it is important for all those in positions of responsibility to condemn far-right views wherever we hear them,” she said, probably worrying it would mean we’ll now have to sell the carrier. And the first-year depreciation on those things is a killer. You mark my words: one of the UAE will snap it up for a nine-figure sum and it’ll end its days as an enormous swim-up casino.

  But May didn’t actually slag off Trump. She asserted a contrary view, but she didn’t then say, “… and so President Trump is wrong and bad”. Which gave Jeremy Corbyn the opportunity to complain that “Theresa May cannot remain silent while the US president refuses categorically to denounce white supremacists and neo-Nazi violence.” I don’t blame him – that’s politics, and it’s a lovely opportunity. Now, if she doesn’t condemn Trump, she’s “remaining silent” and, if she does, she’s bowing to pressure from the opposition.

  So I sympathise with May. Would her having a pop at Trump do any good? By, say, making clear what this country stands for – “The UK: very gradually phasing out racism since the abolition of the slave trade!” – or marginally weakening the position of a bad American president? It’s possible, but it might not. It might have achieved no more than messing up a cushy trade deal.

  In some ways, the shock at Trump’s remarks surprises me. I suppose I can understand it coming from Republicans. They’re the ones who either believed, or hoped others would believe, that Trump, while a maverick, was broadly on the side of civilisation. They thought the popular forces he called into being with his artless demagoguery could be harnessed in the service of their own more conventionally conservative agenda. Now they’re starting to feel like Von Papen.

  But I think, for Trump’s opponents, his response to Charlottesville is good news. Let his remarks stand; let him continue to speak from the heart, as I believe he has here. Many have said he’s a Nazi sympathiser; now he’s openly sympathising with Nazis.

  Up until now, Trump’s “gaffes” and lies – moments when he’s mocked a disabled person or expressed contempt for women – have done him little harm, and sometimes a bit of good. He was different from the politically correct, mainstream politicians that the American electorate had b
ecome accustomed to, and millions mistook that difference for something refreshing. It was a change, and they misread it as an improvement.

  But I don’t believe this view can survive long while he’s openly defending those who consort with neo-Nazis and the KKK, and showing suspicion for people who oppose them. Too many Americans, conservative and liberal, fought in the second world war for that; too many saw the realities of segregation. And if I’m wrong, and the Trump who spoke out against the “very violent” “alt-left” on Tuesday remains a popular hero, then the US is already lost, and has been for some time.

  April 2018

  When Peep Show, a Channel 4 sitcom I was in, was first broadcast in 2003, it was watched by a disappointingly small number of people. Over the many years we made the show, that disappointing number crept marginally downwards. However, the vertiginous decline in television viewing figures surrounding it meant that, by the time the programme finished in 2015, it was a mild ratings hit. Our initial failure, recontextualised in a worsening world, had become a success.

  Which brings me to Theresa May. Maybe she’ll do now? What do you think? She used to seem so awful: unashamedly careerist, blandly cunning and not particularly bright. But now that doesn’t seem like the end of the world – instead, everything else does. Suddenly, recontextualised, she looks kind of OK.

  I like it that she’s not a crazy-haired blundering incompetent who, while grasping for a soundbite, further imperils British citizens unjustly imprisoned abroad. And that she isn’t a flinty-eyed xenophobe posing as a harmlessly antiquarian PG Wodehouse character. Or one of the legion of suited men you’ve never heard of who smilingly plod into No 10 whenever a suited man you have vaguely heard of has to resign due to decades of assiduous groping. And I’ll admit it, fusty old centrist that I am, I also quite like the fact that she genuinely shows no signs of antisemitism.

  Don’t get me wrong: if there was an election tomorrow, I’d probably still vote for what most people reckon is the more anti-semitic of the two main parties, in preference to the one most people reckon is the more racist in other ways. That feels like the public-spirited thing to do: to vote for the ones being racist to the fewest people. Though, of course, antisemites would be being racist to many more people if it weren’t for the success that that prejudice has enjoyed in recent history.

  With such troubling choices ahead, Theresa May starts to appear comfortingly familiar. I know what you’re thinking: every day she seems more floundering, ineffectual and pathetic. And I agree, I like that about her too. Now that the whole “strong and stable government” shtick has been revealed as just the elaborate set-up for a gag to which the current shambles is the punchline, I find her much more sympathetic, even verging on likable. I’m opposed to the government’s key policy, but then so, until recently, was she. There’s a job that doesn’t need doing and, increasingly, it feels like she’s just the person not to do it.

  I’m not saying she’s deliberately screwing up Brexit, a Remainers’ fifth columnist in the heart of government. That doesn’t strike me as her style at all, notwithstanding her shameful history of running through fields of wheat without applying for permission. I think she’s doing her best, dutifully keeping going, possibly as penance for the political hubris that got her into this mess. Plodding on, like small “c” conservatives are supposed to. Resisting unnecessary change, specifically any change to the occupancy of 10 Downing Street.

  So I felt sorry for her when I read that she’s been forced to give up her ageing BlackBerry and replace it with an iPhone. It appears that BlackBerries, which to someone of my luddite worldview seem to have gone from terrifying icons of modernity to pitiful relics of the past, with no intervening period of being normal objects, no longer pass technical muster in Whitehall. The prime minister was the last to relinquish hers, of which she was apparently so fond that she had previously asked officials to get missing keys replaced.

  That’s right, she got it mended. She got her smartphone mended. She liked it, she knew how it worked, so, when it broke, she simply had it repaired. Just like used to happen with everything. Now that’s what I call a conservative. Not a Thatcherite, or a monetarist, or a libertarian, or a Christian democrat, or a rightwinger, or even a Tory – but a conservative, an instinctive resister of change.

  And now she’s been made to throw her mended BlackBerry away because, for reasons unconnected to the device itself except by invisible signals constantly passing through the ether, it has been found wanting. It’s hard to imagine a greater assault on her conservative vision than that enforced change happening in her handbag, in the palm of her hand, despite her clear wishes to the contrary – despite the fact that she’s a Conservative prime minister and supposed to be able to stop that sort of thing. Why not just send the Queen to open parliament on a quad bike, flanked by robot footmen?

  So, amid baffling and irresistible change, I understand what ignited the blue-passport furore. I liked the old passports too, though not primarily because of their colour, but because they were bigger and had a hole in the front through to some paper on which someone official had written the bearer’s name in pen. That was what was great about them and, to my mind, it would have been a more appropriate aesthetic cause to fight over: “Let’s bring back writing the bearer’s name in pen!”

  Tories are deeply conflicted about this sort of thing. Their inclination towards an unfettered market-led economy relentlessly clashes with the aesthetics of conservatism, with an instinct to keep Britain how it is, or restore it to how it was. Hence the paradox of passports changed back to blue for nationalistic reasons, then manufactured in France because that’s what the unflinching market demands. Hence Theresa May being forced, despite being prime minister, to have a phone she hates. Hence Brexit.

  I feel sorry for May because I understand that conservative feeling. I instinctively don’t like change myself. Obviously, it is intellectually absurd to be either in favour of or against change – it all depends on the change. But, emotionally, we all know which camp we’re in. Everyone’s knee-jerk reaction is either “Ooh, new!” or “Ugh, new!” Then you think about it properly. Or, at least, in the good old days you did.

  Boris Johnson

  September 2018

  What do you do if you think you’re like James Bond? You’re convinced of it. “I’m so handsome and strong and brave and ruthless and intelligent and good at sex – I’m sort of amazing,” you say to yourself. “I admit I haven’t always behaved well in relationships, but I’m so incredibly attractive that I totally get away with it, and anyone whose heart I’ve broken would say that it was all completely worth it just to meet me. Plus, in a crisis, I will literally always save the day. Like the song says, ‘Nobody does it better.’ That 100% applies to me.”

  So, if you think that about yourself, and yet no one seems to be saying you’re like James Bond, or particularly terrific in those ways at all, what do you do? I suppose it depends how like James Bond you really are. Because if you say, “Hey, everyone, I’m like James Bond! Can I get a bit of credit please?!” you’re really being very unlike James Bond. James Bond is cool, and that’s not cool. James Bond would never say that.

  Obviously, that’s partly because it would sound even weirder actually coming from James Bond – because he’s called “James Bond”. In a universe where James Bond literally, rather than literarily, existed, the phrase “I’m like James Bond” wouldn’t carry the same meaning as it does in this one. He’s a spy, so he wouldn’t be famous. So if he said, “I’m like James Bond,” that would be an MI6 operative saying, “I’m like me,” which would just be a cue to get him into occupational therapy and change all the passwords.

  But what I mean is that the character James Bond would certainly not say anything that meant “I am amazingly handsome, cool and capable”. He may believe those things about himself, but he’d be bright enough to realise that asserting it is not how you make people believe it.

  Which brings me to Boris John
son. Don’t worry, he doesn’t think he’s like James Bond. Which is something, because he’s right about that, and it’s always nice when powerful people are right about things. Conversely, it’s always frightening when they’re wrong about things. So, actually, do worry, because I’m pretty sure he thinks he’s like Winston Churchill.

  I was reminded of this when I read that Boris Johnson and Carrie Symonds call one another “Bear” and “Otter” respectively. Carrie Symonds, in case you don’t know, is that “friend” Boris has been “linked to”. Linked by his penis and her vagina is the implication. I don’t know if that’s true, I hasten to add before I get sued into oblivion. I’ve never seen them screw. But it’s clearly what a lot of people reckon because, believe it or not, the fact that there is someone in the world who is sincerely an actual friend of Boris Johnson is not in itself considered newsworthy. Apparently, he’s got lots of friends. The world is a terrible place.

  But whatever the literal or figurative nature of the Johnson–Symonds link, “a friend” told the Sun about this whole Bear/Otter thing. (This is obviously a different sort of “friend”. If Johnson was ever “linked to” this friend, it ended on a sour note.) And I think the furry nicknames are actually all about Churchill.