The mortar of cynicism
On Boris Johnson's “romantic” impulses
Long Remain. I’ve often thought songwriters tend to have four or five big themes that they return to – the Beatles are big on childhood nostalgia, for example. Opinion columnists tend to be similar, crowbarring their existing opinions into whatever has happened that week (myself excluded, obvs).
Step forward Martin Fletcher, who is continuing to rehearse remoaner arguments for the New Statesman after most of us stopped caring. This time the target is ‘Global Britain’, dismissed by Fletcher as “no more than a branding exercise.”
“Global Britain” is a country now powerless – by itself – to prevent China trampling on Hong Kong’s democracy, to constrain Vladimir Putin’s Russia or to intervene in Syria’s endless conflict. It is a country that has undermined its much-vaunted “soft power” by merging the Department for International Development with the Foreign Office, that plans to close 20 British Council offices overseas, and that is actively undermining another British institution which enjoys global influence and respect – the BBC.
Carping over a departmental merger and – as referenced elsewhere in the piece – plans to cut the British foreign aid budget strikes me as the parochial attitude here. Just as McDonald’s customers don’t care about its franchising model, aid recipients won’t care how London organises its bureaucracy. The 0.7% of GDP aid target has likewise become an important symbol, but that's all it is.
At any rate, our ability to intervene in Hong Kong, Russia or Syria is basically unaffected by our EU membership. European security depends on American arms, and the Yanks’ appetite for foreign misadventures has diminished irrespective of Britain’s EU membership. That it is the leavers who we’ who were accused of imperial ambitions is only one of the relevant ironies.
Blonde ambition. I was among those who took an interest in Boris Johnson before he was widely reviled. Some years ago I read Sonia Purnell's Just Boris, now a staple reference in any profile of our current prime minister.
Reading Purnell has not put me off those newspaper profiles either. The latest by the Atlantic's Tom McTague is good, containing this gem:
Johnson is a romantic who urges the country to believe in itself, but who plays the political game, stretches the truth, stands against his friends, and deposes his colleagues. After an initial show of mock evasion [at being accused of being romantic], the prime minister replied: “All romantics need the mortar of cynicism to hold themselves up.”
When reminded of this line at the end of the piece, Johnson dismisses it as “pompous”. I guess it is. It also reminds me of an old Jack Dee quote. The famously morose comedian once argued that he was actually an optimist who was perpetually disappointed (if I remember rightly). It is handy for biographers that all of us contain such contradictions.
Clegg the maniac. Silicon Valley's recent pivot into championing regulation has made many tech watchers suspicious. You don't have to be that old to remember when the nerds were telling us that privacy is dead. Such hubris cannot go unpunished, and tech's public reputation has tumbled as fast as its valuations have soared.
A global tech tax is now being offered as a means of addressing both these trends. Meanwhile the former British deputy prime minister Nick Clegg has again called for American regulations to take tricky decisions out of the hands of Facebook, where he works as a lobbyist.
The argument remains funny to me, even if persuasive in a way. Facebook can't be trusted to make tricky decisions over whether to ban Donald Trump from social media, so government should do it. Such moral incompetence makes you wonder what else tech shouldn't be doing.
Please return to your desk. In the last year I've had many conversations with employers over their plans to return staff to the office. I even turned down a job in December when they insisted I go in five days a week. You'll recall that the bodies started piling high not long after.
I'm not one for blaming old men for societies' problems, but I suspect habit and technophobia among the grey hairs are key factors in pulling staff back to business districts. Most employers I spoke to had read the room (or at least the Zoom) and were looking at a hybrid model, with work both at the office and home.
Not so one lobbyist, as reported by the BBC. “I expect we will see three or four days a week in the office as the UK recovers,” Paul Swinney, director of policy and research at Centre for Cities, told the corporation. He added he was “quite hopeful that we will see people return five days a week” citing the traditional argument about innovation only happening in workplaces.
The claim that colleague proximity boosts innovation strikes me as unfounded as it is gormlessly repeated. But more importantly, working for home is better for staff, reducing commuting, saving money and allowing them to doss properly when there's no real work on.
That is without noting the potential benefits to regional equality from remote working, as well as reduced environmental impact from less travelling and maybe even healthier lungs as people escape polluted cities. I hope the Swine is proved wrong.
Enjoy the sunshine, at least while you can.
Jimmy