Nick Cohen

Boris Johnson will never sack ministers for being tawdry, lazy and incapable of doing their jobs — if he did, he would have to sack himself. Nevertheless, the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee’s investigation into the Foreign Office’s complicity in the Afghanistan catastrophe showed the consequences of the collapse in standards in ministerial competence better than any public inquiry I have seen. The autopsy was all the bloodier because Tom Tugendhat, who should be foreign secretary, was asking the questions, and Dominic Rabb, who really shouldn’t be foreign secretary, was ducking them. Raab’s demonstration of what he did not know was almost awe-inspiring. Did he, for example, know how many ministers were overseas right now? Maybe he did.

Screams for help are coming from Afghanistan, and echoing around the world. Mine comes from British consultancies and charities the UK government funded to run state-building projects in Afghanistan. As a fair number of Conservative politicians and activists read The Spectator, I am publishing them here in the hope that you will alert your leaders to the desperate need for sanctuary for people who have every right to expect help, but are being abandoned. I am not writing it in the polemical 'this is the worst government in modern British history' spirit. (There will be more than enough time for that.) Nor is it the moment to say that the Johnson administration failed in the basic political task of imagining a worst-case scenario and having a contingency plan ready for when it hit.

A Conservative government that boasts it is a defender of free speech against the attacks of 'the woke' is about to impose the severest censorship this country has seen in peacetime since parliament abolished press controls in the 1690s. In an extraordinary power grab – which is all the more extraordinary for the absence of opposition – ministers want to silence views that carry no criminal penalty. This is more than a much-needed crackdown on racial attacks on black footballers or incitements to violent crime or any other crime; it is an unmerited attack on free speech. The government’s draft Online Safety bill imposes a ‘duty of care’ on internet companies to remove content that may cause ‘psychological harm’.

If they have any sense – a proposition I will test later – officials from Labour, the Liberal Democrats and Plaid Cymru will be beginning meetings to work out a pact for the 2023/24 election. If they do not agree to a joint programme, there’s a good chance that Conservatives will be in power until a sizeable portion of this article’s readership is dead. The next redrawing of constituency boundaries in 2023 is almost certain to favour the Conservatives, adding ten seats to the already unhittable target of 123 constituencies Labour needs to win to govern on its own. There’s a possibility that Scotland could be independent by the end of the decade, and that ought to terrify anyone who wants to stop the rest of the country becoming a one-party Tory state.

The Labour party has updated the old metaphysical question: ‘If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?’ It ought to be protesting on behalf of all who are suffering because of Brexit. It ought to be throwing the government’s broken promises back at it and ramming home the message that voters cannot trust Boris Johnson. And yet, listen as hard you like, you cannot hear a sound. If no one can hear Labour opposing, is it really an opposition? The Brexit debacle is drowning once viable business sectors in bureaucracy and threatening what peace and prosperity Northern Ireland enjoyed.

Britain has suffered one of the world’s highest Covid death tolls and worst Covid recessions. It has managed this abysmal feat despite spending nearly £300bn on countering the virus, a sum far greater than almost any other comparable country. We have achieved the triple crown of medical, economic and fiscal failure because of a reason that is under-discussed: the lethal divisions on the right. They have paralysed the government, and condemned thousands to premature deaths and needless suffering. Yet we do not see them with the clarity we should because of our skewed culture. Conservative titles dominate the written media, and for reasons I will get to, opposition to public health is far more likely to be found on the right than the left.

The Brexit and Covid crises have merged into one. As of today, 21 December, France has blocked trucks from crossing the Channel as fears about a new strain of Covid — ‘the Kent virus’ to coin a phrase — sweep the continent. Perishable food was rotting, approach roads were jammed… it was as if we were living under a wartime blockade. By the time you read this, the French may have shifted from an outright ban to stringent health checks on exports and imports, but the pressure will still be on. In less than a fortnight, on 1 January, we will have the real Brexit. It will be either without a deal or with a thin deal.

Academics at Cambridge won a cheering victory for free speech today when they voted by an overwhelming majority to reject plans from the vice-chancellor to change the rules governing debate at the university. They rejected the university’s proposals to insist that students and staff be ‘respectful’ of opposing views. They decided, instead, that the rules should say students and staff must ‘tolerate’ opposition. The result was as close to conclusive as you can get. Only 162 academics voted in favour of the university’s plan, while 1316 voted in favour of the change. (A further 208 academics wanted neither.

For all his Falstaffian swagger, Boris Johnson resembles no Shakespearian character so much as Henry VI. He is a weak and vacillating king at the mercy of palace factions. He thinks whatever the last adviser he spoke to told him to think. He has no policies that cannot be changed under pressure or principles that cannot be abandoned if the loudest voice in the room says they must go. He does not know his own mind. At times it appears he has no mind worth knowing, Conservatives are struggling to explain why the purging of Dominic Cummings and his clique matters. Perhaps the government will change. Cummings forced out good civil servants just when the country needed them most.

The best way to understand contemporary Britain is to stop thinking of it as a liberal democracy. If we lived in Russia, Hungary or Venezuela we would have few problems in understanding the manoeuvrings around the BBC. The governing clique wants the state broadcaster to be run by a fellow traveller, who has paid his dues by giving it money, and shown a willingness to conform by subscribing to its ideology. What else do you expect? In the case of Britain, the Johnson government is briefing it wants to appoint one Richard Sharp as chair of the BBC. Never heard of him? Then, dear reader you clearly don’t move in the right, right-wing circles. Its first choice, until he dropped out, was Charles Moore, of this parish.

Keir Starmer’s decision to suspend Jeremy Corbyn shows a courage so many lacked when the far left ran the party from 2015 until 2019. Do not underestimate the risks he is running. Starmer might have let Corbyn’s characteristically conspiratorial remark that anti-Semitism in the Labour party had been ‘dramatically overstated for political reasons’ pass. He must have guessed that Corbyn in his arrogance and delusion would reject or choose to ignore the findings of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission that his own staff interfered with investigations into anti-Semitism. It wouldn't be out of character. Corbyn’s time as party leader, indeed his whole life, has shown him to be willing to dismiss hard facts with paranoid insinuations of a put-up job.

What is the North? Where is the North? Does it start at Stoke-on-Trent and Derby or at Chesterfield and Runcorn? Even when you get into the unquestionable north, it is full of divisions between Liverpool and Manchester, Lancashire and Yorkshire, Newcastle and Sunderland. It’s no more packed with men in cloth caps than the south is packed with merchant bankers. If you put your mind to it, you can analyse northernness out of existence. And yet it exists, as surely as the short 'a' in bath. You hear northern defiance, and the perennial suspicion that the south barely thinks the north worth condescending to, everywhere now. You heard it when Andy Burnham said the government was treating the north with ‘contempt…and it's my job to stand up to it’.

Writing in the Observer this week about the use of dark money in right-wing thinktanks and the explosion of domestic and foreign propaganda on the web, I said there was an obvious need to protect British democracy. The Electoral Commission should be given police powers. Political parties should have the same duty as banks to check they are not laundering dirty money. Thinktanks and lobbyists should be required under pain of criminal punishment to declare who is funding them. As should social media companies running political adverts. But come now, I concluded, ‘Do you expect a government led by Dominic Cummings and Boris Johnson to open up a system that gave them power?

On Thursday the supposedly resurgent Labour party lost control of Brighton and Hove, one of its few centres of power in southern England, because of the endemic anti-Semitism on the left. The fate of the local Labour group shows in microcosm the problem facing the Labour leadership nationally as it struggles to pull the party away from being the natural home for creeps and conspiracy theorists. There are just so many of them. And they will give up anything before they give up their fantasies of supernatural Jewish power. Take Brighton and Hove, where the Greens have just assumed leadership of the council, as anti-Semitism allegations shrunk the Labour ranks.