Are we living in a new era of sleaze?
“Cronyism leads to ‘Sovietism by proxy’, with all the effects you might predict from the real thing”
David Cameron pestering the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, for a bung to rescue a business he stood to make a mint from. Communities secretary Robert Jenrick redirecting cash meant for deprived towns to marginal Tory seats that didn’t qualify for the help. Companies with political connections getting priority for Covid-19-related government contracts and for money from the “levelling up” fund. Boris Johnson’s holidays, redecoration plans, gongs for cronies and cash for his ex-girlfriend’s business. His text-message exchange with James Dyson about tax and ventilators.
It would seem, as Henry Mance puts it in the Financial Times, that we are living in a “new era of sleaze” – one “built upon Johnson’s personality, the winner-takes-all politics of Brexit, the denigration of the civil service, and the emergency of coronavirus”, which has proved ahandy defence for government ministers in a rush to hand contracts to their chums.
It’s not just the Tories either. Labour figures at a regional and national level have been mired in sleaze
