The Sunday Times April 10, 2022 2GN 25NEWS
Matthew Syed
The Tory party used to be led by
people who made real sacrifices
Today’s ruling class arguably have more loyalty to their own ambitions than to the nation
the formative experience of much of this
group (including Johnson, David
Cameron and George Osborne), a club
whose members would urinate on the
streets, humiliate prostitutes and, in one
case, throw a pot plant through a
restaurant window. The important
aspect here, though, isn’t the low-grade
delinquency but the moral psychology.
The rules are not for our class but the
plebs! (Toby Young, a contemporary of
Johnson at Oxford, said working-class
students were called “stains”.) We don’t
follow the rules; we make the rules!
I couldn’t help thinking of this while
watching Cameron give evidence on the
Greensill scandal to a select committee,
smoothly explaining that it was
legitimate to parlay his political
connections into an equity stake worth
millions in direct violation of the public
interest. He claimed, again with a
straight face, that he had not broken any
laws — without pausing to mention that
he had introduced the loophole for in-
house lobbyists through which he had
enriched himself. I am guessing his
Bullingdon chums will have roared with
approval.
The point is that while most people
shudder at the thought of a system
rigged in favour of a small clique, for
many leading Tories it is the only way of
life they have known. I joined Balliol
College from a comp a couple of years
after Johnson and assumed that the only
advantage enjoyed by public-school
boys at the interview stage was their
expensive education. Today I blush at
my own naivety. “One or two telephone
calls are still necessary to find places for
the borderlines,” John Rae, headmaster
of Westminster in the 1970s, noted.
“Some lavish dinners for dons may have
gone into preparing for those calls.”
In this sense Partygate is not a bug inmodern Tory ideology; it is a feature.
To introduce rules that elites do not
obey is a direct expression of the Tory
world-view. In much the same way,
misleading parliament isn’t a breach
of convention but a clever ruse of the
kind much admired at the Oxford
Union, where Johnson, Michael Gove
and Jacob Rees-Mogg cut their teeth. It
was a place in which, as Anthony
Gardner, later US ambassador to the
EU, put it, “a premium was placed on
rapier wit rather than any fidelity to the
facts. It was a perfect training ground for
those planning to be professional
amateurs.”
Some will say the Tory party has
always sneered at the lower orders, but
that is a distortion of history. For
decades the party was led by people
willing to make sacrifices for the nation,
another point made by Kuper. Harold
Macmillan was wounded three times in
the First World War (on one occasion he
was hit in the pelvis and lay in a shell
hole for 12 hours); Winston Churchill
was nearly killed after volunteering for
the western front, where Anthony Eden
won the Military Cross. I have no doubt
that Margaret Thatcher, too, would have
bled for her nation. These leaders had
skin in the game.
Today a critical mass of Tories
symbolises the moral inverse: men who
put the skin of the public on the line
while creaming off the rewards. The
tragedy of modern British history is that
the political alternatives have been so
dire. Either way, it is a category error to
judge this government on policy alone
when its more enduring legacy will be
measured in the erosion of public trust
and a pervading sense of one rule for
them and another for us. Sunak, in this
sense, is a modern Tory to his core.
@MatthewSyedA tax expert
described the
excuse as ‘a
disgrace’. Let
me put it
more simply:
it was a lieI
n his book Uncontrolled, the great
statistician Jim Manzi writes of the
dangers of naively interpreting the
results of a clinical trial. He posits a
drug that instantly cures headaches
but simultaneously exerts more
subtle, at first unobservable,
damage on the kidneys. People
might happily take the pill for years
before realising it had fatally weakened
the renal system. As Manzi puts it: “To
determine the efficacy of a drug you
cannot look merely at the immediate
effects; you have to look at how it
influences the whole body over the
lifespan.”
I think we should adopt the same
perspective when it comes to the
present incarnation of the Tory party,
which has done many good things (lethal
weaponry to Ukraine; the vaccine
rollout) but is simultaneously destroying
the vitals of our political system.
Deviousness, a sense of one rule for
them and another for us, a string of
excuses for wrongdoing that wouldn’t
pass muster in primary school: all have
become endemic over the past decade.
I had hoped Rishi Sunak would prove
to be a new kind of Tory, but we have
learnt over recent days that he shares
much of the deviousness of his boss. We
can argue until we are red in the face
about whether is it morally legitimate to
minimise one’s tax bill. My own view is
that aggressive tax avoidance, even
within the law, is ethically dubious,
particularly for a chancellor who
reportedly didn’t declare his wife’s vast
financial interests when discussing tax
policy with his officials.
But Sunak has demonstrated a certain
slipperiness, a promiscuity with the
truth, that is indicative of the wider
malaise within the Conservative Party.
This isn’t just about tax avoidance, theuse of tax havens (Sunak has been listed
as a beneficiary of his wife’s, according
to The Independent) or a green card; it is
about a default to dishonesty. Did you
notice, for example, the original defence
of his wife’s non-dom status, leaked with
a nudge and a wink and approved by
Sunak himself? That’s right: it was
claimed that she could not pay full UK
taxes because of her Indian citizenship.
A tax expert described this as “a
disgrace”. Let me put it more simply: it
was a bare-faced lie.
What emerged later, though, was far
darker. Sunak implied that stories about
his wife were evidence of racism:
speaking to The Sun, he expressed his
“hope” that “fair-minded people” did
not mind “an Indian woman living in
Downing Street”. How dare a serving
politician conflate legitimate public
unease over tax avoidance with bigotry?
How dare he devalue the concept of
racism in such self-serving fashion? It
has been said that Sunak lacks political
antennae. I disagree. This was a ruthless
attempt to muddy the waters — not
unlike his aides desperately briefing that
the leaks were coming from No 10.
On the latter point, by the way, they
were probably right. A large proportion
of this generation of Tories have little
loyalty to the nation or one another;
only to their own ambitions. That is why
they are willing to trash institutional
norms to reach positions of power and
to rig the rules in their favour. In this
sense the real story here is bigger than
Sunak; bigger even than Johnson. It is
about a group of public-school boys
moving via Oxford into high office while
wrecking the institutions they are
supposed to be serving, a point made by
the author Simon Kuper in his book
Chums, published later this month.
Many point to the Bullingdon Club asT
he news from Cambridge
University that Murray Edwards
College is changing the name of
its art collection from The New
Hall Art Collection to The
Women’s Art Collection will
please many people — but it
surely won’t surprise them.
Started in 1986, specifically to gather the
work of female artists, the Murray
Edwards collection has grown into the
largest of its kind in Europe. Of course its
name should reflect its ambitions.
The switch in nomenclature has been
explained as an effort to “better promote
the work of women artists”. It’s a worthy
cause. The gender imbalance in Britain’s
art collections is unmissable. The
National Gallery in London recently
admitted that out of the 2,300 paintings
it owns, spanning the 13th to the early
20th century, only 25 are by women. In
Washington the American National
Gallery has fessed up that 90 per cent of
its holdings are by male artists.
These are shocking figures. In matters
of gender equality, the art world and its
collections offer striking evidence of a
need for change. Obvious wrongs need
to be righted.
Where it becomes trickier is in
deciding on the continuing value of
these imbalanced collections and the
overwhelmingly male contribution to
them. Just because you are male, does
that make you a bad artist? Just because
you are female, does that make you a
good one?
The reasons for the imbalance in art
are historic and obvious. Female artists
were rare because the social roles
assigned to them were largely domestic
— running the home and having
children. Only in rare instances were
they allowed to take up the paintbrush
and flout the rules: if they came from an
art-making family or if an artistic
dynasty ran out of sons. As an artistic
situation it was grossly unfair.
The few women who managed to
emerge as artists in these restrictive
circumstances and make powerfulOf the 213
exhibitors,
185 will be
women. It’s a
startling
statistic —
bravo to the
organiserscareers for themselves — the Artemisia
Gentileschis, the Élisabeth Vigée Le
Bruns, the Michaelina Wautiers — are
heroic contributors who succeeded not
only in fighting the system but in
bringing something new and important
to art: a woman’s voice.
Unfortunately, there are notably few
of them. And no amount of angry huffing
and puffing at the masculine walls of our
museums can ever change that. We’re
more or less stuck with the fact that the
great collections of old masters, for
whatever unjust reasons, will always be
gender-imbalanced. It’s unfair, but it
should not stop us — must not stop us —
appreciating what is there.
Where things can be and are
different is on the contemporary front.
Female artists today are in a completely
different boat from their predecessors.
Recent times have brought a powerful
turn in the tide of art towards the
distaff side.
In a couple of weeks the greatest
art event of all, the Venice Biennale,
which has been going since 1895, will
open its gates for the 59th time. Britain
will be represented by Sonia Boyce,
woman and artist of colour. At the last
biennale we were represented by Cathy
Wilkes. At the one before that by
Phyllida Barlow. At the one before that
by Sarah Lucas. The past four British
representatives at the Venice Biennale
will have been women.
In the main biennale exhibition,
meanwhile, no fewer than 185 of the
213 exhibitors will be women. It’s a
startling statistic, part of a deliberate
effort by the organisers to correct the
historic wrongs. Bravo to them.
Art, however, is driven by the
immutable rule of the swinging
pendulum. Periods of romanticism
are always followed by periods of
classicism. Expressionism is always
followed by artistic calmness. It is only
a matter of time before nervous male
voices start to pipe up and ask why
there are so few men exhibiting at the
Venice Biennale.
@JanuszczakWaldemar
Januszczak
Once it was
only old
masters, but
art’s future
is female
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