PLUS: What BAME Britain really thinks
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The Times and Sunday Times
Friday November 13 2020
Red Box
Patrick Maguire
By Patrick Maguire
Good morning,
After a week like this, Westminster usually breaks the emergency glass on Jeremy Thorpe's most memorable bon mot: "Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his friends for his life."

But reflecting on the defeat of No 10's Vote Leave lads at the hands of Carrie Symonds and Allegra Stratton, the 1988 FA Cup Final feels more appropriate than the Night of the Long Knives.

As John Motson very nearly said: "And there it is, the culture club has beaten the crazy gang!"
Patrick Maguire
Red Box reporter
Twitter icon @patrickkmaguire
 
The briefing
  • Of course, if you listen to Cummings then this was the plan all along. He told the BBC that his "position hasn't changed since my January blog", in which he said he hoped to make himself redundant by 2021.
  • Yet the row over Lee Cain, his Vote Leave associate, made his position untenable. Instead this morning’s Times reveals that Boris Johnson is to soften the government’s image and rebuild relations with MPs, who are hailing the end of their endless confrontations with No 10 this morning.
  • How? The plan, we’re told, involves putting an end to culture wars, promoting the green agenda and taking a less dogmatic approach to the Union.
  • That required Carrie Symonds, the PM’s fiancee, to oust the “mad mullahs” of Vote Leave, Steven Swinford and Oliver Wright write in today’s essential read on the ructions in No 10.
  • The next step if relations between Johnson and MPs are to improve, meanwhile, will be a Downing Street chief of staff they can work with, according to Lord Barwell, who did the job for Theresa May.
  • In the immediate term, No 10 has reached a settlement with an aide who was marched out of Downing Street by armed police after being sacked by Dominic Cummings, avoiding the need for a damaging tribunal.
  • Daily confirmed coronavirus cases jumped by 46 per cent yesterday to 33,470, taking the government by surprise after they had been levelling out.
  • Outside Westminster, meanwhile, economists fear yesterday's lacklustre growth figures mean the UK faces a double-dip recession over the course of the next year.
  • Trivia question: What links Jeremy Thorpe, Ken Dodd, and Manchester's legendary Hacienda nightclub? Answer at the bottom of today's email.
Cummings is going
Baby we were born to run
I’ll spare you the jokes, you’ll have heard them all already. Instead, the news Conservative MPs have longed to hear for months: Dominic Cummings is finally going.

Listen to the prime minister’s slapheaded Svengali and he’ll tell you, as he told the BBC late last night, that this was always part of the plan. Last year he wrote that he hoped for his job to be “largely redundant” by the end of 2020.

Nothing to see here. Because what you’d really do if you only planned to stay another year was spend several months of it gutting an entire floor of the Cabinet Office for your own space-age office quarters.

But here we are, a month out from the deadline given in that half-forgotten, year-old blog, and he’s gone one further than his original promise. As of the New Year you can substitute “largely” for “completely”. Lowering expectations only to then exceed them when we least expect it. Classic Dom.

Only Westminster did expect it. Coming as it did after a fractious 48 hours in Downing Street and repeated suggestions that the paterfamilias of No 10’s Vote Leave posse was on the brink, Cummings’s departure was more a question of when rather than if.

And so it came to pass. The gatekeeper leaves his post. Off into the sunset rides the Phil Mitchell to Lee Cain’s Grant, as far as he needs to work out whether the prescription for his reading lenses is strong enough for another Dostoyevsky.

He leaves behind an inquiry into a lockdown leak for which some suspect he and Cain could be blamed; a prime minister ready to hang up his Vote Leave issue knuckleduster and reboot his premiership and, as this morning’s Times reports, his very sense of self; and hundreds of Conservative MPs wondering what took him so long.

No flowers, please. Not that any will be forthcoming from the cabinet, a punch-drunk parliamentary party or many of his subordinates. One minister scarred by his refusal to go after his breach of lockdown seven months ago moans: “To spend so much capital keeping him and yet not keep him long enough to derive the benefit is absurd.”

For those who like listening to arguments between strangers, or the voyeuristic thrill of hearing the neighbours bickering through the partition wall, there has at least been some entertainment value to the psychodrama of recent days.

Yet second-hand rows in which Lee and Dom lost to Carrie Symonds and Allegra Stratton still mean very little to a great many people. You might count yourself among those conscientious objectors. But look at it this way: the row just resolved was not really between No 10 officials; instead, it pitted one Boris Johnson against another Boris Johnson.

The first is the Boris Johnson of City Hall, the so-called Heineken Tory fondly remembered — perhaps misremembered — as an often lonely torchbearer for cosmopolitan liberalism, or something like it, in a party that then seemed most at home in the first half of the 20th century.

The second is the populist Boris Johnson of Vote Leave, of chucking Chequers, the Surrender Act, getting Brexit done, and sending asylum seekers to Ascension Island. In other words: the culture warrior who tore down Labour’s red wall.

Which Boris Johnson is it to be? Maybe those two visions aren’t mutually exclusive but No 10’s warring factions increasingly saw it as a binary choice: mellow, or stick to the magic — or toxic — formula that won the Tories their first substantial majority since 1992.

Many will be tempted to declare victory for moderation, and a more consensual relationship with party and nation of the sort we report in this morning’s Times: an end to culture wars, a green agenda turned up to 11, and an end to the zero-sum game of engaging with Scottish nationalists only to tell them to shut up. Yet the culture wars will still rage even if the PM pulls off his promised reset.

While Tory MPs have long thought Cummings’s disdain for them is bad for business, many of them are fully on board with his agenda in the country, where changing perceptions will require more than a deckchair shuffle or two.

But here’s the problem: lots of the assumptions that underpin the culture wars waged in and from Westminster are wrong.

In the wake of the protests that gripped the world following the death of George Floyd this summer, a special YouGov study spent two months studying the attitudes of black and minority ethnic Britons to the defining issues of the day.

The results, shared exclusively with Red Box, confound many of the narratives that have taken hold on both sides of the Atlantic, and in the Commons chamber.
What BAME Britain really thinks
Take removing statues and defunding the police: asked to name their top three priorities for black and ethnic minority Britons, only 10 per cent named the former.

Instead it’s a curriculum that better reflects Britain’s colonial past and diversity and mentoring and job opportunities for young people from minority backgrounds that win out.

Even more starkly, only 3 per cent put decreasing police funding at the top of their list, even though 56 per cent of BAME voters and 69 per cent of black voters believe that they are most likely to experience racism at the hands of the police.

In fact, think of any argument Nigel Farage has ever made about Britain’s minority communities and the data shows it to be on shaky ground indeed.

Some 79 per cent of BAME Britons believe it’s important for immigrants to integrate into British society, including 82 per cent of those born outside of the UK. Eighty-one per cent say that friendships across races are key to reducing racism. Sixty-nine per cent have close friends who are white. Seventy-five per cent say they would not mind if their child married a white person.

In short, the overall picture is one of overwhelming tolerance — albeit given, and not received. Some 70 per cent believe that race is a hiring factor for jobs; 40 per cent believe that their race has directly impacted their ability to succeed in life.

And perhaps most soberingly, 74 per cent believe that racism will still be a problem to be faced by the next generation of black and minority ethnic Britons.

Theresa May, who pledged to solve Britain’s burning injustices, could have told you that. But BAME voters don’t trust the Conservatives or their leader, despite David Cameron’s attempts to detoxify and diversify its parliamentary party. Maybe he had a point.
 
The culture wars club
Yet Conservative culture warriors will fight on, oblivious. Take the 50-strong Common Sense Group of Tory MPs, founded to wage war on woke.

Just as last month they refused to undertake unconscious bias training and this week they railed noisily against the National Trust as a hotbed of Marxist revisionism, next month they’ll be tilting at another windmill and asking why Wagon Wheels used to be bigger than they are now.

And other backbenchers won’t stop worrying, even those elected in Labour’s old heartlands. They think their party’s stance on trans rights is their generation’s Section 28. A few even took the knee.

For Labour, too, the picture is complex and contestable. BAME voters are likelier to back the opposition than not, yes, but they are not a monolith of left-wing idealism on identity or the economy, particularly when it comes to the thorny question of tax on middle earners.

Why does any of this matter? Because if you listen to most political strategists, armchair or otherwise, these questions of identity now go a long way towards deciding elections.

They’ve just decided who gets to advise the prime minister, for one. Assumptions as to who thinks what inform how our MPs and ministers themselves think, act, and dream up policy and campaigns. And on this evidence, they don’t have a clue.

Cummings may be going, but his way of thinking won’t shift so easily from the party he never deigned to join.
 
RED BOX: COMMENT
Renie Anjeh
Britain’s ethnic minority voters are no homogeneous blob
Renie Anjeh – Polling consultant
John Kampfner
Lee Cain’s exit has exposed the No 10 house of horrors
John Kampfner – commentator
TMS
From the diary
By Patrick Kidd
A paltry error by Ken Clarke
The resignation of Lee Cain as Downing Street’s director of communications came as a big surprise to many. Who knew that such communications were being directed?

Cain’s first experience of politics came in 2010 when he was the man in the Daily Mirror chicken suit. Ken Clarke paid tribute to his galliform talents, saying that Cain had pursued him. “He seemed a decent enough chicken at the time,” the former chancellor said.

A good line for the CV. In fact, it was Tom McTague, now writing for The Atlantic, who had that Clarke gig. McTague says that he followed Clarke to a café and tried to sit on his lap. Clarke, politely but firmly, told him to cluck off.
Read more from the TMS diary >
 
RED BOX: COMMENT
Marsha de Cordova
Ministers need to start a grown-up conversation on race
Marsha de Cordova – Labour MP
Zesha Saleem
How can young people engage in politics if they’re always told to know their place?
Zesha Saleem – Student and writer
Need to know
BANK OF MA'AM AND DAD: There will be a special four-day bank holiday weekend to mark the Queen's Platinum Jubilee in 2022, the culture secretary announced yesterday. (The Times)

CHINA CRISIS:
Dominic Raab, the foreign secretary, accused China of a “clear breach” of its legally binding international commitments after Beijing ordered the expulsion of members of Hong Kong’s parliament. (The Times)

ARMED FARCES: Defence officials say that the number of soldiers will have to be cut, bases closed and plans for a new fighter jet shelved if the military is not given a multi-billion-pound settlement. (The Times)

GREAT EXPECTATIONS: The scientist behind the first effective Covid-19 vaccine has said that his jab can "bash the virus over the head" and end the pandemic for good. (The Guardian)

THE HOUSEMARTIN: The controversy surrounding Martin Bashir's interview with Diana, Princess of Wales is likely to mean that he never works for the BBC again, corporation insiders have said. (Daily Telegraph)

PEER PRESSURE: Lord Kilclooney, the peer who referred to the US vice-president-elect Kamala Harris as "the Indian" in a widely condemned tweet will not face any official sanction, Lords authorities said yesterday. (News Letter)
The vast majority of you don't care about Lee Cain's resignation, according to yesterday's poll. Fair enough.
Have your say
Yesterday I asked you who Boris Johnson should appoint as his new chief of staff.

Jane O'Nions: "Alan Sugar — he would get things moving in the corridors of power."

Nicholas Coulson: "I'd propose Jared Kushner — unparalleled experience dealing with the dysfunctional."

Gina Burton: "Alan Partridge, who has been described as someone who is convinced of his own superiority but bewildered by the public’s inability to accept it."

Susan Malcom: "Marcus Rashford, obviously."

Alex Connell: "The Mekon."

Chez Newman: "Um, who will be unemployed, gets on with Boris, has vast tweeting experience and is available? Ooer! Trump at No 10..."

Neil Walker: "Jeremy Clarkson. He could double up as head of communications as well."

Clive Jacobs: "Me, because I want to knock their egotistical heads together."

TODAY: Who would you like to see resign from Boris Johnson's government next? Email redbox@thetimes.co.uk and we'll use some of the best tomorrow.
The best comment
James Forsyth
No-deal Brexit would be bad for the West
James Forsyth – The Spectator
Ed Conway
Things are looking up for post-Covid economy
Ed Conway – The Times
Gerard Baker
There's a strategy to Trump's sulking
Gerard Baker – The Times
Why this Downing Street debacle doesn’t matter
James Kirkup - Spectator
What will now fill the power vacuum in No 10?
Fraser Nelson - Daily Telegraph
The cartoon
Today's cartoon from The Times by Peter Brookes
RED BOX: COMMENT
Grant Shapps
We’ll help Britain get back on its bike
Grant Shapps – Transport Secretary
The agenda
Today
  • Results for elections to Labour's ruling national executive committee are announced.
  • MPs on the international development committee publish their final report on its inquiry into the impact of the pandemic on humanitarian crises monitoring.
  • 12.15pm Nicola Sturgeon briefs the media on her government's response to coronavirus.
  • 8pm Chris Christie, the former Republican governor of New Jersey, appears in conversation at the Oxford Union.
House of Commons & House of Lords
  • Parliament returns on Monday.
Today's trivia answer
Trivia question: What links Jeremy Thorpe, Ken Dodd and Manchester's legendary Hacienda nightclub?

Answer: All employed the same QC: George Carman.

Send your trivia to redbox@thetimes.co.uk
 
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