We need to talk about Nicky. Or Baroness Morgan of Cotes as she now insists on being called by family and staff alike. Not even Nicky addresses herself as Nicky any more. Some people are born great, some achieve greatness and some have mediocrity thrust upon them.
On a rare day out among the great unwashed, her ladyship dropped in to the right-of-centre thinktank Policy Exchange to share her thoughts about the BBC. Well, not her thoughts exactly – Nicky has never knowingly had any of her own – but she was more than happy to pass on some of Boris Johnson’s. Any enemy of the prime minister’s was an enemy of hers.
“You need to change with the times if you want to stay relevant,” she informed the BBC, her voice laced with misplaced superiority. At least here the culture secretary was on solid ground. Because this is exactly the same attitude she has taken to her own principles.
A year or so ago, Morgan appeared to be on the way out. A backbench MP who was being cold-shouldered for repeatedly holding her government to account over its mismanagement of Brexit. Something had to give, and that something was what passed for Nicky’s conscience. Almost overnight she became a passionate leaver, dedicated to doing anything – including recruiting hundreds of SAS-trained badgers to patrol the Irish border – in pursuit of rebuilding her career.
But it wasn’t Brexit that really sealed the deal for Morgan. What secured her a place in government was effortlessly closing down the investigation into Boris’s financial dealings with Jennifer Arcuri before it had even got under way. Since then, Nicky has been astonished to discover that baubles keep tumbling into her lap as if from heaven. All she has to do is be tirelessly loyal. To Boris, if not to herself.
As ever, Morgan delivered her speech with the air of the perpetually startled. It would be nice to imagine this was her subconscious at work, that deep down she has a conscience and can scarcely believe some of the stuff she is now saying or how she got to where she is now. The truth, though, is almost certainly more prosaic. She’s just a bit out of her depth reading out some other person’s words.
On and on she plodded. She loved the BBC – as in she couldn’t give a toss about it one way or the other – but it should be following the Netflix model of going £10bn in debt rather than being funded by a licence fee. So the government was going to do whatever it took to put those pinko, remainer bastards at the Beeb out of business.
By the way, she added as a closing thought, the BBC needed to be more transparent and accountable. This from a minister who doesn’t understand the meaning of democracy, having secured her position in the cabinet by lying to her constituents and helping herself to a peerage. And a government that refuses to engage with either the Today programme or ITV’s Good Morning Britain, bans journalists from the prime minister’s speeches and excludes half the lobby from press briefings. Luckily Nicky is so lacking in self-awareness she doesn’t notice the irony.
Still, it’s hard not to feel a little bit of sympathy with Nicky. At least she has been on a journey towards becoming a total sellout. So there must once have been a thread of decency in her. A glimpse of humanity, long since buried, that could – unlikely I know – resurface one day.
The prime minister of course is totally untroubled by any such sensitivities, having always been profoundly morally bankrupt. Which makes life so much easier for him. Watching Boris at PMQs these days is a case study in unfiltered narcissism and sociopathy. Past prime ministers have gone to great lengths to disguise such dysfunctionality but Johnson actively glories in it. Labour has given up on itself, Jeremy Corbyn has given up on himself, and so Boris feels himself free to do whatever he wants. Boris Unplugged. A combination of vanity, arrogance and the boredom, tinged with disappointment, that comes from having achieved all his ambitions. He had only ever wanted to become prime minister. He’d never wanted to be prime minister. As with his attitude to women, the thrill had only ever been in the chase.
Corbyn mumbled a few questions about the climate crisis that could have been challenging if delivered by someone rather more interested and quick-witted. As it was, Boris merely shrugged off his own climate emergency denial credentials and invented a few statistics about carbon emissions and economic growth. All of which were totally untrue, but which no one thought to question. Labour MPs because they are now totally comatose and Conservative MPs because there’s no need. They know he’s a liar. But he’s their liar.
Having insulted the Scottish National party for no good reason – other than because they were there and he could – Boris then failed to answer questions from his own side on Huawei before ending by saying he loved journalists and was committed to democracy. Both of which he went on to demonstrate by bypassing the media with yet another edition of his online “people’s PMQs” in which he was free to answer questions that Classic Dom had written for him.
Even then, it was a mess. A combination of unchallenged untruths bookended by pointless rambles about nothing very much, just to fill the dead air. You could sense that even Boris was overwhelmed by his own futility. But as an exhibition of contempt, it could hardly be improved upon. We’re so lucky to have him.
