Sometimes things that are self-evident still need to be pointed out. So it is with one aspect of the crisis we now know as “partygate”, and an element of the story that both observers and participants have seemed to take for granted: the fact that all the disgrace and deceit revealed since December took place amid a level of plenty that millions of people will surely consider almost surreal.
This is not just a matter of a suitcase full of booze, generous helpings of M&S “picnic food” and the infamous fridge that held 34 bottles of wine. Consider the bit-part players: an interior designer whose wallpaper of choice costs £840 a roll, a London property developer (and Tory donor) famed for taking out an £80m mortgage, and a chancellor whose family is reckoned to be worth more than the Queen. Note also the centrality to the Boris Johnson soap opera of cake, from the kind he says he can have while eating it, to the confection he was “ambushed” with in the cabinet room. In this world, any privations demanded by lockdown were more than balanced out by the comforts of eating, drinking and ostentatiously spending, not least on what Johnson apparently terms “letting off steam”.
Lexie often gets through a day by eating only toast, because, she told me last week, “my kids need to eat more than I need to eat”. She is disabled, and lives in rural north Wales, with her husband – who was recently made redundant – and four children, aged from eight to 18. Like so many other people, the benefits system leaves them unable to meet the cost of basic essentials, and their day-to-day predicament is now being made impossible by the mounting cost of living crisis, and everything it means for the price of food, petrol and heating.
Inflation at the supermarket, she said, seems to fall in all the wrong places: “Chicken nuggets don’t seem to have gone up, but the food you should be feeding your children has. My children think it’s a treat when they get frozen vegetables mixed in a cheap jar of sauce and pasta. That’s as close as we get to fresh meals.” The lack of warmth is just as trying. “My kids are cold,” she said, “and I can’t tell them to switch on the heating: I have to tell them to put another layer of clothing on. They get up in the morning and they’re shivering, trying to get dressed.”
Obviously, what is happening to Lexie and her family stands in vivid contrast to all the opulence and decadence at the top. But partygate also highlights one of the fundamental reasons why poverty and need are snowballing. With huge rises in fuel bills due to arrive in early April, the government has so far failed to act – partly, it seems, because it has recently been stuck in such a state of chaos. But it has also made deliberate decisions that will worsen many people’s predicament, from the hike in national insurance – which, in a jointly written article for the Sunday Times, the prime minister and chancellor have now confirmed – to the cruel snatching-back of the £20-a-week “uplift” in universal credit that Lexie told me had tipped her and her family into even deeper problems. Amid cake, “wine-time Fridays” and Johnson and his acolytes’ almost surreal levels of privilege, is that really much of a surprise?
I was put in touch with Lexie by a project called Covid Realities, jointly organised by researchers from the universities of York and Birmingham, and the Child Poverty Action group. Between June 2020 and July 2021, it allowed people living in difficult and vulnerable circumstances to write – usually, like Lexie, using pseudonyms – about their experiences of life in the pandemic. In December, rising prices and the end of the universal credit uplift prompted the people in charge to ask for new material from their contributors, who have now added to a stock of intimate, striking testimony, describing how fragile millions of lives are as the pandemic seemingly begins to recede.
Covid Realities also connected me with Erik, whose life was changed by a car accident, and who lives in the Surrey suburbs with his 15-year-old daughter, carefully self-rationing food, heating and hot water. “Last week was the first time for a while that I didn’t have enough money to buy milk or bread,” he said. After talking to him, I spoke to a single mother who writes her diary under the name Aurora. Recently widowed, she lives with her two children in a privately rented house in west London, close to family members who provide much-needed support. Thanks to the benefit cap introduced by George Osborne (who, amid an extensive list of post-politics commitments, now has a full-time job at a “boutique investment bank” called Robey Warshaw), she and her children receive an annual £23,000, but her rent totals £21,600 a year. “I’m in a huge amount of debt,” she told me. “I’m basically caught in this cycle. It’s never ending. And now the costs of everything are rising, and I don’t know what’s going to happen. We’re going to be made homeless, which will cost the government more.”
She briefly fell silent. “We’ve just been ignored, people like me. And I’m doing the best I can. I’m desperate to find work. I’m desperate.” Her last spell of paid employment, she said, was at a call centre, but had come to grief when she couldn’t combine the shifts she was asked to work with the necessity of picking up her youngest child from school.
Predictably, the ad hoc responses to rising living costs reportedly being discussed in government do not suggest any convincing answers. Rishi Sunak is said to be considering an extension of the warm home discount scheme that currently reduces some poorer households’ energy bills by £140 over the winter; there has been talk of a one-off payment of up to £500 to “struggling workers” (“That would sustain me for what – about a month?” said Aurora). Cutting VAT on fuel bills entails a saving of only 5%; bowing to Tory pressure to remove the green levies on fuel bills would threaten insulation programmes designed to reduce the living costs of people at the bottom of the income scale. Meanwhile, though poverty and disadvantage are kept festering by our cruel and miserly benefits system, the government seems to want to make things even worse. Never mind such obstacles to employment as expensive childcare and pitiful local public transport: last week, Johnson and his ministers announced a new scheme titled Way to Work, whereby unemployed people on universal credit will no longer be given three months to find their preferred job, but will instead be seemingly forced to take whatever work they can find after only four weeks. At that point, if they are deemed not to have made “reasonable efforts” to find work, part of their universal credit payments will be stopped.
The same day, it was reported that, after proposing to spend £3,000 of public money on a diplomatic lunch replete with high-end wine and gin, Liz Truss used a government private jet for an official trip to Australia at an estimated cost of £500,000. Such are the almost feudal features of current British politics, which take you straight to the heart of why, as prices zoom up, deprivation will only deepen. People steeped in excess are so far from the pain they keep causing that it barely registers: glasses clink, engines roar, cakes arrive, and the sound is simply drowned out.
John Harris is a Guardian columnist
