Today, Explained - 10 Downer Street

Episode Date: January 21, 2022

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is facing political ruin because his aides partied while the UK locked down. This episode was produced by Will Reid, edited by Matt Collette, engineered by Efim Shapiro, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. Hi, this is Tom McTague. I'm a staff writer at The Atlantic, based in London. Beautiful. Tom, when we spoke early last summer, we talked about Brexit and the guy who got it over the finish line, Boris Johnson. And I just want to play for you really quickly how we ended that episode.

You quickly see how he could dominate a decade in a similar way to Thatcher and Reagan dominated the 80s. Johnson could be dominating Britain for the 20s. That's certainly, I think, his plan. Well, let's get in touch in another five years and see how he's doing at that point. We really should. Yeah, something will have blown up so bad by then that he's no longer prime minister and my prediction looks ludicrous. People have lost track of time in this pandemic, but it's only been about six months, not five years. Tom, why are we talking again? What's going on? Because something extraordinary has happened and it's blown up and he's almost lost the premiership completely. It's just an extraordinary story. You know, this is a guy who won the biggest conservative majority in 30 years,

the biggest conservative majority since Margaret Thatcher. And then the pandemic hit he had various ups and downs he almost died during the pandemic himself and he emerged out of it during this Omicron wave with these snowball of stories and revelations about what had been going on inside Downing Street during this whole time that have just leaked out one after the other and the snowball has grown and grown and grown. It looks like it just might mow him down and take him out of Downing Street altogether. For those who haven't been following the scandals, where does this story start? So the story starts before New Year, late towards the end of last year. And we start to get stories about gatherings and, in quotes, parties that were going on inside 10 Downing Street

during the various lockdowns that Britain has gone through over the last two years during the pandemic. Last December, there was a Christmas party at number 10. A week since we learned about it, Boris Johnson's December, there was a Christmas party at number 10. A week since we learned about it, Boris Johnson's spokesperson insists there was not a party at number 10. All of these stories started to leak out. Was a Christmas party thrown in Downing Street for dozens of people on December the 18th? What I can tell the right honourable gentleman is that all guidance was followed. There's some extraordinary details that are emerging. You know, you had an email that was sent out by a senior official saying...

After what's been an incredibly busy period, we thought it would be nice to make the most of the lovely weather and have some socially distanced drinks in the Number 10 garden this evening. Please join us from 6pm and bring your own booze. And this was when the rest of the country couldn't go out of their homes to meet anyone, even if they had dying relatives in hospital. You couldn't go and see them at the time. So you have things like that. And then you also have this leaving do. This was a leaving party for a senior member of Johnson's team.

And this is when Johnson was away from Downing Street. At one point, a staffer reportedly went to a nearby supermarket to fill an entire suitcase with bottles of wine. And when things got a little bit out of hand, one of the staff broke the Prime Minister's child's toy swing. So, you know, you just have this sort of image. Sounds like a rager. Yeah, you have this strange image of, you know, things getting out of hand,

people boozing in this cocoon environment. But outside, everybody else is sort of hunkered down in their homes. Now, this started to become damaging because you could date these photos and you could date these various parties that were alleged to have taken place and then you could match them up with the rules that were for the rest of the country at the time. These were, just to sort of put it in perspective, extraordinarily draconian laws, more so than I think were ever in place in the United States. You know, this was a kind of virtual house arrest for most of the country where we couldn't go out at all or we could go out for a little bit of exercise or to see one friend in the park at a time. There was police tape over park benches and swings in the playgrounds that were closed to children.

And yet this was going on in 10 Downing Street. So that is the source of the fury. And so it's this hypocrisy that's really struck a chord with the country? That's right. You know, it's hypocrisy. It's a moral charge, really. You know, it's a sense that everybody else was taking these rules seriously. I think this is the extraordinary nature of the crisis, you know, that I can't think of a precedent in British political history. The prime minister is, he might well lose his job. And it's not over a question of policy,

like almost every other Prime Minister that has fallen. That's how Margaret Thatcher went. That's how previous Prime Ministers who have made terrible mistakes have gone. This is not that. Boris Johnson's lockdowns were actually supported by the country. His policies over Omicron are not particularly controversial. Nobody's really questioning Brexit at the moment or any of his main policy thrust. They're furious with him over a question of moral rectitude.

And that's what makes this so different. The only parallel I can think of is Watergate. Tell me about the consequences thus far for Boris. How close has this come to him losing his job? It's come ever closer. So it's very close this week. And what is happening is you've had a real turn in the public who are furious at this. They are bombarding their members of parliament with letters and emails expressing their fury. Members of parliament are seeing this and panicking and thinking, what happens to my seat at the next election if this carries on?

Then it puts the prime minister into an imperil position, if not yet an impossible position. Today is the first day in my adult life that I've not been a member of a Conservative Party. It's that serious. And so the party in Parliament is starting to turn against the Prime Minister, furious that he can't get a grip on this and put it to bed

because they're facing the fire themselves. You had a meeting earlier this week of a group of MPs that were members of parliament that were elected in 2019 with the Johnson landslide. These were people who really owed their seats to his victory and had decided that he was a liability and they were starting to put letters of no confidence into these party bosses. And that is the mechanism that could see him go. If there is a certain number of letters that go in from members of parliament, I think it's 54 letters are required to trigger a formal vote of no confidence in Boris Johnson as Conservative Party leader. And so he would

then need to win that vote of confidence among members of Parliament for him to be able to stay on as leader. If he loses that, he's gone. And what are members of Parliament saying to his face in Parliament? Absolutely extraordinary scenes here for two weeks now. A week ago, you had a kind of Rubicon cross when the opposition party was saying formally, you need to resign. And then this week, in Prime Minister's questions, this happens every week on a Wednesday, he was more punchy. And I know the rage they feel with me.

He was more sort of on the front foot. I believed implicitly that this was a work event. He had this question that came down at him from a member of his own party towards the end, a guy called David Davis. Like many on these benches, I spent weeks and months defending the Prime Minister against often angry constituents. This was a Brexiteer, senior member of the party. He had stood for the leadership in the past.

This guy stood up at the back of the House of Commons and quoted one of the most famous speeches in British political history by an MP called Leo Amory that was aimed at Neville Chamberlain in 1940 when his policy of appeasement had collapsed. So Amory says to Chamberlain, in the name of God, go. And it's at this moment where Chamberlain's authority is performatively gone. Now David Davis had stood up and quoted that speech to Boris Johnson. So I'll remind him of a quotation altogether too familiar to him of Leo Amory to Neville Chamberlain. You have sat there too long for all the good you have done. In the name of

God, go. Shut up! And it was a dramatic moment because people weren't expecting it. You weren't expecting that to come from his own benches, from people who should be his supporters. You obviously expected the Labour Party opposite him to be pushing at him. But this was a dramatic moment in the same way that Amory's was from the Conservative benches as well to a Conservative prime minister. I must say to the right honourable gentleman, I don't know what he's talking about. But

what I can tell him, I don't know what quotation he's alluding to that he's referring to, but what I can tell him is that I, and I think I've told this house. What comes next? At the moment, what we can say is that Boris Johnson is just clinging to the one thing that might save him, which is time. He needs time just to hope that something comes about

that shifts the conversation, moves it away from this sort of rolling scandal that he just has not got control of. Now, the next thing that he is waiting for is this report that's coming out, an official report by a woman called Sue Gray, who is a senior civil servant. And she is looking into exactly what happened over the last two years, which parties happened, when, who attended, who organized. And she's going to lay it all out in a report that everyone can then look at. And that is going to a large extent decide Boris Johnson's fate. If it gives him something of a pass, he may be able to survive this. If it is particularly damning on him, then that might be curtains.

But that's the next thing that we're waiting for. And if he can get through that, who knows? You know, Tom, when we spoke last summer and you told me that Boris Johnson was this potentially game-changing politician, I really believed you. And had you told me last summer, you know, but you heard a rumor that he was maybe letting his staffers party at 10 Downing Street during the pandemic, I also 100% would have believed that and not at all believe that it would be the thing that could potentially bring him down. You know, I think the answer is the qualities that made him so effective as a politician

during one particular crisis, which was Brexit, but which then turned into a kind of national stasis and humiliation for Britain, where the politics were just locked. There was like a stalemate. And Boris Johnson was this weapon that the Conservative Party could deploy to end the stalemate. He was a character who was big enough and would break rules to get this crisis out of the way. You know, he was fundamentally a kind of unserious figure. Now, he had the misfortune of then almost immediately after having that once-in-a-generation election victory, suddenly being hit over the head by an entirely different crisis, and one you could say to which he is monumentally ill-suited. And any sniff of rule-breaking that was an extraordinary political gift for him

suddenly turns into an extraordinary potential political weakness because during the pandemic everybody in the country was sticking to the rules or not everybody clearly but most people were sticking to the rules because they thought it was an incredibly serious thing so he goes from the guy who you quite liked breaking the rules because he was breaking the rules to socket to the Europeans, you know, and to stick up for the country. Suddenly he's breaking the rules that you're having to stick by. He's laughing at you now rather than at somebody else. And that's why I think it's suddenly flipped. That's the kind of the sort of tragic story of Boris Johnson's

political demise. Well, Tom, I guess we'll check back in with you in five days to see how it's going. It'll be Churchill by then or, you know, or Chamberlain, who knows? We've got five days stuck on my eyes. Five days. What a surprise. We've got five days. My brain hurts a lot. Five days. Days. Days. Days. Days.

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is it possible that you're still drunk do you know i think i might be slightly michelle gelfand you're a professor of organizational behavior and psychology at stanford university throughout the pandemic we've seen public figures get in trouble for bending or breaking COVID rules. Not far from you, California Governor Gavin Newsom, recently tennis star Novak Djokovic, and now Boris Johnson and his staff. Why does this strike such a particular nerve in people? You know, for years, we know that people who have power tend to take a lot of

latitude. They behave in all sorts of norm-violating ways. In this really funny study by Paul Piff at Berkeley, they had people hiding in bushes watching which cars tended to violate more traffic rules and even cut off pedestrians. And they found that cars like Mercedes, these high power, high status cars, were much more likely to break the rules. And while we may be more willing to accept that powerful people are more norm-violating, being in a global pandemic has raised the scrutiny we have for this kind of behavior. You know, we're told we have to follow the rules, and these rules are critical for our safety during COVID. So when our national leaders violate them, it can be really infuriating. Of course, any society has its rule followers and its rule breakers. But are these like psychological categories?

Are we predisposed to be one or the other? Yeah, that's exactly right. So some people tend to have what I call a tight mindset. They notice rules around them. They have a strong desire to avoid mistakes. And they love structure. They love order. And others among us have looser dispositions. We

can be skeptical about rules. We're willing to take risks and are comfortable with disorder and ambiguity. And I like to use a Muppet metaphor that Slate noted some time ago. You could say to yourself, are you more like Cookie Monster and Animal and Ernie who emanate chaos? You know, they think it's out of the box. They're probably nonconformists. Red shot! Red shot! They bring mayhem wherever they go. They're really loose. Or you're more like Sam the Eagle and Kermit the Frog and Bert.

You know, these Muppet characters embody order. You know, think Bert, who loves his hobbies like collecting paperclips. Were you staring at your paperclips again, Bert? Oh, yeah. Yeah, sure was. You know, Bert, you do that all the time. Did you know that? Yeah. Anything wrong with that? These Muppets are tight. And these beloved Muppet characters, they reflect something powerful about human psychology. And over the years, we've been studying this mindset across countries, organizations, states, and even households.

You can take my tight, loose mindset quiz on my website at michellegalfan.com. And truth be told, I have a moderately loose mindset. I think I probably do too. My spouse, my husband, attorney, Veer is definitely tighter than me. And there's a lot of kind of conflicts you can have on this dimension. As you can imagine, he's horrified by how I load the dishwasher. I get a lot of negative feedback on my dishwashing behavior. That's funny. I have a very specific way of loading the dishwasher.

But I remember one time I traveled to Japan and there would be these red lights, but there would be no cars as far as the eye could see. So having lived in New York for a long time, I would just like, you know, jaywalk and people would look at me. The Japanese people would look at me like I was some alien. And then I was there for like two weeks. And by the end of those two weeks, I had stopped jaywalking. I wanted to conform. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you had some cultural intelligence, we call it. You know, a lot of times

when we go abroad, we don't think about these underlying cultural codes that are driving people's behavior. And for sure, in our research, Japan veers tight and the U.S. tends to veer looser. Even though all cultures have tight news domains, we can classify countries, both in the modern era and historically, in terms of how strictly they abide by rules. How did this dichotomy between the rule followers and the rule breakers sort of manifest itself during the pandemic, when in a lot of countries around the world, we were given rules that we were really unaccustomed to. You know, the reality is that when we're under threat, it makes a lot of good sense to tighten, you know, to help coordinate and to loosen when it's safe. And in fact, in the U.S., you know, we've seen that we were able to do this. We tightened under threat during World War II and 9-11. But, you know, COVID was different. It's an abstract germ that's really kind of distant and invisible, and it's easier to ignore. And what we found is that it's the loose cultures that took longer to tighten across the board, across 50-some-odd countries. So you can think about it

as looseness can be a liability. Creativity is great, but it's not well-matched to having a global pandemic. And so did these sort of cultural differences between the looser countries and the tighter countries have, you know, a real world impact on how the countries handled the pandemic? Yeah, it sure did. You know, we published a paper in The Lancet Planetary Health last year that showed across 57 countries that loose cultures tended to have more cases per capita and deaths per capita, like five times the cases, almost nine times the deaths. And this was even controlling for lots of different factors, national wealth, inequality, population density, mobility,

authoritarianism, lots of things. Even above and beyond all these structural factors, culture matters. And, you know, it was astonishing because we also found that loose cultures across the board had less fear of COVID. Ironically, that's the case, even given how much worse they were handling the pandemic in terms of the number of cases. So you can think about it as like during a national or global threat, you need a very strong, consistent signal to help facilitate fear and tightening, which is adaptive under these kinds of consequences. And if that signal gets interfered with, muted, and so forth, then tightening just doesn't happen. Do you think the United States might get better at tightening after this experience? I mean, we covered on our show countries like Senegal, who potentially did better during this pandemic because they'd been through stuff like this before. That's right. So, I mean, that's exactly our logic around why over the course of our histories, tighter cultures have learned the hard way that rules make sense during collective threat. The U.S. and many other loose cultures, some exceptions, have not had that kind of muscle

constantly challenged. We've had the luxury of being loose and being rule breakers. I think we've learned a lot. I hope this knowledge will be used to better deal with future threats. So we know that it's hard to tighten when the threat's abstract and invisible. Like COVID, we need clear and consistent communication. And we know that the threat signal can get muted and interfered with. And if it does, that people won't take it seriously. What about the opposite transition? You know, there will be a day, inshallah, that this pandemic is essentially over and that we can return to normal and come out of our little cocoons if we haven't already.

Will it be hard for some people who've tightened up so much to adapt back to the normal we've been seeking for so long. Yeah, most definitely. A lot of our research, both kind of in the laboratory, but also using computational models, these kind of simulations, shows that it takes a lot longer for tight groups to loosen. And part of that relates to that increased sense of fear. And so, you know, we know that when people feel fearful about a threat, they're going to maintain that level of tightness. And so we need to help people in tighter groups to take small steps toward normalcy and make them feel like it's safe, you know, to kind of start to explore, start to kind of gradually loosen. Just like it took loose groups longer to tighten, it's likely to take tight groups longer to loosen. Boris Johnson, though, he seems ahead of the curve. Apparently so. Michelle Gelfand is a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Go Trees. You can find out whether you've got a loose or tight mindset or something in between at her website. It's michellegelfand.com slash TL dash quiz. That's

Michelle with one L, Gelfand, G-E-L-F-A-N-D dot com slash T-l-quiz. I went. I'm moderately loose. Everything in moderation. Even moderation. That's what my uncle tells me. Earlier in the show, you heard from Tom McTague. He's a staff writer at The Atlantic.

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I've never really said contact me there, but a lot of people do so anyway. My email address at work is pretty simple, Sean at vox.com. I guess we both have personal email accounts too, but that feels excessive, don't you think? What about good old-fashioned snail mail? Send us a postcard. The office is waiting for us. I would do anything for love, but I won't do that

No, I won't do that you