All the world’s a stage, but ‘The Birthday Party’ is not the play for today

A passage from Harold Pinter’s 1957 play “The Birthday Party” reads as follows:

Opinions about the latest twist in the Downing Street drama will divide according to estimates of its most famous living resident, but for me Pinter’s timeless masterpiece somehow captures

the irony of his predicament. The atmosphere of menace seems entirely apposite for what may be about to happen next in Westminster.

Are we really going to bring down an elected Prime Minister for having a birthday party? Regardless of what you may think of Boris Johnson, surely this is a grotesque and sinister way to

treat our public servants. You may share Ruth Davidson’s view that the leader of her party is “unfit for office”, but does she seriously believe that this has anything to do with whether or

not the gathering on June 19, 2020, was within the rules? The former leader of the Scottish Tories tweets that her partner shares a birthday with the PM and they held a small outdoor party

that day: “It didn’t occur to us — literally couldn’t conceive — that we would act outside the rules.”

But Baroness Davidson wasn’t running the country at the time. How do people imagine that the Government continued to function during lockdown? The staff at Number 10, like other key

officials in Whitehall, were working round the clock to keep the machinery of the British state running. They spent all day, every day, working in close proximity. Does anyone really care

whether some of them took a few minutes out of what must have been very long days to spring a birthday surprise for their chief?

Is Parliament now going to debate whether or not the purchase of an M&S birthday cake turned an impromptu celebration into a criminal conspiracy? Will the presence of the Chancellor of the

Exchequer implicate him in this nefarious plot, even though (as the Treasury was at pains to point out) he was not actually invited? Will the Metropolitan Police, who are now investigating

parties at Downing Street, be expected to examine CCTV footage to determine who actually sang “Happy Birthday to you”, so that those in the vicinity who were merely getting on with their

jobs for the ten minutes that this innocent ceremony lasted can be eliminated from their inquiries?

And what of the Prime Minister himself? Do we seriously suppose that he has nothing better to do just now than to be interrogated about why he did not interrupt these proceedings as soon as

he became aware of their potential illegality? Yesterday, around the time when the birthday party story was breaking on ITV News, he was participating in a 90-minute video meeting with NATO

leaders to decide how to deter Vladimir Putin from invading Ukraine. While the British media were beside themselves with excitement at their “gotcha moment”, the PM was trying to defuse a

crisis that could engulf Eastern Europe in the bloodiest conflict so far this century.

Nobody in the newsrooms of London showed much interest in that. The kind of questions that preoccupied my profession this week were: could the presence at the birthday party of Lulu Lytle,

the interior designer and friend of Carrie Johnson, be spun to make a crucial link between “Partygate” and “Wallpapergate”? Can we keep this story on the front pages for long enough to

justify writing off the PM even if the official inquiry exonerates him?

One day, perhaps quite soon, we shall rub our eyes in disbelief. Just as medieval thought was ridiculed by the legend that scholastic philosophers spent their time in disputations over how

many angels could dance on a pinhead, so the reductio ad absurdum of British politics could be: how many candles were there on the prime ministerial cake?

One footnote to all this. Anyone investigating the impact of Partygate in the country, especially in the so-called Red Wall seats, may be surprised to discover that most people are not

especially interested in this story. What they want to know is when the politicians will stop navel-gazing and get on with addressing their immediate concerns. They punished the Labour Party

for precisely this failure. They won’t hesitate to punish the Conservatives if they indulge in one of their regular exercises in collective narcissism known as leadership contests at the

behest of the media.

They know that such a contest would inevitably be followed, sooner rather than later, by a general election to lend a figleaf of democratic legitimacy to the winner. They reckon that the

Westminster bubble ought to have listened to them, the vox populi, which spoke quite clearly less than three years ago. Their priorities haven’t changed, but the pandemic has made them more

urgent and acute.

Something must be done to bring the focus of politics back to where it belongs: the condition and the security of the United Kingdom. This week will probably determine the Prime Minister’s

fate. If he is wise, he will not allow himself to be caught up in the hysteria now sweeping through Westminster. A steady focus on the cost of living crisis at home and the Ukrainian crisis

abroad may not impress the lobby, but it will remind the people who matter that he has their interests, and not merely his own, at heart. He could start by explaining why it matters to all

of us that, with Russian tanks massing on the borders of Ukraine and Russian warships gathering off the Irish coast, that the House of Commons should not become, even more than usual, a

stage set for the theatre of the absurd.

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