Power, corruption and corona virus truth-twisting

Every year, the highly respected German-based civil society organisation Transparency International issues its Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), an invaluable tool for all those engaging with governments around the world. The UK government has always ranked relatively well, and in 2019 it was the 12th least corrupt state in the world out of the 183 ranked with a score of 77%. Countless experts and international institutions are consulted in developing each year's rankings. Many of us would like the UK to score better but it is not a bad score and we all like to believe that the UK Government generally behaves with integrity backed by its civil service of nearly one third of a million professionals.

Yesterday at 5pm London time, the UK Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, defended the actions of his senior advisor Dominic Cummings, in making a least one journey in late March the length of England to near Durham during a period of almost total lockdown. As has been the case all around the world, millions of people in the UK have had to make childcare arrangements as well as leaving elderly and sick relatives to cope the best they can believing it was in the national interest to make such sacrifices in the fight against the spread of the COVID-19 virus.

Now we find that not only did one of the architects of the lock-down policy interpret the guidance in a way different from the rest of us, the Prime Minister is backing him in doing so. Dominic Cummings has refused to resign and Boris Johnson has refused to sack him. Today, health advisors, police chiefs and backbench MPs within Boris Johnson's own party fear that the British public will no longer take government instructions seriously and that the sacrifice of recent weeks might be undermined as social distancing rules are broken.

As to why the Prime Minister should back his advisor in such a way is open to speculation. It is likely that officials in Number Ten Downing Street, who must have been in daily if not hourly communication with Dominic Cummings during the period, must have known his whereabouts. So perhaps the Prime Minister sincerely feels that his advisor has done nothing wrong. Or he fears that sacking Dominic Cummings would only lead other dominos to fall. An investigation by the regional police force in Durham might clear up some of the facts and shed some more light on the integrity of government itself. Perhaps we will find out that the Daily Mirror and The Observer newspapers, who first broke the story, have been too willing to believe their sources or that someone in power has been 'economical with the truth'.

Yesterday, someone within the UK government machinery was outraged enough after listening to the Prime Minister to tweet on the UK Civil Service's official twitter handle "Arrogant and offensive. Can you imagine having to work with these truth twisters?" Within ten minutes the tweet was taken down but only after there had been nearly 36,000 retweets and it had been reported on the BBC. The Prime Minister must be hoping that this is a "Westminster bubble" issue that will not cut through to the nation at large, a nation that only half a year ago demonstrated its support for Boris Johnson in the 2019 election, and for "getting Brexit done".

But the events of last night are not about the UK leaving the European Union, they are about an issue that has eclipsed Brexit almost entirely and brought the nation together again. Whilst it is true that the poor and the vulnerable have suffered more from the effects of the virus and the ongoing economic recession, Corona has touched everyone's lives, including the Prime Minister himself. In fact many of us issued messages of support to the Prime Minister when he was under critical hospital care suffering from the virus last month.

But beyond party politics lies something much deeper - the integrity of the nation and the values of public life. Even the right-leaning Daily Mail, normally supportive of the government, asked on their front page today: "What Planet are they on?". "Planet Boris" one would suspect, or perhaps the public will increasingly feel that during a period of national sacrifice there have been two planets: one for those that make the rules and another for those expected to follow them.

We cannot call this an issue of corruption (no money has been changing hands as far as we can tell) but it is certainly one of integrity - and it is the road of poor integrity that leads to corruption. Transparency International's methodology for assessing their annual index of nations include criteria such as:

• The use of public office for private gain;
• Nepotism in the civil service;
• State capture;
• The government’s ability to enforce integrity mechanisms;
• The effective prosecution of corrupt officials;
• Legal protection for whistleblowers, journalists and investigators.

Who knows how the UK will fare when next year's CPI index is developed but how the events of the days and weeks to come are handled will speak volumes about the health of the nation and its essential institutions. In addition, the British people will not easily forget any betrayal of the fundamental values at stake.