The Prime Minister is due in Edinburgh today, ten days shy of the General Election. His welcome may not be as warm as that recently afforded to Taylor Swift. He certainly doesn’t have his troubles to seek. The number of “flutters” on the date of the election, allegedly placed by people in his party with insider knowledge, seems to be increasing. Mr Sunak is “incredibly angry”, and no wonder. Only last week, the psephologist Sir John Curtice was discussing the fact that trust in politicians among the general public, is apparently at an all-time low. Fluttergate has been likened to Partygate – one rule for us, one rule for them.
So it might have been fortunate for the Conservatives that Crapgate only came to light yesterday, perhaps a good day for burying further bad news. At a private function, James Sunderland, aide to Home Secretary James Cleverly, described the plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda as “crap”. I first heard of this yesterday on the news on BBC Radio 4. Radio 4 doesn’t normally use words like “crap” on the national news, but I guess they must have decided on this occasion that plain speaking was in the public interest. Before he gave this utterance, Mr Sunderland asked everybody in the room to switch off their devices, a sure-fire way, I’d have thought, of making sure he was going to be recorded. Mr Cleverly toured the Sunday morning TV studios to reassure us that Mr Sunderland was simply using the word “crap” for dramatic effect. The Rwanda policy was not crap.
True enough, Mr Sunderland had gone on to point out that the policy had been modelled on a similar initiative in Australia, which had proved very effective in deterring migrants down under. So, what exactly was he referring to as crap? One interpretation might be that the offer of asylum in Rwanda is a crap offer that nobody would wish to accept. Perhaps Mr Sunderland asked everybody to switch off their mobiles, because it is necessary to insist that Rwanda is a safe destination, whilst sending out a subliminal message that it is a crap destination – a classic example of cognitive dissonance. Another interpretation would be that the depiction of Rwanda as a favourable destination is crap, or, another apposite word, bullshit.
But I suspect this story will just peter out. Fluttergate, on the other hand, has legs. The media may have the opportunity to drip feed further allegations. Drip, drip, drip. In Edinburgh, Mr Sunak will wish to discuss the economy, jobs, and hospitals, but the reporters will keep asking him for more flutterers’ names.
Likewise, amid the furore, Mr Farage will not be much damaged by his alleged remark that the West, and the expansion of NATO to the East, is at least partly responsible for the war in Ukraine. One of the problems of obsessing over a scandal like Fluttergate is that we are inclined to take our eye off the ball, especially with regard to foreign affairs. The relationship between Russia and the West was brought into sharp focus for me last week when I read Giles Milton’s wonderful book The Stalin Affair, The impossible alliance that won the war (John Murray, 2024). I was put on to it again by BBC Radio 4 which has been serialising it, read most beautifully by Nigel Anthony. When the Nazis launched Operation Barbarossa on midsummer’s day, 1941, and attacked Russia, Churchill, who had been an implacable foe of Communism since 1917, immediately pledged Stalin the support of Great Britain. He was criticised for this; many thought that the Nazis and the Reds should be allowed to get on with it and destroy one another, but Churchill argued that if Germany had an easy victory, as seemed likely, then the Nazis could turn their entire attention to the west, and Continental Europe would become an impregnable fortress. He made the famous remark that, if the Nazis should attack Hell, he would not hesitate to make a pact with the devil. That was in essence what he thought he was doing.
The Big Three, Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt, and the famous summits at Teheran, Yalta, and Potsdam form the backdrop to Giles Milton’s book, but the focus is on subsidiary characters, Roosevelt’s representative Averell Harriman, the British ambassadors Sir Stafford Cripps and subsequently Archie Clark Kerr, the Russian foreign commissar Molotov (“Old Bootface”), and the interpreter Arthur Birse. This focus on (not quite) ordinary people caught up in extraordinary affairs gives the book an atmosphere not unlike that of a historical novel by Walter Scott. It is certainly as vivid. But the star of the show is Harriman’s daughter Kathy, who accompanied her father, got involved in his work, and learned to speak Russian. She saved a file of letters and documents which has only recently come to light. She comes across as a thoroughly modern woman.
Churchill’s power on the world stage waned throughout this period, just as Roosevelt’s health deteriorated. It is really Stalin who dominated the Big Three, and got most of what he wanted. It was perhaps Averell Harriman who was the first to realise that Stalin was going to become an enormous threat to the west.
And here we are again. The riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. The US has given Ukraine permission to launch missiles deep into Russia. A factory producing drones has recently been attacked. As the Government never tires of telling us, we are living in an incredibly dangerous world. But not so dangerous, apparently, that some people don’t have time for a flutter at the bookies.
jamescalumcampbell 