Signs of hope, from Israel and Gaza to Batley and Spen 

Let’s face it. It’s been a pretty lousy 18 months. Signs of hope and decency, (pace the NHS) let alone good governance, have been as elusive as a bar of wet soap. The sight of a trilby-hatted George Galloway strutting about the late Jo Cox’s constituency, oozing vanity and venom, seemed like a fitting image for a year doused in fear and loathing.  

But last week, two totally unconnected stories defied expectations and lifted my spirits. 

A 50-year-old Jewish mother, part of a staunchly Right-wing Israeli family, offered a kidney to the country’s transplant programme. It turned out the organ would be donated to a three-year-old Palestinian boy in war-battered, Hamas-governed Gaza. Her family pleaded with her to change her mind. 

Idit Harel Segal, a mother of three with a gentle smile and a core of steel, refused to back down. After the operation she met the boy’s parents, speaking to them, The Times reported, in broken Arabic. She sang lullabies to the recovering child and his mother in Hebrew. Soon both mother and child were asleep. Segal described it as “moment of sweet gentleness”.

Then there was the Batley and Spen by-election and that old tomcat Galloway. He failed to unseat Labour, despite stoking rancour on pretty much any subject that came to hand. The Labour MP Emily Thornberry describes Galloway as a “bucket into which people pour all their anger” — a withering but not unfair description, though a little unkind to buckets.

In the event Labour’s Kim Leadbeater, Jo Cox’s sister, bullied and harassed during a toxic campaign, scraped home. Keir Starmer, the embattled Labour leader, has been handed a reprieve and time to put his house in order. 

Two things connect these stories, at least for me. The first is two strong, principled, independent women ploughing on in the face of bad faith and prejudice, doing what they think is right. 

The second is the idea that life is what happens when you least expect it and that nothing, with the exception of the obvious, is set in stone.  

My all-time favourite movie is Lawrence of Arabia. In the defining scene, a Bedouin has fallen off his camel in the furnace of the Nefud desert. Lawrence is told a rescue attempt would be futile. The man’s death was “written”. Lawrence ignores the advice and achieves the seemingly impossible. Afterwards, over hot, sweet tea in the desert, he tells Sharif Ali, a leader of the Great Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire: “Nothing is written.”

History is littered with examples of anti-determinism winning through against the odds. In fact, history, by and large, is anti-determinism. Or put simply, achieving the seemingly impossible: the abolition of slavery, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of apartheid.

This is the oops factor that leaders who rule by spin or decree, or both, forget at their peril. Power can make people tipsy and impair their judgement, especially if they surround themselves with nodding heads. 

Johnson has a big majority. As long as he delivers on “the people’s priorities” or — and this is the crucial bit — voters believe that he is doing so, his star will keep on rising. 

And so far he has been proved right. The improbable narrative that the Tories have suddenly been transformed into the natural party of the working classes still has some purchase. 

Delivering Brexit and a successful vaccination programme have double-jabbed him against failure. Just for a minute, though, set Brexit aside and ask yourself this question. How many voters who are not natural followers of Johnson’s tub-thumping style (left, right or centre), but support him because he got Brexit done, will remain loyal as the reality of his record falls behind the rhetoric? 

It’s not as if Johnson has a clean sheet. This Prime Minister has presided over a record pandemic death toll and the biggest economic hit in Europe. He plays fast and loose with Northern Ireland’s fragile peace. He normalises sleaze and cronyism. Post-Brexit trade is spinning its wheels. He is a ditherer and a serial U-turner. 

He employs a cabinet so mediocre — but so loyal — that numpties like Gavin Williamson and shady characters like Robert Jenrick survive unscathed. The main criterion for advancement in Johnson’s world is loyalty. 

Matt Hancock fell on his sword, not because he slipped his chums PPE contracts. Or because, to his eternal shame, he allowed thousands of vulnerable old people to go into care homes untested and unprotected. He fell because someone switched the angle of the CCTV camera in his office. What cut through was not his incompetence but his hypocrisy. 

The message filtering out from the country is that people do actually care about the things Johnson thinks are mere trifles: integrity in office, one rule for them and another for the rest of us. The moral atrophy of this Government is beginning to grate. 

The Liberal Democrats overturned a colossal Tory majority in the Chesham and Amersham by-election. Labour have narrowly held Batley and Spen. But for Galloway, Labour would probably have had a comfortable majority, defying predictions of another collapse similar to the one in Hartlepool. Out there, things are already shifting, even if it’s too early to say in which direction.

Labour is still in a mess. Starmer needs a coherent message voters can believe in. The Labour leader’s big problem is that he himself does not come over as a believer. He is clever and decent, but dull. Watching him trying to summon up a full-throated, fist-pumping victory roar next to Kim Leadbitter was frankly painful. This wasn’t joy. It was relief. Is he big enough for the job in hand? 

Johnson, on the other hand, paints himself as a born-again believer in his cause, always at the service of and subject to the people. His pretensions are fed by a media that characterises his grab-bag of policies as a New Tory Age. 

Johnson is full of bounce and optimism. But events may not bounce his way. The pandemic is not done with us yet. The economy is a long way from recovery. 

In the 1960 movie Elmer Gantry, Burt Lancaster gives an Oscar-winning performance as the charming, hedonistic travelling salesman in Sinclair Lewis’s 1927 novel of the same name. Gantry was a huckster-turned-preacher, a chancer and a serial adulterer who exploits America’s fatal attraction to fast-talking evangelists and the cult of personality. 

Gantry experiences a meteoric rise and equally precipitous fall. Johnson may keep on rising. But don’t be surprised if, like Gantry, he falls to earth with a thud. Nothing is written.

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