Bookending Boris

As one layer of political dust falls out of the air and begins to settle, another cloud is kicked up by the shuffle of political feet, stinging the eyes and clogging the back of the throat. Boris is no more. Not quite true of course. Like so much else about him, what is said, and what has actually transpired do not quite tally. They might, in time; hopefully they will. But with Boris, one just never knows. I am referring of course to our current and (probably) soon to be former Prime Minister, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. He became PM on the 24^th July, 2019, and stepped through the Number 10 door to announce his intention to resign at 12.30pm, July 7^th, 2022. When the Conservative party has elected a new leader, Boris will tender his resignation to her Majesty, who will then invite his replacement as Conservative party leader to form a new administration.

To digress and to be clear, the people of the UK to not elect Prime Ministers. We each of us have a vote for a constituency MP. In theory, the PM is anyone who can command a majority in the House of Commons (usually, but not always, determined by a general election), and he or she then chairs a cabinet of equals to implement a manifesto and govern the country. In practice, for much of the last 200 years this has been done on a party basis, and the leader of the largest party (which usually holds an absolute majority in the Commons) is the PM. Parties and manifestos have become less important as first mass and then social media have turned politics into a personality-driven affair focusing on one person. But our system does not work well this way. The kind of checks and balances in the US presidential system (of the kind Trump tried to subvert with partial success) do not actually exist here. In a way, because our PM holds lots of executive and legislative power, the position of PM is the more powerful (and therefore dangerous) position. This is something Boris has amply demonstrated.

He has been displaced without an election, even although it took an election to (only just) dispense with Trump – at least for now. There is no great policy divide in his party. Everyone is now a brexiteer, and believes in a small state and reduced taxation. It was Boris personally, rather than politically, who had become unacceptable and had to be replaced. It was his colleagues in government who provided the mechanism, not the people at large. This is not in the least anti-democratic, provided that Boris’ Conservative successor is committed to implementing the manifest on which all Conservatives were elected back in December 2019. There’s no point huffing and puffing that the next PM is being imposed on the rest of us by a selectorate of mainly southern bluerinsers. We don’t elect the PM, and we never have. Anyway, back to Boris.

Although he has not yet departed, it is worth identifying what has done for him, because it is both troubling and heartening. His lack of attention to the requirements of governing (as opposed to campaigning), observing important rules and conventions, paying attention to detail, caused problems which afflicted his administration right from the start. But it was his complete inability to act honestly and transparently that really hurt him. Latterly, there was even an attempt to institutionalise what looked like his contempt for honesty by making none-too-subtle tweaks to the “ministerial code” – a venerable but toothless set of guidance authored by each PM, and provided to serving ministers. Boris’ problems with honestly and consistency, as evidenced by his inability to apply the code to himself and one of his friends, cost him two ethics advisors who were both serious and non-political public servants with copious experience in public life. This all began catching up with Boris when his Health Secretary and then his Chancellor resigned, to be followed by a gathering avalanche of other resignations. So the central issue was not policy; it was entirely to do with Boris’ unsuitability for the role because of his lack of personal integrity. What’s troubling is not only that all of this was predictable, but that it was predicted.

This is usefully illustrated by two columns written by Max Hastings, the first in June 2019 and the second last Thursday, (7^th July). Two bookends for Boris’ time as PM. Hastings is a distinguished (indeed Knighted) journalist and historian, and one of Boris’ previous bosses. He has observed him from afar and up close, and while never a chum, was not a natural enemy. While I suspect Hastings is a natural, small “c” conservative, he has actually voted both Conservative and Labour in the past. In 2019 he was excoriating; he is now relieved, while sounding somewhat apprehensive about the future. He is clearly a remainer, although in his more recent article he makes it clear that for the time being re-joining the EU is off the agenda (the current political consensus), even while arguing that he expects the issue to be revisited in the future. But while thinking that Brexit is folly, this is not at the centre of his critique.

Writing in 2019, Hastings quickly honed in on the character flaw that would eventually lead to Boris’ downfall: “He would not recognize the truth…if confronted by it in an identity parade”. He was unfit for national office because “…he cares for no interest save his own frame and gratification”. He then predicted that Boris’ premiership “..will almost certainly reveal a contempt for rules, precedent, order and stability”. Prescient indeed. Writing after Boris’ demise, with the evidence clear to see, Hastings wrote “[Boris] is a stranger to truth who has sooner or later betrayed every man, woman and cause with which he associates”. Nothing has changed though, Boris was “the same moral bankrupt as when the Conservative party chose him”. Of course both the Conservative party and the country connived in the Boris phenomenon. Pushing issues of personal morality aside, he was voted for to achieve what was deemed of more importance than things like truth and integrity. I understand this; I struggled with it myself at onepoint.

The heartening bit is that, having flirted with disaster, we have avoided it. The unwritten British constitution has been flexible enough to both survive and remove Boris, without mass violence. This is not something to be dismissed lightly, as events in the US demonstrated. It looks like the system there has also survived but only after mass violence that cost lives. We have apparently decided that integrity matters, even if accompanied by a dash of hypocrisy and political calculation. It may not be everything, but I’ll take it as a promising sign that all is not lost.

One other heartening aspect is that according to Sajid Javid, whose resignation got the ball rolling, it was the sermon of the Rev Les Isaac, “Serving the Common Good”, at the National Prayer Breakfast early on the 5^th July that pushed him across the line. He went straight back to his office to write his letter of resignation. The cynics will claim that this is just convenient cover for ambition and disloyalty. But it sounds to me more like Providence being kind to us (again), and doing what we could not do ourselves – focus on, and value, truth over expediency.

Surely you’re joking (Mr Feynman)?

Richard Feynman was a Nobel prize-winning physicist, who is perhaps best known these days for his role in the Rogers Commission which investigated the Challenger disaster. It was Feynman who famously worked out what had caused the disaster. He was as far from the stereotypical nerdy, bespectacled, white coated boffin as it is possible to get. When I was a student (of Physiology, not Physics) his memoir “Surely you’re joking, Mr Feynman”[1] was a must read. One thing you won’t read in it is a quote about the philosophy of science that’s usually attributed to Feynman: “The philosophy of science is as useful to scientists and ornithology is to birds”. No one appears to be able to pin down where and when he said (or wrote) this – hence the brackets in the title of this blog piece. So it is possible that it’s not one of his aphorisms. But it captures fairly accurately his attitude toward philosophy in general and the philosophy of science in particular. It is an attitude probably shared by not a few physicists.

Sir Peter Medawar, also a Nobel prize winner (this time for Physiology and Medicine for his work on immunity), had a bit more time for philosophy, at least to the extent that he was quite fond of perpetrating it. He pointed out that if you ask a scientist about the scientific method, “….he will adopt an expression that is at once solemn and shifty-eyed: solemn because he feels he ought to declare an opinion; shifty-eyed because he is wondering how to conceal the fact that he has no opinion to declare.”[2]  What he was highlighting was that in professional science we have tended not to think about the intellectual procedures we follow, and we rarely explicitly teach them to students either. I was expected to learn my scientific methodology through a combination of observation and osmosis. Of course what this has meant is that when challenged to articulate how we do what we do, we are apt to come up short. That was Medawar’s point. Given the undoubted success of science in providing explanations for, and control over, all sorts of aspects of the natural world, this apparent vacuum about science itself was bound to be filled with something.

Of course on one level there have always been philosophers of science. The list includes the like of Aristotle who philosophised about science before science, as we know it now, existed. Bacon, Hume, Mill and Kant all had something to say on the topic. Scientists did from time to time contribute; Newton famously had a dig at hypothises. But throughout the 19^th Century a division began to set in between those on the outside talking about science, and an increasingly professional cadre of scientists on the inside doing the science. And it appeared that you could do it fairly successfully, without actually knowing too much about how you were doing it. Perhaps this is when (some) scientists started getting a bit sniffy about the philosophers. It didn’t help that sometimes the description of science from the outside was not flattering. In the 1960’s it was the philosopher Thomas Kuhn who talked about one set of new scientific theories conquering and displacing an older less powerful set as a “conversion experience that cannot be forced”[3]. Not entirely rational on Kuhn’s account. Interestingly, his views were shaped by examples from physics and cosmology; perhaps this explains the antipathy of at least some physicists to philosophers.

But thinking has to be done, concepts have to clarified, and this is the proper province of philosophers. Yet even today there remains a bit of a prejudice against burdening science students with thinking about what science is and how it works. I used to be in charge of a large health sciences module on research methods. As part of the module I introduced a session on the philosophy of science, so that students would be introduced to a coherent account of scientific methodology (the sort of thing that might avoid the situation described by Medawar). To say that my colleagues thought that this was the lowest of low priorities would be an understatement. It didn’t remain a part of their course for very long!

However, there are a number of issues within contemporary science that mean it is more important than ever that  students are trained properly in scientific methodology, and that as a profession we understand what we’re doing and to what standards. There’s no harm at all in understanding research ethics (ethics being a branch of philosophy no less), and being introduced to issues in research integrity. There has always been successful and unsuccessful science. Some experiments work, others fail. Some turn out to be misconceived and doomed to failure from the start, at least when viewed with scientific hindsight. That’s all grist for the scientific mill. But success and failure in scientific terms are not the same as good and bad science, or for that matter good and bad scientists. The bad ones are the ones that fabricate data and such like – in other words they lie and cheat. This is of sufficient concern for governments, agencies and institutions to have introduced research integrity codes of practice. Perhaps the best known example of these is the Office of Research Integrity in the US.

Research misconduct certainly happens (as the ORI website attests). It is not common, and it is not widespread (probably). Along with proper policing and an open culture, better training might well improve the situation. Clearer understanding of how science works and what is, and is not acceptable practice, can only be a good thing. But more is required. This is about something beyond science; one might even say that it requires knowledge of something above science that underpins good science. Policies and procedures, clear thinking (yes, aided by the philosophers) will get us so far. But at root, this is about right and wrong, it is about values. But where do we get the right values? This is not a scientific question at all. But science (as well as every other area of human endeavour) depends on it.

Birds don’t need ornithology, but scientists do need lots of resources from beyond science. Intellectually, the help of the philosophers should be welcome. But an underpinning morality is needed too. And where are we going to get that?  

1. R.P. Feynman (1985) "Surely you're joking, Mr Feynman". 

2. P. Medawar (1982)  "Induction and intuition in scientific thought" in "Pluto's Republic".

3.T.S.Kuhn (1962) "The structure of scientific revolutions"