Ain’t no party: scandals hobble Britain’s government

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Speed slow. 135 gigabytes of network busy. Taxes and fees extra. See mintmobile.com. Hello, and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. The history of Tamil Nadu, India's southernmost state, is murky, but an archaeological find has pushed back the date of the first civilization there in modern India. Messing with that timeline has serious implications for politics and identity. And high up on a building in Beijing, there's a listening post. Not to sniff out dissent, but to gather information on the wildly diverse bird populations that pass over. One man hopes the data he's gathering will lead to new policies that preserve that variety. But first, Britain's Prime Minister, Boris Johnson announced new restrictions for England yesterday, an attempt to buy time. While the Omicron variant spreads, they include more masking requirements, proof of vaccination for big events and a recommendation to work from home.

Ben Reilly Smith of the Telegraph. Thank you, Prime Minister.

But reporters wondered whether the announcement was a distraction from other potentially damaging news for the government.

Victorian Peace have suggested you pull this.

Announcement forward to bounce headlines about the Christmas party.

Is that true?

A day earlier, a leaked video published by the broadcaster ITV showed the Prime Minister's staff joking about holding a lockdown, defying Christmas party last year.

His fictional party was a business meeting.

And it was not socially distanced.

Earlier that same day, a former Foreign Office employee recounted a shambolic mishandling of Britain's withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Dysfunctional and chaotic. That is the damning verdict of a foreign Foreign Office whistleblower on the way it handled the evacuation of people from Afghanistan.

The embarrassments and the distractions just keep piling up. This morning, Mr. Johnson's Conservative Party was fined for failing to report money donated to freshen up his residence. Oh, and he's just had another baby, a daughter. This weekend will mark two years since the Conservatives won a thumping 80 seat majority in the House of Commons. But one thing after another has ensured that the government struggles to deliver any of the big changes. Mr. Johnson campaigned on, I think, in.

Number 10 in Downing street as Prime Minister, you can either have drama or delivery. And the more drama you have, and there's been no shortage of it in the Boris Johnson years in office, the less delivery you're able to achieve.

Ann McElvoy is a senior editor at the Economist.

He came in with a rather ambitious project, Revolution in British Government, sweeping away the more bureaucratic hurdles to reform that do dog aspects of Britain and public policy making. But this permanent sickly excitement, if you like, that the government seems to produce has just made life very difficult for those trying to deliver change.

Let's start with the two events that are the latest example of that drama. They happened on the same day on Tuesday. Let's go through them one at a First, the claim about the evacuation from Afghanistan.

Yes. This is a young man who'd worked as a junior adviser in the Foreign Office for a few years until September. He has submitted evidence to Parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee and that states that the government's evacuation from Afghanistan this summer, obviously the chaotic circumstances of having to get out very fast. But he says that this was very arbitrary. People weren't being put in any particular order of the seriousness and urgency with which they needed to be rescued. That he emailed please for help that went unanswered. And he said that was due to a lack of direction from the top, from the former Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab. There's also a personal angle to this. The whistleblower says that Boris Johnson personally ordered the airlift of dogs at an animal charity as eligible Afghans, human Afghans, were being left behind. The implication is that he did that at the behest of his wife, Boris Johnson's wife, who's got a strong interest in animal welfare. Mr. Johnson denied that the animals were given priority.

And then later that same day, there was news that really seems to have gripped the country now about an alleged Christmas party at 10 Downing Street. What's the story there?

This is a story that's emerged about a big gathering of some 40 or 50 people at the Prime Minister's office held last December. Remember that the UK was in some of its toughest lockdown measures at the time and more were looming. Then the broadcaster ITV published a video of staffers who were rehearsing a press briefing, including someone who was then very close to the Prime Minister as his spokesperson, Allegra Stratton, discussing this party.

I've just seen reports from Twitter that.

There was a Downing Street Christmas party on Friday night.

Do you recognize those reports?

I Went home. Hold on, hold on. Would the parents condone having a Christmas? What's the answer? I don't know.

Does cheese and wine.

All right. It was a business meeting.

I'm joking. Is this recorded?

Yesterday, Boris Johnson got a real beating in the House of Commons at Prime Minister's questions from both sides of the House.

I can understand how infuriating it must be to think that the people who have been setting the rules have not been following the rules, Mr. Speaker, because I was also furious to see that clip.

And Mr. Speaker, he said he was very sorry for what was in the video and the whole tone in which the issue had been addressed.

But I repeat, Mr. Speaker, that I have been repeatedly assured since these allegations emerged that there was no party and that no Covid rules were broken.

And that is what Mr. Johnson said. He'd ordered an investigation into what had happened. He would discipline those involved. It was pretty clear. There's going to be a bit of a clear out there of those involved in this incident. And Allegra Stratton, who'd been his spokesperson giving that mock briefing in the video, she resigned. Very upset.

I will regret those remarks for the.

Rest of my days.

No, for my profound apologies to all of you at home for them.

And how damaging do you think this, this latest pair of scandals will be for Mr. Johnson and his government?

I think it looks very bad, the party attorney against him over this, because it does look as if there was culture around Boris Johnson, if not directly involving him, which said, well, that's a rules for the little people. If it comes to spinning out an event or a meeting into something that looks suspiciously like a party, we can get away with it because nobody's watching. I think there is much greater doubt than there was in Conservative Party ranks that Boris Johnson is able to be the spearhead of, of the kind of reforms and changes in energy that he wanted to bring into government when he got elected. And that for Boris Johnson was the flip side of Brexit. He said, now we're out of the eu, we can go ahead and do lots of really interesting and distinctive things. The trouble is he can't. He staggers from one crisis to the next and somehow the interesting things get lost on the sidelines.

Well, I suppose he has three years left in his term, I guess I should say at most. Do you think there is a chance he could turn things around? Will any of these scandals turn into to more opportunities, do you think?

Boris Johnson is one of the great and gifted opportunists of modern politics. The question is can he turn that into grabbing opportunity and can he get the discipline and the self discipline back in his own camp, also within his government and frankly within himself to be the transformational prime minister that he promised to be? I think at the moment it feels a bit like an empty proposition. There is the Boris Johnson magic. It is a tainted stardust, but it does exist. He is very good at getting out of trouble. He does repeatedly climb out of scrapes and come back. One should never count that out. But I wouldn't underestimate that. This is a particularly deep hole that he does seem to have dug himself into. And that's what is keeping conservatives awake at night.

Thanks very much for your time, Anne.

Great to be with you, Jason.

I promise I'll only mention this twice more. Time is running out to take our survey. We're asking listeners like you to tell us what you like about the show and what you don't. Head over to economist.com intelligencesurvey or just click the link that's in the notes for today's show. Thanks a lot. The state of Tamil Nadu, on the southeastern tip of India, has a rich history. Tamil people are rightly proud of their distinct culture and language, But little has been known about just how far back that culture and that language go. Now an ancient meal found in the region is offering some food for thought.

What archaeologists have found is an extremely old rice. It was found in a clay bowl, which itself was inside a bigger bowl of actually a funerary urn in a village that's near the very, very far southern tip of India at a place called Shivakalai.

Max Rodenbeck is the Economist's South Asia Bureau chief and is based in Delhi.

This rice has just been carbon dated and proved to be 3200 years old, much older than was expected. In fact, this makes it the earliest evidence that's been found yet of civilization in the state of Tamil Nadu, which is a very large state at the bottom end of India.

And so why is some very old rice in a funerary urn a big deal?

Well, this rice pushes back what was thought to be the beginnings of civilization in the far south of India by quite a long way, by a few hundred years. So it means that civilization seems to have been underway in Tamil Nadu as early as 1150 B.C. the Tamil people, which is a nation within the greater nation of India with their own language and a very long history, have an extraordinarily rich literature of ancient poetry that goes back to B.C. but how far B.C. has not been known. They have their unique language, they have a long tradition of seafaring. But the trouble is that there hasn't been evidence, real archaeological evidence, of a much older civilization. I mean, it's partly because there's very difficult weather conditions for the survival of monuments. In Tamil Nadu. There are two annual monsoons, it pours with rain, and there's a lot of rice cultivation, which means that a lot of the land is also flooded and there's also extreme heat. So things like wood or brick just don't survive.

So it sounds as if it's a big deal even to find any archaeological remains, much less remains this old.

Yes, but you also have to do some looking. And that's part of the trouble too. There hasn't been much archaeological work in Tamil Nadu, although over the last few decades there has been more and more. So estimates of when urban settlement began have been pushed steadily back. So 20, 30 years ago, people have been thinking maybe 300 BC, 500 BC something like that. There was a big breakthrough that came in 2014 near a village called Kiladi, which is outside of Madurai, a big city in the south of Tamil Nadu. And apparently it was that archaeologists who were looking for someplace to dig were overheard chatting by a lorry driver who took them to a place where he said he used to steal coconuts in a palm grove. But he'd found a pile of pottery. And so they thought, wow, this looks great, and started digging.

And so was it as great as they thought? What did they find?

They've now found a hundred acre site that's absolutely rich with all kinds of remains. It doesn't have huge monuments or anything, but the size of this site and the many layers of things that they've found, they've now been digging for seven years shows that there was extensive urban civilization in around the 6th 7th centuries BC including signs of industrial activities such as textiles and pottery and so on, and also trade with distant parts of the world. But also writing, which is kind of interesting because it shows clear links with the later script used in the Tamil language. And also what looked like links to far earlier civilizations that existed at the far northwest of India, the so called Indus Valley civilization, which dates to about 30002000 BC. And those links to the far ancient Indian civilization are quite tantalizing.

And so the issue here is just plotting out the full timeline of Tamil Nadu and its culture and establishing exactly when it got started, just as simple as that.

Well, there's also a political angle to the whole thing because although India is a very diverse country. It has been dominated by the point of view and the history and the culture of northern India. And that culture is very linked to the language of Sanskrit, which is the language of Hindu texts. And it's an Indo European language which has evolved into various languages across the north of India. Southern India has a completely different past. They're Dravidian languages and are a distinct language family. So the two interactions. But the northern narrative has been dominant for a long time, and particularly so in the last few years under the rule of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janatha Party or BJP party, which has tended to want a very unified vision of India and a very unified vision of the Indian past to sort of simplify the history of India into a story about the sort of rise of a Sanskrit civilization that peaked in one sort of glorious pan Indian Hindu golden age. But from this perspective of people in the south of India, that sort of leaves them out of the story and they want to be back in the story. So they're kind of interested in their own past. And there's also a kind of resentment, a feeling that the government hasn't put enough money into looking into Tamil archeology in particular. So they've been pushing for a much more sort of local nationalist version of history.

So how much does this rice bowl and pushing back the earliest state of Tamil culture upend that narrative?

Well, it's complicated because the chief minister of Tamil Nadu, his name is MK Stalin, used the discovery of this rice bowl to triumphantly declare on the floor of the state assembly that, you know, his government will begin to prove now that, as he said it, history begins from the landscape of the tunnels. And so there was a lot of applause and Tamils were cheered by this, but it's not entirely true, because the very most ancient period of Indian history, history does date from much earlier, more than a thousand years earlier actually, than this rice bowl discovered in Tamil Nadu, a place called Mohenjo Daro. There was a city that had something like 40,000 souls in what is now Pakistan. And this was a complete civilization that arose in about 3000 BC and then collapsed in about 2000 BC. So at least sort of 700 years before the rice offering was made down in the far south of India. But what may become clear from this discovery in Tamil Nadu is that civilization arose in the far south at the same time that the post Indus Valley civilization arose in northern India. So it's not that it was the Tamil civilization is the very oldest in India, but that after the collapse of this really, really early civilization. There seems to have been a kind of empty period of several centuries in India when two parallel civilizations arose afterwards in both northern and southern India. So what the Tamil archaeology may prove is that the revival of civilization in India took place in the north and south at the same time.

So how does this affect the cause of the Tamil people, then, in terms of establishing themselves in the timeline of the country?

It just proves that they have a very unique contribution to make to India, that they're distinct and have the right to call themselves a proud nation unto themselves. A lot of the debate that goes on in India has to do with polemics and politics. And so it's always useful to have actual evidence to put into the story. And that's what's going to happen, is we'll have more and more real evidence to paint a fuller picture of India's past.

Max, thank you very much for your time.

My pleasure, Jason.

The skies of Beijing are known best of all for their chronically polluted air. The sounds of the city are dominated by traffic and people. But move a bit further up from the streets and listen a bit more closely and you might notice a remarkable variety.

It's a rather surprising fact about Beijing that has one of the most diverse bird populations in the world.

Ted Plafker is a China correspondent for the Economist.

Historically, China's had very little enthusiasm for studying birds or watching birds. And only until very recently has there been anything like the bird watching culture that is so familiar in Britain or other places.

And why is it that Beijing has so many different kinds of birds anyway?

It's right in the middle of a huge migratory flyway, the East Asian Flyway, that birds use to travel between their homes all over South Asia. Even further in Australia, New Zealand, when they migrate to breeding grounds in Siberia. Beijing sits right in the middle of it. And because of the Gobi Desert to the west, which birds like to avoid, and the sea to the east, huge populations of migratory birds get funneled right over the airspace of Beijing.

What kind of birds are we talking about here?

Up until now, no one has looked very carefully at exactly how many birds and what kinds, especially the ones that migrate at night and are not easily observed. But there's a British bird watching enthusiast named Terry Townsend who's lived in Beijing for many years, and he started a project to record bird song of nocturnal migratory birds and then analyze it and compare it to known databases of bird calls and actually identify the many species. He has found a wide variety of species, though. Olive back, pipit, Eurasian Skylark, among others. It will take a while to understand exactly what he's got. He's got 700 hours worth of audio files that need to be painstakingly analyzed. So it will be some months, and there's a lot more to come in terms of what he understands about the birds and the biodiversity of Beijing.

But you said traditionally there's not much of a history of birdwatching, of taking such an interest in these birds. Why is that?

It's a historical quirk. China historically has valued birds for food, for medicine, artistic or religious symbolism, but they were not really ever studied scientifically or observed for entertainment until the 19th century, when Western bird enthusiasts got here and started getting some Chinese people interested. And even then at birdwatching as a pastime never really took off until the last couple of decades, when people's incomes rose to the point where they could afford the travel and the time and the gear, the optical gear, binoculars, scopes, cameras, and.

So what's Mr. Townsend's purpose here?

Is it.

Is it just sort of cataloging what's there?

Cataloging what's there is meant to inform policymakers about how to preserve biodiversity, how to protect habitats, to understand what birds are coming through and what Beijing can do in terms of its onward development and infrastructure to preserve these habitats. Understanding which birds are here makes a huge contribution to that. It involves policies around tree planting, how they maintain Greenlands and parklands, how buildings might be built to avoid bird collisions, any number of things that could be done to protect the birds once they're better understood.

So you think this project will actually lead to policies on that kind of scale just on the basis of what's.

Flying over it could make a difference. China is receptive to input from environmentalists and civil society groups. It's very sensitive about criticism. It's done differently here, but there are pathways to. To present information and inform policy. Groups here don't tend to be campaigners the way they are in other places. The dynamic is different. But a project like this could make its way up the chain and into the years of people who need to hear about it. He's also very interested in using the project to spread awareness about just how much diversity there is here and how threatened it might be. So raising awareness and inspiring other bird enthusiasts would be a delightful outcome for him.

Thanks very much for your time, Ted.

Thank you, Jason. It's always a pleasure.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, leave us a rating and a review and you can subscribe to the economist@exterator.com intelligenceoffers. The links to subscribe and to take our survey are in the show notes. See you back here tomorrow.