John Harris

The gap between reckless Brexit promises and reality will soon be too big to ignore | John Harris

Monday, October 18th, 2021

Voters invested hope in the idea of leaving the EU. But a few years of queues and chaos could further erode public trust

What must it be like to be in the inner circles of this government, watching the economy bounce from crisis to crisis? Shortages mount, while livestock that suddenly cannot be put into the food chain is slaughtered and sent to rendering plants. Ships are diverted from UK ports because no drivers can be found to transport their cargo once it is offloaded. In response to ministers’ threats to suspend the trading arrangements for Northern Ireland – that we are now told the government never believed in to start with – there is reportedly pressure within the EU to begin preparations for a trade war.

The prime minister goes off to Marbella, where he pretends to paint pictures; the business secretary, Kwasi Kwarteng, is said to be pinning his hopes for an easing of the current energy crisis on a “wet, windy and mild” winter. Yet the Conservative party is still ahead in the polls, apparently shored up by the weakness of the Labour party and the clear, optimistic narrative that Boris Johnson has so far managed to project on to events. And I wonder: in cabinet meetings and ministerial get-togethers, do they laugh at the apparent absurdity of it all, or anxiously exchange estimates of when the roof might finally start to fall in?

John Harris is a Guardian columnist

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‘Insufficient and very defensive’: how Nick Clegg became the fall guy for Facebook’s failures

Friday, October 15th, 2021

After election humiliation and Brexit, the former UK deputy prime minister swapped Westminster for a £2.7m job in Silicon Valley. The catch? Serving as the public face of the crisis-hit company

On Sunday, Nick Clegg did a succession of interviews with some of the US’s biggest TV news shows. In his role as Facebook’s vice-president for global affairs and communications, he was defending his company after weeks of headlines about its latest crisis – this time involving Frances Haugen, a Facebook staffer turned whistleblower who had testified days earlier before a committee of the US Senate. The story centred on a stash of company documents that Haugen had given to the Wall Street Journal. The central allegation, which Facebook vehemently denies, was that the company had ignored its own research into the harms caused by some of its products in favour of the pursuit of “astronomical profits”.

Anyone au fait with the five grim years Clegg spent as the UK’s deputy prime minister would have had the familiar impression of someone emphasising his good intentions in almost impossible circumstances. His facial expression regularly expressed a sort of righteous exasperation; his words seemed to imply that if only his critics could grasp the facts, everything would quickly die down. Like any well-briefed politician, he emphasised a handful of statistics: the 40,000 content moderators Facebook employs, the $13bn (£9.5bn) it says it has spent cracking down on misinformation and hate speech; the company’s claim that the latter accounts for only five of every 10,000 Facebook posts.

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Johnson will survive these crises because he can turn them into a story about Britain | John Harris

Monday, October 11th, 2021

‘If it’s not hurting, it’s not working,’ the Tories used to say. So as the pain grows, Boris Johnson will claim it as a success

On the face of it, politics in England is in a weird, almost delirious state. The governing party has been in power for more than a decade and now claims to want to solve problems it has either ignored or worsened. Brexit is causing calamities that show no signs of easing; and the government’s handling of the pandemic has been largely awful, with a cost measured in tens of thousands of lives. Yet Boris Johnson and his party seem so full of confidence that the Prime Minister has flown off for a mid-crisis break on the Costa del Sol.

The Tories’ opponents, meanwhile, boggle at how a rightwing politics seemingly composed of stories and unlikely visions – as well as outright lies – can be so successful. Labour looks disoriented and downcast, its politicians aghast at the contrast between the government’s “fantasism” and hard reality. Part of 2021’s all-enveloping strangeness, they seem to think, is the fact that Johnson affects to be so upbeat while so many of the relevant numbers suggest chaos and uncertainty. In fact, looking back, this is the one bit of the current picture that should be completely familiar.

John Harris is a Guardian columnist

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The universal credit cut is the end point of years of ‘welfare’ cruelty | John Harris

Tuesday, October 5th, 2021

The loss of the ‘uplift’will have awful results. But with even Tories supporting the backlash, could this be the moment things change?

Here it comes. This Wednesday, the Department for Work and Pensions will finally end the £20-a-week “uplift” to universal credit introduced in March 2020. The cut will hit different households at different times, but it will formally arrive on the same day that Boris Johnson gives his big Conservative party conference speech in Manchester, which is sure to be full of boosterish talk about “levelling up”, the new global Britain – and, if recent announcements are anything to go by, the supposed prospect of a country that cannot currently feed itself becoming a major player in space exploration. On Earth, by contrast, millions of people’s sudden loss of £86.67 a month will inevitably trigger increases in debt, evictions and quiet, grinding want.

The surrounding picture only makes the cut look more cruel. Last week, the government’s furlough scheme came to an end, triggering fears of new redundancies and even more people being loaded into a benefits system that makes basic subsistence all but impossible. We all know about rising energy prices and food inflation. What the cut in universal credit will mean for lives already upturned by the pandemic hardly needs explaining; among other issues, in the midst of a crisis of childhood mental health, a change predicted to increase child poverty by nearly 300,000 children looks both reckless and nasty.

John Harris is a Guardian columnist

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Beatles on the brink: the truth about the Fab Four’s final days

Monday, September 27th, 2021

The director’s new documentary weaves together hours of unseen footage to dispel many myths about the band’s final months. John Harris, who was involved in the project, tells the inside story

On paper, the idea looked brilliant. In the opening weeks of January 1969, the Beatles were working up new songs for a televised concert, and being filmed as they did so. Where the event would take place was unclear – but as rehearsals at Twickenham film studios went on, one of their associates came up with the idea of travelling to Libya, where they would perform in the remains of a famous amphitheatre, part of an ancient Roman city called Sabratha. As the plan was discussed amid set designs and maps one Wednesday afternoon, a new element was added: why not invite a few hundred fans to join them on a specially chartered ocean liner?

Over the previous few days, John Lennon had been quiet and withdrawn, but now he seemed to be brimming with enthusiasm. The ship, he said, could be the setting for final dress rehearsals. He envisaged the group timing their set so they fell into a carefully picked musical moment just as the sun came up over the Mediterranean. If the four of them had been wondering how to present their performance, here was the most gloriously simple of answers: “God’s the gimmick,” he enthused.

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