Anthony Steen, he of the tree surgeon’s bills, has said voters are just jealous. Nadine Dorries complains about a witch-hunt. The party leaders are struggling to distance themselves from the issues and Rowan Williams is telling the public to stop humiliating MPs – in the name of democracy itself. So what is actually going to be the result of this? The momentum does not seem to be subsiding, and the scandal is the only real show in town, with no-one really interested in the side dishes of Europe (even in the face of impending European elections, though I don’t think David Cameron can breathe a sigh of relief quite yet over his decision to leave the EPP and the Treaty of Lisbon being sidelined in the face of the biggest onslaught of parliamentary sleaze Britain has seen since 1688 – Owlperson chillingly says, that’s for next week...) and Royal Mail privatisation. It needs to be read for at this stage since I think things are only just beginning, two weeks after the first revelations were made public (and Owlperson said to me, Louise...I don’t think you want to watch the news tonight...).
Without much further ado, let us read for the further progression and ins and outs of this scandal and its potential consequences. The Speaker has gone – but will the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition be next? Cameron is already sailing into dangerous waters by propping up Bill Wiggin, and desperate “reshuffilitis” ((c) Andrew Grice, the Independent) is breaking out with Hazel Blears looking precarious, but not yet gone, and Jacqui Smith, the first cuckoo of spring, probably for the chop.
I am using a deck without occult imagery – the Angel Tarot, which is largely done with the style of ordinary playing cards – so that I can remove the tedious typing of meanings and work freeform for a while. It is always nice to rely on a printed meaning, but sometimes it can be restrictive for relying on one’s own sixth senses.
Situation – X Pentacles, reversed
The situation is damaging to the internal structure and is not just one’s average sleaze scandal where the perpetrator can be sacked and the status quo continue. This is the wholesale abuse of power that has overturned the government’s ability to rule the country and the Opposition’s ability to hold the executive to account. Alexander Chancellor in today’s Guardian complains that 9/11 was much more deserving of such long and thorough coverage, but he misses the point – this is the British version of 9/11 – just as unforeseeable, just as deadly to the status quo and just as likely to prove a point of no return than just remain a simple problem with Jacqui Smith’s bath plugs.
Appearance to the public as of 22 May 2009 – Ace of Pentacles, reversed
A gift, but a deadly gift. The public exposure has given people back control of their democracy, but potentially at the cost of effective government over the summer at least and possibly political sclerosis while the situation is resolved. Although the legislature would not be sitting over the summer months anyway, the chaos threatens to deprive us of the control needed on public officials and private servants – from ministers, if not MPs – and this damage could lead to virtual anarchy unless order is imposed. The public know that damage has been done, but are beginning also to realise that anarchy will now reign until there can be a direct and concrete resolution. They will not be pacified by reshuffles – rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic for both parties – and will only be satisfied with wholesale change.
Appearance to the Labour party leadership – X Swords, reversed
Actually, it may have stopped the moves against Gordon Brown proposed only two or three weeks ago because of mounting concern that he was not up to the job. It stopped the process for Alan Johnson in its tracks and perhaps handed Brown more latitude to get tough. It might have prevented a bloodbath even after the European Elections because no potential leadership challenger has emerged as a complete saint from this. Anyone taking over would have to be completely clean to stand a chance. I also think that even if Labour are scattered to the four winds at the European elections – and the Salford by-election suggests perhaps not, or at least that this heavy defeat will drag the Tories down with them – Brown stands a chance of limping towards the next election with at least his office intact, even if he is not actually able to command the same authority as he was during the winter.
Appearance to the Tory leadership – III Pentacles, reversed
A lot has been said about how this had wrecked Cameron’s attempts to modernise the Conservative Party and its image (though in my opinion that began a long time before he became leader: university students were joining the party in increasing numbers since just after the 2001 election, according to Owlperson – and his Bullingdon Club photographs and Etonian origins belied that anyway). In that sense, yes it has, but it has also damaged the party at just the time when it was beginning to construct (but only just beginning) its manifesto for the next election. Never robust, this has been the most damaging time for Cameron’s “project” as a whole, because there is not much more time to rebuild the platform. In my mind’s eye I could always see a house being built, as in the biblical parable, on the sandy shore rather than on the rocky hinterland; it took this scandal to wash away the flimsy Cameroon programme where something much more solid much earlier on might at least have saved the Tories from total oblivion and embarrassment by Anthony Steen’s ludicrous comments and Cameron’s desperate attempt to shore up Bill Wiggin.
Appearance to the Labour backbenches – The Moon, reversed
The Moon in itself is a card which hides the truth of a situation behind opacity and cryptic clues. Working through this card can take precious time itself; Labour backbenchers therefore may find that they are unable to agree on what seems right to do and do not have enough information at their fingertips to make a coherent judgements. Upright the Moon can suggest the querent knows what to do intuitively; here however it is only sheer luck which might assist the Labour backbenches stave off defeat and collapse because they have no real compass to guide them except for a morass of conflicting advice and evidence of the public’s mood. The Salford local by-election was fought on issues closer to the ground – and they still won it even two weeks in to the apparent political apocalypse Westminster is facing – but Labour will just need to wander for the moment before the direction in which they are going becomes clear.
Appearance to the Tory backbenches – IX Cups, reversed
The Nine of Cups reversed is drunkenness, excess and a hangover – the party is over for the Tories as well as Labour. Although Cameron is not directly in the line of fire, this is, of course, the point at which last time the Tories began to doubt victory under Howard and come badly off the rails as a result. Howard never regained the absolute support and conviction of his parliamentary colleagues, and they decided that another term was necessary to prime the party for resurgence. But Cameron has failed to overcome this hurdle as well, and in a more spectacular way than his predecessor failed because there is much more at stake. The mood in the party may not revive and however much Cameron tries to prevent his own record being called into question, going forward, the election is no longer looking such a certainty.
Appearance to the guilty parties (of all stripes and none) – King of Pentacles, reversed
The party is definitely over and the ability to scam and manipulate the public purse ended. Some have responded with the appropriate mea culpa and quit. Some, like Steen and Dorries, have not gone so quietly. But the important thing here is that the misuse of money was cardinal – it was driving the system forward. The King of Pentacles is one of the most powerful court cards because he has control of his suit and his suit is that of the material, substantial Pentacles or Coins – earth. They were playing with real money, and they got shafted. This shows the collapse of the means, in other words, of pursuing the goals that have usurped proper governance, opposition, and participation in the democracy they were elected to serve. Guilty as charged, and in a very dangerous spot.
Roots of the situation on 22 May 2009 – VIII Pentacles, reversed
This was the momentum and constructive elements of this card working to undo what was being done and making a coherent start into cleaning the situation up. Michael Martin has already become the first casualty of the undoing of the Mother of Parliaments in the mother of all sleaze scandals, and more and more hitherto unblemished careers are being ruined. Nadine Dorries, for example, with her arrogance and her dubious involvement in Smeargate, is now probably too toxic for Cameron – if it is he who forms the next government at all – to consider for his ministerial team. Owlperson, who has been watching her since her election in 2005, says that he is sorry she has been tainted in this way as she would have made a good minister for any leadership, and perhaps might have got to the cabinet. The deconstructing of careers is in full swing and has led us to the important phase – the aftermath of the revelations.
Seeds sown by the situation – II Wands, reversed
The situation begins to boil down to a climax, and intensification is matched by the kind of foot-dragging that just generates frustration, exasperation and climax. The party leaders are responding with the kind of crass partisanship, resignation (though not yet quite literally) and a scramble to defend people they are close to while throwing others to the hungry wolves of Fleet Street. It should not be dependent on who was at school with who – all the guilty need to be punished, but this may only happen when the party leaders are forced into it rather than happening as a natural process of catharsis.
Advice to Brown – IX Pentacles, reversed
Brown should seek consensus immediately since he no longer enjoys the ability to be safe within himself. His rather chequered premiership has surprised me at times – he appeared to do countless Houdini acts over the winter – conference, Glenrothes, the PBR – and he appeared to have regained control until the turmoil of this spring emerged to almost fatally damage him. He did, however, during much of 2008, still smile unnervingly – most notably when he was greeting the triumphant Olympic athletes home from Beijing – which suggested me that he was behaving as in the upright Nine of Pentacles: alone, but secure within because he knew his enemies were more inept than he was (most notably David Miliband’s ill-timed declaration of his Cabinet team before there was even a vacancy for leader, which in my opinion cost him the top job – oh yes, that and the bananas). Now he needs to understand the days of being able to retreat within himself are over and that if he wants to keep both his leadership of the Labour Party and his occupancy of Number 10, he needs to reach out and become the charismatic demagogue his predecessor was.
Advice to Cameron – Knight of Pentacles, reversed
Tricky as advice, but reaching into the meaning of the upright card, and the element of Pentacles (that of material substance), Cameron needs to act as the Knight and be able to move the discussion on to definite ways and means of governing if he really is ready for the election he desires. As he is now, with the reversed Knight in his cards, not only can he not aspire to the pro-active King or even the responsive Queen, but he cannot fulfil what the Tories need to fight an election so soon after this maelstrom has done its worst. He should put on the brakes on calling for a general poll – though we all know he won’t – and he should try to put together what manifesto he can to try and convince the public – and even The Sun itself, with whom he united in his call for an early election – that he is ready to govern in reality as well as in his personal PR. The reversal means simply that this is not possible given the position or mindset he is in.
Warning to Brown – IV Wands, reversed
Structure is beginning to break down. Brown can no longer govern with this scandal out in the open; the government is descending into anarchy and at risk of taking the country with it. The IV denotes a tenuous structure at best – it would be better to see Pentacles as signifying real grounding and strength, and the Wands as temporary, shifting but internally consistent bringers of balance (as in the difference between a brick house and a canvas tent). So what little balance and harmony there was for the Prime Minister before this episode, there is now very little of that left and what’s more, it threatens to bring down the whole legislature and executive rather than just a couple of convenient scapegoats.
Warning to Cameron – III Wands, reversed
Patience is rapidly running out in some quarters, and while some people in the press try and claim Cameron’s leadership was better than Brown’s in the initial phases of this scandal, there needs to be a lot more done now than protecting his Shadow Cabinet and hoping the people will swallow Tory propaganda about needing a new culture. The rot has set in and as the country and its government moves away from the precious stability that has long been a comforting feature of the Westminster system, so the Opposition is on more and more dangerous ground that could, if Cameron is not careful, turn into quicksand for him as well as Brown. The public – as far as I can see on the blogosphere at least – is calling for an election, but it has a unique opportunity also to call for someone other than the current tainted leaderships. Cameron may have gotten away with platitudes and humbug in the security that he was not the leader of the Labour Party for so long, but now cannot rely on that because of the damage to his party too. He has a few weeks to convince the electorate that he can rise above this, but unfortunately was never aware, during the good times, how much he had to do to lay in stores for the bad times. Now they are upon him, the ground is shifting too dangerously to do anything about that.
Direction for Labour – II Cups
This could be good for Labour – it means a re-connection with their electorate and a re-connection with the party who were sidelined too long. It seems that after a long string of negative issues, this card at least gives some hope that the damage may not in their case be absolutely terminal – relative to the above warnings, at least. There is still the connection there, as we saw in Salford, so the first thing for Labour to do is to jettison those who have broken the rules and shattered moral standards – even if it takes half their parliamentary party away – and then go to the country while the Tories still lag behind in policy terms. But I don’t feel this is what will ultimately happen as I don’t feel confident that this connection will be enough in the long run to save the system from going under. I think it’s only a short term way of shoring up the vote and the inability of Westminster to govern effectively with a lot of its membership under a cloud will ultimately dwarf any attempt to re-orientate a discredited parliament.
Direction for the Tories – Temperance, reversed
This is more destabilising in the short term for the Tories as they have a lot more to lose than Labour – no less than their credibility as a possible alternative and the possibility of the fragmenting of the opposition to Labour just when they were beginning to gather together support which in 2005 was stolen by UKIP, Veritas, the BNP and, oh yes, the Liberal Democrats under Charles Kennedy. If Cameron cannot make sizeable gains on June 4 then the party may go backwards into its pre-2005 funk rather than forwards into government. And, as so often with the Tories, it will be the leader that gets the blame, not the unruly and mulish backbenches or grassroots.
Direction for the Liberals – Judgement, reversed
The Liberal Democrats would like to gain from this as they did from Howard’s dithering in 2004 but they find themselves this time round on the wrong side of the fence – the scandal has claimed those previously felt to be upright and upstanding members such as Menzies Campbell and Lembit Opik. Owlperson predicted Campbell’s downfall the summer before it happened and told me he wouldn’t survive to the new era he’s been on about for a long time. (Lembit survives, to the delight of all ufologists and Estonians out there.) This is really that the LibDems, with their own problems, cannot reap this political whirlwind and are as in need of a clearout as the big two are.
Solution for all – VIII Swords
There is no way out of this. Even though the allegations may subside – though not yet I feel – Westminster is utterly trapped until it deals with this, and the public will not be fobbed off with a promise of reform or reconstruction – it will cause the actual downfall and/or arrest of other senior figures before too long. The energies are trapped and the actual bomb has not yet gone off.
Outcome for 23-30 May – Page of Wands
There is no recess from this scandal; there are only for now attempts to deflect or manipulate it further and further, which will have the knock on effect of exacerbating it. The Page of Wands is playing with matches – there is here a sense of trying too hard to get over this issue and failing, because the people involved are too inept to deal with it themselves. It is far too far outside the realms of normal business that it resembles 9/11 in its scale and effect – and combined with other issues, which the Government is gamely trying to deal with too, it will ignite more fires rather than put them out. Recess is not an effective firebreak when the people concerned insist on using barbeques in a shed full of gunpowder.
Outcome for the European elections – II Pentacles
The shift in emphasis begins away from the money side of things to deeper and more direct issues, and since the design on this card resembles a tape winding on, there are still ways to keep this going and perhaps solidify and substantiate the effect into a genuine process of reform as well as keeping the destructive mood of the public still in political consciousness. We cannot go back – we can only go forward.
Outcome for the General Election – V Swords
The defeat of the old order and the beginning of the new. This does not bode well for either party – it suggests that before we can go forward to any new Parliament, we need to stop this one in its tracks and get to the bottom of the corruption. There is no Cameron government, and no Brown government, and no messy hung parliament either – this is a finality beyond the possibility of normal rules purely because this has been Britain’s political 9/11. 8/5, anyone?
Timing of significance – III Cups, reversed
A reversed card in this position suggests time has already elapsed, and this is straightforwardly the end of a three month period in which politics has been shaken out of its complacent and somnolent mien and driven towards some sort of climax. March was marked more by stasis than anything else, though Brown began to look precarious because of worsening economic issues and the debate over Fred the Shred Goodwin. April brought us party politics returning with a vengeance, with the G20, the Budget and Smeargate ruining Brown’s tenuous balance between a stagnant Conservative Party and a fading Labour, and then of course May has been destructive and devastating for all and has redrawn the political map and opened the door to not only to the return of the fringe (which was all but moribund as a result of the return of the Conservative opposition to direct favour) but also the threat of total anarchy still hanging over our heads. Going forward, therefore, we will enter a newer and stranger era, which doesn’t look as if it will end with the current system completely intact.
