The floating turkey
I suggest there is no better symbol of the Spirit of Britain than the cross channel ferry lying idle in Dover.
At what size does a metaphor become too unwieldy to make its point? Over the next few hundred words, I will try to find out. But I am willing to bet that it’s well over 47,000 tonnes, which just so happens to be the tonnage of P&O’s ferry, the Spirit of Britain, that sits idle in Dover at the moment.
The cross channel ferry has been deemed “deficient” by authorities following the dismissal of 800 workers by its owner, Dubai-based P&O, and their replacement with cheaper foreign staff who are presumably still learning the ropes. In the meantime, despite all the talk over the last five years of a Global Britain commanding the high seas of trade and influence, even the nearest port of Calais, only 50 miles away, is out of reach. I can’t think of a better vessel for the failed hopes of the nation, if not paying passengers, than the stricken ferry.
A rusting hulk, abandoned to the elements? Check. A former glory made impotent, having sold itself for foreign cash? Check. The cause of miles of angry queues, empty shelves and overpriced bars? Check, check and check. Even the vomit spattered carpets have their analogue in any UK town centre on a Sunday morning.
Despite noise and fury from various parts of the government when P&O announced its move, it doesn’t appear that much can be done to help the sacked workers. Worse, the possibility of legislation to prevent others from replicating P&O’s actions seems unlikely, despite it being a fine example of the ‘levelling up’ agenda that forms one of the government’s central policies. Of course, the same government that has complained of P&O’s actions in the press still favours the company’s owner, DP World, to run the free ports that form the cornerstone of post-Brexit trading freedom. But, of course.
I am sure the government itself would point to a better example of the UK’s lofty ambitions in the form of a planned national flagship and replacement for HMS Britannia. But at a cost of £200 million, and with no appetite for its commission beyond the editorial pages of the Daily Telegraph, it’s tempting to see the ship as simply another hazy mirage on the sunlit uplands of Brexit.
Many in the government would have us believe a better, if not much lighter, metaphor for the country — and the living embodiment of the Spirit of Britain — is to be found in the footage of our Prime Minister striding along burned-out streets in Kyiv, rightly showing solidarity with the people of Ukraine.
Yet even then, the rusting hulk at rest in Dover casts its massive shadow over the prime minister’s actions, like a black hole bending and folding a passing beam of light into its ghastly singularity.
For news of the Spirit of Britain’s deficiencies came on the very day it was revealed that the Prime Minister has been fined for attending a party during lockdown, thereby breaking rules that his own government introduced. Rules that his government enforced through harrowing images of ventilated patients that asked us to look into their eyes and explain why we were not obeying social distancing rules. He is the first serving Prime Minister to have committed a criminal offence while in office — no mean feat given some of his predecessors over the last 300 years — and a unique achievement even for a man who wanted to be King of the World as a child.
Famously not someone for policy detail, our original metaphor is somehow strengthened by the claim that Johnson apparently sees himself as the captain of a ship, and believes that his job is to provide encouragement to the crew and point it toward calmer and more promising waters. Squeezed into a hi-viz jacket, two thumbs held aloft and a toothy grin below his artfully unkempt fringe, it is hard not to picture him at the helm of a cross channel ferry, even while it remains stuck in dock for having the incorrect paperwork and a patchwork crew.
Johnson has, of course, defied requests for him to resign, defended by a select bunch of backbench and ministerial allies who argue that, as the country ‘is at war’, any change of leadership at this point would be mistaken.
Yet the government’s position on Ukraine would remain unchanged if he were to leave office and, despite the hysterics of the Daily Mail, the UK itself isn’t actually at war. Although one could argue that making the son of a KGB agent ‘Lord Lebedev of Siberia’, and opening the country’s floodgates to elicit Russian cash, rendered any traditional assault by Russian forces on the UK entirely unnecessary.
Even then, the same MPs who argue that Johnson is needed to ‘fight the war’ forget that, were the UK to actually be at war, victory would require more than warships that don’t work in warm waters. Armoured vehicles that don’t deafen the troops inside them might be useful, as would an air force with a few more planes.
In the final analysis, then, maybe that ferry moored up in Dover could serve as more than a metaphor, and be pressed into active service? Those workers might get their jobs back, and a uniform to boot. Having fought its battles and secured its glory, the ship would then be towed up the Thames to Rotherhithe and scrapped, secured in popular memory as a Fighting Temeraire, not a floating turkey.
