Kayfabe or magic circle?

Cummings tells us a lot about the state we are in

Chris Johns

Kayfabe refers to the practice - or art form - embodied in professional wrestling that demands the performance - the fight - to be completely staged but is presented as authentic. ‘Suspension of disbelief’ is invoked, with everyone knowing that what happens is pure fiction but nobody ever acknowledges the lie. Part of the fun is pretending it’s all real. It is, like Douglas Adams’ description of humanity, mostly harmless. Applied to fighting it means injuries are rare. The lack of seriousness, the absence of true competition, doesn’t matter, at least to devotees. It may not represent Olympian idealism but that is almost the point. It’s just another game, albeit one with unusual, if not unique, rules. Olympians fix things with drugs and space-age running shoes; wrestlers do it with it choreographers.

Kayfabe, in a political context, has several variations, depending on the country where it is played. In Ireland, civil war politics and all that. In America:

Dominic Cummings’ recent interview with BBC Political Editor, Laura Kuenssberg, has been described as pure Kayfabe. On the surface, the slogan on the middle chap’s T-shirt, above, captures most of it. But by no means all.

There are lots of similarities between modern political discourse and professional wrestling; insiders know the rules and the moves, everyone plays the game. In Westminster, the lobby system of anonymous briefings to the press and the ‘sources close to Downing Street’ are the ropes around the ring. No referee is needed, as no one ever breaks the rules. Other countries have their own system but there is usually a riff on the Kayfabe theme: a game played by insiders which few onlookers take terribly seriously. And that’s Cummings’ problem: his audience views his ongoing ‘revelations’ with amusement but little else.

Cummings played the game very well until his Barnard Castle eye test. Having broken the political Kayfabe rules then, he has been struggling to rewrite them ever since - without, it has to be said, much success. Switching metaphors, he is now viewed by his peers, Westminster insiders, in the way magicians treat one of their own who has revealed the ways in which the tricks, sleights of hand and outright cons are actually pulled off. Outside the political bubble, his verbal blows don’t land, especially on Johnson. If what he said is half true, we might now reasonably ask ‘will anything ever stick to Boris?’.

Mic Wright has brilliantly described the Cummings interview in explicit wrestling terms. It’s worth a read. He reserves as much criticism for Kuenssberg as he does for Cummings. And doesn’t have many nice things to say about the rest of the Westminster press pack.

Kuenssberg’s looks of surprise - occasionally horror - when she heard Cummings’ replies to her questions could have been as inauthentic as any fake wrestling move. Wright suggests that Kuenssberg knew all the answers to her questions - she must have done, goes the argument, as she was at the centre of things when Cummings was in power. Cummings was usually the ‘Downing Street source’ that Kuenssberg would cite in her nightly reports.

But it’s hard to say whether Kuenssberg was faking it or not. . A more charitable take would be that she was left feeling very uncomfortable by the extent to which she was manipulated by Cummings over the past year or two. Which, in no small part, was one obvious feature of the interview. Equally, she could just have been astonished that here was someone recently at the centre of political power actually answering the questions he was asked. We all know how rare an event that is: Danny Finkelstein suggests(£) that should Johnson ever actually be forced to answer a difficult question he could be in trouble. But nobody has ever answered a Parliamentary PM question since the first one was asked over 60 years ago (Harold Macmillan simply replied with ‘yes’).

Kuenssberg was clearly irritated by Cummings’ smirks which accompanied most of his Brexit testimony. Cummings said that he still doesn’t know whether Brexit was a good idea. When challenged on the ‘£350m a week for the NHS’ and the ‘threat’ of imminent Turkish entry to the EU he did a couple of things.

First, he clearly enjoyed the fact that these two great lies came wrapped around a kernel of truth. All great lies do. It enables the liar to bait-and-switch, to focus on the tiny bit that is true. As Kuenssberg forcefully reminded Cummings, the reason why the courts demand the whole truth, not just a partial truth, is that context matters: the whole picture must be revealed if the important truth is not to be obscured. Partial truths can conceal much bigger lies. Importantly, Cummings didn’t deny the bigger lies.

Which brings us to the next big reveal: Cummings cheerfully admitted that he delighted in driving Remainers round the twist with his partial truths/big lies strategy. Yanking Remainers’ chains was an objective in and of itself. It’s probably an Oxford thing: people who annoyed you in the junior common room finally get their comeuppance. Revenge is a dish best eaten cold and other schoolboy aphorisms come to mind.

So, in no small part, Brexit was a game played by an insider to put one over on people, Remainers, against whom he held a grudge. Collateral damage for the rest of us? Irrelevant - but the only time Cummings looked uncomfortable was when Kuenssberg asked him about that damage.

Apart from the great Brexit reveal, Cummings’ biggest allegations were that Johnson is a lockdown sceptic, isn’t fit to be Prime Minister, the whole truth wasn’t told about the eye test, the future ex-wife of the PM wields a lot of power and that Johnson thinks The Telegraph, his past and future employer, is his real boss. Those of us who think the current head of the UK Government is merely on sabbatical from his job as a newspaper columnist had all their worst suspicions confirmed.

Cummings told us that he and a shadowy group of others gave thought to removing Johnson from office just after the last general election. The look of astonishment on Kuenssberg’s face was, I think, genuine.

There was a time when any of these allegations would have created a media storm such that the people at the centre of them would be in a lot of trouble. Not today. The times that we live in.

David Aaronovitch had a slightly different take(£). I’ll leave it here:

Perhaps it was like this in 1461 when Cao Jixiang, chief eunuch at the court of the Ming emperor of China, realised that his coup to depose his master and replace him with the Crown Prince had failed. He doubtless told himself that it had been a noble enterprise.