Chaos theory

Picture: Jessica Taylor/Twitter/@Jess__Taylor__

I would normally run a country mile to stay out of politics, but having been confined to a hospital bed for the last 19 days, with only Sky News and reruns of Minder to occupy the mind, it’s been hard not to be absorbed by the maelstrom consuming Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. His defensive line, and that of the ministerial stooges sent out to bat for him, has been that the rows over how the Downing Street flat redecoration was paid for, whether or not he'd allegedly said “let the bodies pile high in their thousands” to avoid another lockdown, the Dyson text affair and even the Greensill lobbying scandal, are all of little national consequence. Johnson and his acolytes, whenever pressed, have pushed the message that outside the Westminster bubble none of this political ‘rough and tumble’ counts, and that most people are more interested in their COVID jabs and getting a holiday abroad this year.

Westminster is, I’d agree, invariably an introspective pit of self-absorbtion. One of the most bizarre aspects of the government response to the pandemic has been the Downing Street press conferences, wherein Boris or the minister-du-jour gives a scripted speech, hands over to the experts for slides, then invites a couple of pre-recorded questions from Joe Public before facing scrutiny from the working media. Those with a mistrust of journalists have objected to the provocative questioning from heavyweight, if divisive, politicos like the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg or Sky’s Beth Rigby, regarding them as irrelevant when pitched after enquiries from regular folk about when they’ll be able to hug Granny again. But as self-serving as the media scrutiny can be, the chaos currently surrounding Boris underlines the fundamental importance of being able to hold politicians to account.

When you take a step back from the micro dramas swirling around Johnson, a picture emerges of a character whose leadership appears pinned to charisma alone, rather than any discernible management skill. For as long as he's been in public office, his blathering, Eton-educated P.G.Wodehouse persona depicted in his hapless guest hosting experience of Have I Got News For You? has projected a form of eccentricity that has masked whatever strength he might actually bring to the party. Moreover, it has certainly exposed his myriad weaknesses. But something got him into power; something has appealed to voters, repeatedly, to get him elected, first as an MP, then mayor of London, and latterly prime minister. Even factoring in the Brexit pledge that was central to his 2019 general election victory, you have to conclude that the public is either enamoured by Johnson’s appeal or brazenly immune to his deficiencies.

Picture: Jessica Taylor/Twitter/@Jess_Taylor_

Read any profile of Boris and the image of a bumbling but slightly endearing prat has been his perennial schtick. I encountered him myself in Copenhagen a few years ago when I was attending the COP17 climate change conference, and he was there as London mayor. Unlike the pomp and ceremony that accompanied Barrack Obama (who flew in on Air Force One with the usual presidential entourage and city-wide security lockdown), or even Prince Charles, who turned up with a vast supporting army including his own film crew, I ran into Boris shuffling about on his own, anorak and copious backpack making him look more like a misplaced tourist at Kings Cross station. There are stories aplenty of his financial woes and frugality, though this seems more about disorganisation rather than any fundamental regard for economy. As editor of The Spectator, Johnson reportedly asked interns to fetch him vending machine coffees without paying for them. Another story, concerning a dinner for former Daily Telegraph editor Bill Deedes, saw Boris allegedly welch on the £40 everyone had been asked to cough up to cover the bill. Such fiscal absent mindedness is matched by the dysfunction in Johnson’s private life, what with claims of serial womanising - inside and outside of marriage - and questions about how many children he has actually fathered. Again, this can be regarded as tittle-tattle, irrelevant to professional performance, but without taking a moralising tone, you start to accumulate a picture of someone singularly incapable of running a bath, let alone the country.

Hypothetically, transplant Boris out of public life and into the private sector: if he was the CEO of a quoted company it would be hard to imagine any board of directors having much stomach for the drip-drip-drip of reputation-damaging antics. Some CEOs sort of get away with apparent zaniness - Richard Branson and Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary spring instantly to mind - but while the photo ops might be good for PR, reputation matters. Attritional reputational damage can, over time, erode a brand, impacting both investor and consumer sentiment (viz. G. Ratner). I’ve worked professionally in this area a long time, and have been embroiled in various exercises in damage-limitation, though thankfully, nothing along the same lines that 10 Downing Street and Conservative Central Office will be enduring right now. My experience has been mostly confined to addressing media speculation about M&A gossip and the occasional executive slip-up. If done right, corporate communications functions are well prepared. Own goals can mostly be avoided, even if that means putting up executives who have been media trained to within an inch of their lives. Authenticity does count, as does honesty. In a crisis the advice is always to get your arms around the problem quickly, and to communicate 'little and often'. That does not seem to be the approach being applied by Boris. The chaos that has, for as long as he’s been in the public eye, surrounded him like the dust cloud around Pig-Pen in the Peanuts cartoons, has been allowed to develop. Perhaps deliberately, as if to project some sort of flawed genius, but we’re now at a point where all these streams of dysfunction are meeting at the same delta. We’ve gone from ‘wacky Boris’, dangling from a zipwire in a publicity stunt for the 2012 Olympics, to own goals that seriously question his integrity, and which are not being resolved by obfuscation and the defensive line that no-one outside Westminster cares about it all.

Richard Nixon was ultimately undone by Watergate. The very real prospect of Boris being undone by the relative triviality of new wallpaper is ridiculous. It is now being seen, on top of the ‘bodies’ story and the Greensill claims, as being the worst of his offences and, now the Electoral Commission has stepped in, even raising the prospect of criminal charges if it is found that Johnson has breached rules of disclosure. No one can deny a prime minister the right to customise their home above the shop (and everyone entering the office gets a £30,000 grant to do so), but without knowing who commissioned what, to be undone by claims of “illegal” donations for having the flat tarted up is farcical self-injury. But, then, it does fit in to another pattern of behaviour - Boris’s love of vanity projects. As London mayor he spaffed millions on the failed ‘garden bridge’ project and plans for the ‘Boris Island’ airport in the Thames Estuary. As prime minister, he’s spent £2.5 million on a new press conference suite in Downing Street in the middle of the COVID-induced financial crisis, while there are strong rumours that he wants to commission a replacement for the royal yacht Britannia as a platform for driving international trade. Then there was the expensive repainting of one of the RAF’s Voyager tanker-cum-transport aircraft so that it flies the flag, Air Force One-style, when shipping VIPs abroad (meaning that when the plane is on military refuelling duties, it’s bright white colour scheme with red-white-and-blue tail fin is in stark contrast to the standard grey paint for the RAF’s combat aircraft). All PR stunts, to some extent.

Picture: Jessica Taylor/Twitter/@Jess_Taylor_

Are all these items erroneous? Not necessarily, but they still point to a Boris Johnson more concerned with trivialities than more important matters of state. And the fact that some of them harm or at least bruise his reputation goes hand in hand with other weaknesses in his leadership, not the least of which being the assembly of a Cabinet populated by lightweights like Priti Patel, Gavin Williamson, Grant Shapps and Liz Truss, plus the walking anachronism that is Jacob Rees-Mogg. All were seemingly appointed in reward for their Brexit loyalty rather than any notable administrative quality. And, then, there was the appointment and staunch endorsement of Dominic Cummings, even through the Barnard Castle debacle seriously undermined Johnson’s own “Stay home. Protect the NHS. Save lives” slogan.

Again, to make the corporate analogy, there’s not a company in the world that could endure such constant aggravation, even in the most unexpected of business crises. Shit happens in any life, private or public, but character and leadership are the most important aspects of ensuring your stakeholders are on board with you. Perhaps Boris likes to see himself as a maverick (along with the much-discussed notion that he is Winston Churchill-incarnate). Perhaps he is a maverick. There is sometimes a borderline between these states of being. You can never tell whether a Liam Gallagher or John Lydon are deliberately awkward, revelling saying “Boo!” (or worse) aggressively, or whether it’s a just a confected image. You could ask the same of Boris: is the dishevelled hair and the hopeless bobble hat-and-shorts jogging combo concocted to endear himself, or is that just a what-you-see-is-what-you-get statement? Maybe. But like it or not, image does count. And the hair and saggy suits merely add to the apparent cavalier attitude Boris consistently applies across most other aspects of his life. 

Little of this is, to my knowledge or, for that matter, anyone else’s, of real consequence. No one - even Her Majesty’s Opposition - believes that Boris is a bad person per se. Even if the Electoral Commission finds that offences have been committed over the Lulu Lytle wallpaper, it’s hardly worthy of carting him off to Belmarsh. But add it all up - the petty misdemeanours, gaffes, dysfunction, chaos and, yes, a propensity for dishonesty - and you have to objectively question whether Boris Johnson is fit to serve. He might be a colourful figurehead, but he's also governing the world’s fifth largest economy, a G7 member and one of five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. If he can’t organise the redecoration of his grace-and-favour flat within the correct transparency protocols, how is he expected to have his finger on the nuclear button? I’ll just leave that there.

Free fallin’

© British Airways/Stuart Bailey

I have been accused, light heartedly, I think, of pandering on these pages with my rants about air travel and, in particular, British Airways. It has been suggested that by having a moan I increase the chances of a cheeky upgrade next time I step aboard a plane belonging to what used to be known as “the world’s favourite airline”. Except that it no longer is, by a significant long chalk, and the odds of getting anything gratis out of BA under its current penny-pinching regime are next to nothing.

I write this while waiting to fly back to London from Munich with Lufthansa. I should have been flying with BA, but then they sent me an e-mail to say that my flight had been cancelled, due to the impending pilot’s strike, and that I needed to rebook with someone else. Which I did. And then, 24 hours later, I received another e-mail from British Airways saying that, actually, my flight to Munich was going to fly, after all. Except it wouldn’t have. As I arrived yesterday morning, Heathrow was a car park of BA planes. As far as the eye could see from the perimeter road there was tailfin after tailfin emblazoned with the airline’s red, white and blue motif. None of them were moving. The disruption caused by the 48-hour walkout will go on for days. In total, 1700 flights were cancelled, affecting 195,000 passengers and leaving 150 of BA's 278 planes - and 700 pilots and 4,000 cabin crew - in the wrong place, with other factors like mandatory rest hours likely to prolong the chaos. The whole affair has cost BA at least £100 million in lost revenue, which was probably the point.

Alex Cruz
© British Airways

At the heart of the dispute by BALPA, the pilots’ union, is a claim for better pay from an airline that last year made almost £2 billion in profit, the result of CEO Alex Cruz’s ruthless application of a profit-first philosophy which removed free snacks on economy class flights in a hope to compete with the likes of easyJet and Ryanair (and in the process, downgrade BA's brand value even further). Mr. Cruz, by the way, earns £1.3 million a year from his job. Now, pilots - as opposed to those who clean the planes between flights and load baggage - earn well. Pilot salaries start at £90,000 and rise to almost £170,000 for senior captains, but the union argues that pilot salaries were frozen at a time when BA was in financial recovery. On top of that, they get to book personal travel for themselves and their families for a fraction of what the travelling public has to pay. Not bad conditions. But when you see your employer not only return to profitability but make record profits on the back of a business model designed to profit even more, it is, perhaps, understandable to want a slice of the action. The upshot, however, is a two-day strike that has ruined honeymoons and wedding anniversary trips, and, crucially, disrupted business travel. Environmentalists will argue that we shouldn’t be flying at all, but this is not the point. People still need to go places, and the strike has made that significantly more challenging for those who already had plans in place.

BA's daily losses throughout the strike and its costs during the knock-on days is money it could probably do with to fix the systemic issues that have seen it plummet to 55th out of 65 airlines in global satisfaction rankings. That is entirely of its own doing and the net result of a litany of offences that have conspired to erode customer loyalty, from £4 Marks & Spencer sandwiches on short-haul flights to squeezing in more rows so that legroom (even in business class) is shorter than in many rivals' cabins; then there’s the atrocious rate of return for Executive Club members trying to build privilege tiers and Avios points - and, therefore, loyalty - and being pitifully rewarded on both counts; and, finally, simple breakdowns in operations, such as the disastrous data breach that cost it £183 million in a record fine, the two major IT outages in as many years, and the most recent debacle involving rogue cancellation e-mails. I’ll even add one more: the airline has just relaunched its iPad app, rendering it now with “limited functionality”, according to one official Twitter reply to a complaint from someone who’d launched it only to find that it now only allows users to book a new flight. No longer can it give you details of your bookings, what you’ve earned air miles for, or other useful information about your BA experience. Nothing.

These might sound like the gripes of an over-privileged individual with club class tastes and club class expectations. But as someone who has to travel a lot for work - mostly economy class, I might add - it’s been frustrating to the point of genuine sadness to see an air carrier like BA, that used to stand for something that felt that you were being treated like a valued customer and not a commodity from which to plunder for profit, go down this path of eroding customer quality. Fault lies squarely with BA’s management and that of its parent company, IAG. Their fanatical profit obsession has reduced the airline to one you'd only choose if there were no better alternatives. I will still have to fly with them on some of my regular routes, but when you look at what your loyalty is rewarded by (and access to a business lounge being about the only thing these days), I could go elsewhere and get a sense of better service all round. Flying Virgin across the Atlantic is still the more enjoyable, up to date experience it was almost 30 years ago when I made my first trip to America; the Middle Eastern carriers have long established themselves as the preferred choice for many destinations in Asia and the southern hemisphere. Even upstarts, like Norwegian, have found a business model that balances economy travel with a product you feel delivers value for money.

The recent report by reputation management specialists Alva which revealed that BA’s ranking had sunk to 55th made specific reference to passenger perception that the airline is all about cost cutting for profit. It has tried to respond by claiming investment in new aircraft like the Airbus A350 to replace shockingly ancient Boeing 747-400s and 777-200s, along with improvements to in-flight catering and, very slowly, the rollout of inflight WiFi (a technology I first experienced on an American Airlines flight 10 years ago). But these are all cosmetics - expensive, yes, but still cosmetic - when the core of the customer experience is still being eroded by simple, stupid mistakes like sending out erroneous e-mails, or allowing IT systems to collapse, stranding and severely inconveniencing hundreds of passengers.

Reputation matters, as people in my own profession are prone to incant, and when a once great airline like BA suffers such repeated fundamental failures, you’d expect Mr. Cruz and his boss, Willie Walsh, to pull their fingers out and do something about it. Worse, when people are driven to tweeting “I want my British Airways back”, it’s clear that there’s an awful lot to fix. They’d better get on with it. Fast.