It’s been yet another turbulent fortnight in politics, accelerating to such a degree that I was put in mind of the name of the 1960s satirical show ‘That was the Week that was’ (some may be old enough even to have heard of it!). This week alone, we’ve seen Rishi Sunak touting his hard wrought Windsor Framework around Westminster and Northern Ireland, trying to garner support for his solution to the increasingly unworkable Northern Ireland deadlock, the shocking if not surprising revelation by Isabel Oakeshott of the Matt Hancock incriminating WhatsApp exchanges during the pandemic and now the news that top civil servant and Partygate investigator Sue Gray has been offered the job of Keir Starmer’s Chief of Staff. This has coincided with the release by the Commons Privileges Committee of their preliminary findings on whether Boris Johnson misled Parliament, which indicated there was substantial evidence relating to multiple occasions. All of this news (and much more) is pretty unsettling and not conducive to our mental wellbeing.
I’m no fan of Sunak but it did seem a shame that his efforts to find, with the EU, a way around the deadlock resulted immediately in jealous and deluded Brexit die-hards like ‘Lord’ Frost trying to decry them. Unfortunately for them, senior Tories were split on this too, ERG stalwart Steve Baker for one (with an irony bypass) praising the initiative and saying how the last 7 years of infighting had ruined his mental health. No acknowledgement, naturally, of how the mental wellbeing of many has been severely undermined by all the dishonesty, corruption and incompetence we’ve witnessed on the part of his government. Many tweeters and commentators were struck by four particular aspects of this debate: the hypocrisy of many Tory MPs now seizing on the proposals when they’d previously voted for the Withdrawal Agreement and NI Protocol; the irony of Sunak excitedly talking up this deal on the basis that it offered Northern Ireland access to both markets (an advantage denied to the rest of the UK); the extent to which the government and media still seem in thrall to the hardline DUP, which seems determined never to accept anything; and the suggestion of ‘constitutional impropriety’ emanating from the involvement of King Charles.
A key irritant has also been the attention paid to what Boris Johnson thinks and his inarticulately expressed ‘verdict’ issued on Thursday. Of course he won’t want to vote for a measure completely contradicting his own and he’s still very much working to bring down Sunak, seen as the one who ‘stabbed him in the back’. Surely what’s undeniable is that the UK’s post-Brexit relations with the EU are bound to be complex and in order to accommodate the contradictory factors relating to Northern Ireland, some compromise on both sides will be necessary. Analyses of the small print showed, predictably, that the measures didn’t quite measure up to the promises of Sunak’s bullish sales job, but the proposals demonstrated the significant amount of work and negotiation having taken place and constitute a marked improvement on existing post-Brexit trade procedures. Meanwhile, Johnson and his allies are keen for the Northern Ireland bill currently going through Parliament not to be killed off – no surprise there, as this would be a double whammy for them which their wounded egos would struggle to cope with.
A piece of news I found puzzling was Joe Biden announcing that he was sending an envoy to Northern Ireland, so concerned is he for the protection of the Good Friday Agreement. Surely this has to be agreed via diplomacy: heads of state can’t just send envoys wherever they like without discussion or agreement as this would be a clear breach of that country’s integrity and autonomy.
The Windsor Framework debate was still going hammer and tongs, with those associated with the original non ‘oven ready deal’ sniping from the sidelines, when a powerful and interestingly timed intervention by Tory journalist Isabel Oakeshott burst onto the scene. She had collaborated with former health secretary Matt Hancock in the writing of his book, Pandemic Diaries, and this week released to the Telegraph a massive tranche (100,000) of WhatsApp messages dating from the Covid era which she had been given access to in her role as co-author. Their predictably incriminating nature, relating to so many policy areas including the decision not to test those being discharged from hospital into care homes, has understandably caused a media storm. During a tempestuous interview with Nick Robinson on Radio 4’s Today programme, Oakeshott strongly defended her actions as being in the public interest, despite, as Robinson reminded her several times, these involving breaking confidentiality and an NDA. What some have suggested sounds the most likely motive: although many sections of the media irresponsibly failed to mention this, she is the partner of Richard Tice, head of right-wing populist Reform UK party, set up in 2021, which is angling to pick up support from those increasingly disillusioned with the Tories. Two other motives are her desire to attack the lockdown policy and to ‘avoid a Covid whitewash’ as the official inquiry is now gathering pace.
Predictably, Matt Hancock played the victim card, complaining of betrayal, and immediately contacted Oakeshott telling her she’d made ‘a big mistake’, which she described as a threatening message. Needless to say, this news shone the spotlight on broader issues, such as inexperienced politicians overruling advice from top scientific and medical officers to suit their political agenda, and the increasing tendency under this administration to govern via WhatsApp, with no minutes taken of meetings and no permanent records kept. Extraordinarily, Radio 4 chose to interview Hancock apologist Lord Jim Bethell about this, who first said this (WhatsApp) is how modern organisations work these days, soon after contradicting himself to say it wasn’t how government worked in terms of serious decisions and things were done properly at all times. An interviewee like this has little credibility, especially given that Bethell was a former health minister who managed to ‘lose’ his mobile phone containing numerous incriminating messages about the corrupt PPE VIP lane.
But the messages also demonstrate what many long suspected: that policy was being made on the hoof and the government was not, as per their mantra, ‘following the science’, especially in the case of the care home hospital discharges. Devi Sridhar, chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, writes: ‘When debating how best to respond to the pandemic, my public health colleagues and I were driven by looking at the latest data, analysing it and presenting detailed advice to ministers. In contrast, Hancock’s messages on testing imply that he was more driven by publicity, and what would make him look good – the phrase “muddies the waters” seems to refer to the perception of a policy, rather than how it would work’. She cites two further examples: the decision to courier a Covid test to one of Jacob Rees-Mogg’s children (different rules for the ‘elite’ and the British public) and ‘the chaotic way in which testing and closures were discussed and implemented’ including the failure to act on Covid before March 2020. ‘…. little planning or preparation went into dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic before late March 2020. ‘….the messages strongly suggest the advice was there – it just wasn’t acted on’.
What a damning verdict this is: ‘By acting too late, and then with its conduct throughout the pandemic, the government let us down during arguably the largest crisis of our generation. Too many people died before their time. Too many health workers worked in unsafe and risky conditions. Repeated lockdowns decimated financial stability for small and medium-sized businesses. Schools were closed in Britain for far too long because preparations weren’t made on how to keep them open safely. Scientists took the brunt of the abuse and anger from the major losers. Ministers and their friends made their own rules and made money during the crisis. And Matt Hancock launched a lucrative media career off the back of it all’.
Every day in the media there have been further revelations about Matt Hancock’s conduct, including knowing that Covid cases were going up in the ill-advised Eat Out to Help Out. The Guardian’s deputy political editor, Jessica Elgot, said: ‘Matt Hancock admits in this message to Simon Case that he helped cover up rising cases in key areas during Eat Out to Help Out. Strikes me as potentially the biggest revelation yet…’. But this was before the latest one the media have seized on, that he spent hours with ‘his team’ trying to figure out whether the damaging footage of his office clinch could be justified. And here’s yet another example of Boris Johnson’s disregard for rules applying to everyone else: ‘By his own account, he said that Boris Johnson had assured him he could carry on even though he and Coladangelo had been pictured kissing in his office in breach of his own social-distancing guidelines’. What’s also noticeable about Hancock is that he seems to be communicating through a ‘spokesman’: is he really so cowardly he can’t stand up and use his own voice? We have to wonder what will happen now to his plan for a future in the media, having set up his own tv company.
What’s been sickening to see is how Boris Johnson is still, despite all the evidence against him, trying to defend himself from the issue of whether he misled Parliament, suggesting that no one told him what everyone else sees as parties were not ‘within the rules’. He told Sky News: ‘I believe these events were within the rules. Nobody told me before or after anything to the contrary’ whereupon the interviewer responded: ‘The report has Whatsapps in it from your director of communications saying things like, I’m struggling to see how this is within the rules.”’ What a lack of personal responsibility. Not only that but there’s evidence that Johnson and his then government tried to impede and delay the committee’s work by withholding or redacting evidence. As a tweeter observed: ‘It’s simply not credible that a former PM, Boris Johnson especially, would not have understood the Covid rules AND they had many advisers, not that anything can be blamed on them. Is there anything he won’t stoop to to get off?’
Johnson allies have been falling over each other trying to discredit Sue Gray and her report (which of course the Privileges Committee will be using), having previously spoken of her very warmly. The choice of vocabulary is interesting, some of them resorting to pomp (like Rees-Mogg) and Johnson himself calling the Sue Gray job offer ‘a peculiarity’ and ‘surreal’. What these people just cannot get their heads round is their clear belief that only they can control the political agenda whereas now Keir Starmer has caught them on the back foot. On Friday Radio 4’s World at One listeners were taken aback that former Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries was given 20 minutes of air time to rant about this appointment, making all kinds of unproven allegations such as Starmer and Gray having been friends and talking for a long time, Gray had broken the civil service code and ‘had deep political motivations’, etc. Dorries suggested that as a result of Gray discrediting herself, (as Dorries sees it) the Committee could no longer use the Partygate report in their deliberations about Johnson. One tweeter said: ‘Now we see why Mad Nads and Rees-Mogg are jumping so heavily on the Sue Gray story. It’s a desperate rearguard action to save their boy’. And they’re happy to use the civil service code as a stick when they and their boss have shown scant regard for both breaches of the Ministerial Code and conflict of interest. Roll on 20th March, when Johnson will appear before the televised Committee hearing – could it be the first time in his entitled life that chickens finally come home to roost?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-64836425
There’s a splendid evisceration of the former Prime Minister in The Observer by Andrew Rawnsley, who contends that Johnson’s ‘ludicrous claims that he was brought down by a leftwing conspiracy show how frightened he is…. He just can’t stop trying to deceive himself and everyone else about why he was removed because he can no more handle the truth than he can speak it. He is compelled to blame anyone but himself because otherwise he would have to face up to the fatal character flaws that self-incinerated his premiership. He will never find it in himself to accept that the architect of Boris Johnson’s disgrace was Boris Johnson….. His misconduct, his mendacity and his toxicity in the office he so debased – these were the reasons why he was removed. And not by some imaginary “socialist cabal”, but by his own party’. Rawnsley rightly frames people like Dorries and Rees-Mogg for pushing the Boris Johnson rescue attempt, cynically trying to undermine Sue Gray and her report but, even more dangerously, the Privileges Committee itself. It will be interesting to see whether any of Johnson’s pathetic attempts to rewrite history (eg alluding to his having ‘stepped down’ last summer when in fact he clung on like a limpet until he was forced out of office by multiple ministerial resignations) gain any traction. Surely no longer.
There’s also a growing body of opinion suggesting that the Cabinet Secretary Simon Case should be investigated: he’s been involved in or behind a number of questionable developments including having attended one of the Partygate gatherings himself, was a regular WhatsApp messager with Matt Hancock including ones admitting to purposefully frightening the public about a Covid variant, playing a role in the appointment of Tory donor Richard Sharp to the BBC Chair role and the Boris Johnson loan, and now having accelerated the search by Sue Gray for pastures new after he turned her down for the senior civil service role at the new Department for Energy Security and New Zero.
On the subject of Rees-Mogg, even if you don’t approve of GB News (seemingly the home of has-beens) it’s worth catching a bit of Farage (7 pm Monday to Thursday) and new boy JRM at 8 pm. He comes across very differently from his normal humourless and pompous self and it’s quite amusing to see how he’s obviously been taught some of Farage’s media presenting skills or are they tics?
All of this has brought the delayed Covid Inquiry further under the spotlight, its Terms of Reference only having been agreed last summer. The media have been alluding to the possibility of reduced confidence in this Inquiry, led by Baroness Hallett, partly due to the recent political shenanigans. Lack of confidence could surely also arise from so many inquiries proving to be whitewashes, with no sanction meted out to wrongdoers. Hallett’s undertakings sound very promising, though, as she seems determined to listen to those who suffered and to reject any attempt to influence or undermine the Inquiry. It’s a shame that the taking of evidence for its first investigation (into pandemic preparedness) won’t start until the summer, although preliminary hearings for some of the investigations have already taken place.
Next to all this, the salad vegetable (and more general food) shortages of last weekend’s news seem to have receded somewhat, although they really haven’t and it’s common to see empty shelves. It’s doubtful whether Environment Minister Therese Coffey grasped how ridiculous and out of touch she appeared responding to a key question in the House of Commons (also using terrible English, alluding to ‘aspects of lettuce and tomatoes’) saying that people should instead be ‘cherishing’ home grown items like turnips. The shortages were blamed on bad weather in Spain, at no point was Brexit cited as a factor and unfortunately significant parts of the media collude with this narrative.
Turnipgate was trending on Twitter in no time at all. Besides the fact that turnips aren’t easy to find in shops (I only saw some on a market stall) a Radio 4 interview with the former ‘King Turnip’ farmer was testament to the absurdity of her position. Farmer Parry said he’d stopped growing them about six months ago because of the difficulty getting labour, the poor deal offered by supermarkets and (the key one?) turnips weren’t seen as ‘a sexy vegetable’. No wonder, as they’re pretty nasty and anyone talking them up has advised, for example, frying in garlic butter, which would make even cardboard taste half decent. They might at one time have passed muster as an accompaniment to traditional British dishes (including haggis, of course) but they definitely don’t go with most modern cuisine.
As time passes and parliamentarians are increasingly thinking about the next General Election, it’s interesting to see evidence of both lack of thought and skulduggery on the part of local constituency associations. It’s been suggested that some Tory MPs are being deselected (eg Damian Green) for being ‘disloyal’ to Boris Johnson, yet others like Therese Coffey are inexplicably being reselected despite making a mess of every government job they’ve done. ‘The Conservative MP Damian Green, the former de facto deputy prime minister, has been rejected as the party’s candidate for the newly created Weald of Kent constituency. Despite having served in the House of Commons since 1997, Green was deselected, fuelling speculation that grassroots campaigners are targeting those seen as responsible for Boris Johnson’s exit from No 10’. It will be interesting to see how this plays out regarding other MPs.
Some Tories believe the system of selection/deselection of MPs needs fundamental reform, but there’s a much wider need than that – for a new and written Constitution and reform of all parliamentary procedures in the light of how many of them have been abused in recent years. It’s clear that we can no longer rely on the ‘good chaps’ style of government, in which rules are often not explicitly spelt out or enforced. One of the main areas for reform should surely be around members’ attendance, given the examples of Boris Johnson’s frequent holidays and trips to Ukraine, MPs with second and even third jobs who fail to attend the House and vote and peers like Lebedev who rarely attend. Not to mention those taking time out for their own or others’ tv shows.
It seems the Royal Family is in the news every day, too, and not just related to the upcoming Coronation, to which King Charles now plans to break precedent by inviting foreign monarchs. It’s a strange state of affairs when Charles effectively ousts Prince Andrew from Royal Lodge, then evicts Harry and Meghan from Frogmore Cottage in order to accommodate Andrew there. All three are angry and upset at these decisions, but it will cause even more embarrassment to the King that his forever entitled and deluded brother is demanding that he should be given ‘a mansion fit for a king’ and asking for a role in the family’s business such as managing estates. An ‘insider’ told journalists: ‘He’s of the opinion that he is still a senior member of the family, despite not being a working royal and deserves to be treated as such’. Good luck with that.
What will be of much more concern to most of us is the fast approaching end of the current Energy Price Guarantee discount, which means the average bill of heating our ‘mansions’ will be £3000 a year instead of £2500. The government has been under pressure to extend help to households so it’s good news to hear that Jeremy Hunt will extend support until the end of June. (He couldn’t have the May local elections in his sights, could he??). Apparently Chancellor Jeremy Hunt is hoping that by June the wholesale price of gas will have fallen sufficiently to render the support unnecessary – we can’t bet on that, though, as consumers have already been asking why are my bills so high when the wholesale price has gone down?
Another area of concern is the news, though no surprise, that even though in person visits to British public libraries have increased by 68%, spending on them decreased by 17% last year, down from £11,970 per 1000 people during 2020-2021 to £9,982 during 2021-2022. This again is another false economy by central and local government as libraries don’t just give access to books, crucial for literacy and broader education, they stock numerous other resources and are overlooked information and community hubs, without which we would be the poorer. Important to note, too, that a good number of them also became Warm Banks as the cost of living crisis began to bite. I always find it rather galling when reviewers and others blithely allude to where you can purchase books including the dreaded Amazon when many can’t afford that and you don’t need to. True, it’s harder in some areas that others but unless we value and make use of these marvellous places local authorities could further (as they already do) regard their closure as a safe target for cuts.
Finally, picking up a local hairdressing and beauty salon leaflet recently, I was confronted with a list of Botox and ‘dermal filler’ treatments, eg ‘bunny lines’, ‘downturned’, ‘gummy lines’, ‘smokers lanes’ and ‘pebbled chin’, all of which were priced at £180. A number of viewers currently watching the BBC1’s The Apprentice were struck by how nearly all the female candidates showed obvious signs of ‘work’ having been carried out, especially the one designed to produce ‘trout pout’ and, not for the first time, wonder what it is that makes young women want to look all the same. The samey look seems to require long hair (whether it suits the individual or not), false eyelashes sticking out half a mile, huge eyebrows and artificially plumped up lips. While I’m glad to say that older generations seem to value individuality of appearance, the fact that I’d never heard of the above named ‘treatments’ did remind me of the American short story character Rip Van Winkle. Or should that be Rip Van Wrinkle?!
Politics and mental health - the missing link? 