Whenever we think the government can’t get any worse, it does, and these last few weeks have been no exception. It seems there’s no limit to the damage this government is prepared to inflict on this country and its reputation on the world stage in order to get away with corruption and incompetence. Besides the ongoing cost of living crisis, rail and NHS strikes, food inflation running at 20%, we’ve seen Home Secretary Suella Braverman once again escape sanction, this time for trying to evade her driving fine obligations, four MPs claiming parking tickets on expenses (not picked up by the expenses authority IPSA so how many more claims have slipped through its perforated net?), health secretary Steve Barclay finally having to admit the long repeated lie of ‘40 new hospitals’, Rishi Sunak and James Cleverly repeatedly using private jets for often pointless gadabouts, the news that the Queen’s funeral and related events cost £162m and that polluting water companies intend passing onto customers the £10bn bill for infrastructure investment, which should have been carried out years ago, while they pay large dividends to shareholders and their CEOs benefit from stratospheric salaries.
But the epitome of shame inflicted on this country must be the latest series of events leading to the government, unprecedentedly, taking legal action against its own Covid Inquiry. Following that revealing and car crash interview of Boris Johnson by a bravely persistent Sky journalist at Washington airport last weekend, during which he again denied fresh allegations that there had been gatherings at Chequers during lockdown, the debacle has gathered pace, marked by a series of volte faces. Initially it seemed that Johnson was holding back, then he purported to have handed all his pandemic era WhatsApp messages and notebooks to the Cabinet Office, which then refused to hand them to the Inquiry. Many of us have suspected the dead hand of top civil servant Simon Case in this, as he’s been implicated in a number of dubious interventions but never been brought to book. The theory then was that as Johnson finally accepted that he was skewered, he wanted to bring Sunak and other ‘backstabbers’ down with him. The Thursday 4 pm deadline was passed, nothing further was handed to the Inquiry and the government subsequently announced legal action, citing ministers’ privacy concerns. Not only a completely feeble argument but the entire Cabinet Office stance demonstrates the contempt these people have for due process (the Inquiry chair, Baroness Hallett, clearly has the overarching authority in these matters) and also for the public and those bereaved by Covid.
But it didn’t temporarily stop there: it emerged that Johnson had been advised not to switch on his old phone, the messages couldn’t be made available, so another volte face as he was clearly never genuinely prepared to release this material from before May 2021 to the Inquiry. What many have asked is why this potentially incriminating material is unavailable because usually it is transferred from an old to a new phone. He’s since allegedly asked for advice on accessing its contents although he was originally told that to turn the phone on would be a security risk. How daft and unconvincing is that given these events were now several years ago?
No surprise at this further Johnson skulduggery, which put the government on the spot. Former head of the civil service Lord Kerslake backed Lady Hallett and said there was a “cover-up” going on here “to save embarrassment of ministers”. So now this shameful pantomime limps on because the court could take several weeks to make a judgement. Surely, if the court finds in favour of the government it will make a mockery of the Inquiry and of the thousands who died and raise serious constitutional issues via the flouting of the Chair’s authority. The government had the nerve to say it wouldn’t hand over anything deemed ‘unambiguously irrelevant’ (only redacted material) but this ‘relevance’ is for the Chair to decide, not them. They really struggle to accept that there can be a higher authority than themselves. Sunak then had the nerve to bullishly declare from Moldova, where he was attending the European Political Community summit, that they were supporting the Inquiry and complying with the law: this, when they’re manifestly obstructing it.
This could run and run and meanwhile, the Inquiry has sent Johnson a list of 150 questions and requests for his witness statement. We have to wonder whether the Covid bereaved and the public will ever get the answers they need. Under the headline ‘Kamikaze Boris sets his sights on Sunak revenge’, the Independent’s Tom Peck wrote ‘There is no aspect of politics or public life that is any more than just a game for Johnson, and taking Sunak down with him would certainly count as a victory’.
You couldn’t make up the Cabinet Office’s defence: ‘We consider there to be important issues of principle at stake here, affecting both the rights of individuals and the proper conduct of government (!). The request for unambiguously irrelevant material goes beyond the powers of the inquiry (!!)… It represents an unwarranted intrusion into other aspects of the work of government. It also represents an intrusion into their legitimate expectations of privacy and protection of their personal information’. The Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice group said the prospect of the Cabinet Office suing the inquiry was ‘absolutely obscene’.
But there’s more – the i newspaper’s Paul Waugh revealed a government plan, a fallback position if the judicial review fails, a Section 19 application, which would prevent the disclosure and publication even of redacted material. Clearly a tactic to rout Johnson – he may be ‘willing’ to disclose material but if this application succeeds (the decision will be on Tuesday, we’re told) it could prevent the publication of anything at all. But just now another twist, in the Cabinet Office writing to Johnson to say that undermining the Inquiry and the government’s position could involve his legal fees (God knows how much this bill now is) not being paid. So now the ball is once more back in Johnson’s court.
Jonathan Freedland summarises how Sunak’s carapace of defending his predecessor was stripped away. ‘Sunak’s reticence has been exposed as self-interested. He wants to keep to a minimum the embarrassments of the Covid era, because they remind many millions of voters exactly when and why they came to despise this government. And, more self-interestedly still, the PM fears that Hallett is about to set a precedent for full disclosure – which means the investigators could soon demand to see every message on his phone….. “There’s never been an inquiry like this,” says the human rights lawyer Adam Wagner, the leading expert on the regime of regulation imposed during the pandemic. ‘This is not a single issue that can be parcelled off. This was a crisis that enveloped the entire government”.
It seems Lady Hallett had already got the government’s number – that their version of ‘unambiguously irrelevant’ (embarrassing stuff they wanted omitted or redacted) was anything but, so she wants to cast her net very wide as the subject of this Inquiry has affected every single one of us in the UK in one form or another. Freedland contends that what initially ‘made’ Sunak (in contrast to Johnson, ie his promise of integrity, professionalism and accountability at every level’) could now well break him too. A tweeter got it in one, though it seems the PM himself believes he’s managing to pull the wool over our eyes. ‘Mr Sunak tried to sell his leadership as a restoration of integrity and capability in office, but his bluff has been called. He cannot exorcise the ghosts of rotten Tory government when he is one of them’. An earthier one said: ‘Boris Johnson leaves a trail of shit wherever he goes and will destroy the Tory party’. Don’t expect to hear this discussed on the BBC – despite the recent resignation of Chairman Richard Sharp, the Tory agenda there is still only too clear to see. For the last 12 hours at least there’s been zero coverage of this massive issue, despite the latest alarming intervention.
Besides all this Machiavellian manoeuvring, which shockingly but predictably shows not one iota of concern for the Covid victims (and not only the bereaved but the thousands still suffering from Long Covid), there’s alarming news from other quarters. I’ve long wondered what institutions like the police and armed forces think about being expected to step in to cope with public service failures and now we know, at least for Greater London. Met Police new broom Sir Mark Rowley unilaterally announced last week that his officers would no longer be attending mental health calls, as it was taking a disproportionate amount of resources and stopped them getting on with their core work. Health and social care services have been warned that this policy would take effect from 31 August, a ban which will only be waived ‘if a threat to life is feared’.
While various authorities and organisations have either sympathised with the police, been appalled at those with mental health issues being abandoned because of the parlous state of NHS services or can see the crisis from both sides, there’s been the usual lack of nuanced thinking. A key example is who and how is it decided when there might be ‘a threat to life’? I can see this from both sides but as someone who’s long pointed up the terrible underinvestment in mental health services over the years by Tory administrations and the NHS itself, we surely shouldn’t be surprised that with every public service under pressure some will start taking a firm stance against mission creep.
How long before the ambulance service decides it has to reduce its own mental health response? Recent NHS figures showed that ambulance crews in England are spending 1.8m hours a year – the equivalent of 75,000 days – dealing with patients with mental health problems, a number rising every year and a 24% increase between 2018-19 and 2021-22. The Shadow Minister for Mental Health, Dr Rosena Allin-Khan, said the data showed that lack of help for people experiencing mental ill health was adding to the strain on the hard-pressed ambulance service. ‘The National Audit Office reported in February that 1.2 million people were waiting to receive care and treatment from NHS community mental health services. Meanwhile, ambulance services are under such pressure that people in a mental health crisis are enduring waits of almost two and a half hours before a crew turns up to help them’. We’ve long known, though, that demand is going up regardless of underinvestment in services and it’s pretty clear that this is linked to austerity policies, the cost of living crisis and particularly (the theme of this blog) the evidence that we’re on our own.
This government doesn’t provide the psychological ‘holding’ (known as ‘containment’ in psychoanalytic theory) which authorities like governments should be providing, because they see high political office as an opportunity for personal gain rather than the true role as ‘container’ of the public’s anxiety amid numerous crises, some of which are the government’s own making. Essentially, we can’t feel safeguarded or looked after in any way when our government is so manifestly incompetent and corrupt. Every day, people are worn down by the fact that nothing in this country is working, there’s a feeling that systems have broken down or are on their last legs, and those in charge are just letting it happen. Perhaps the worst aspect is that this makes us feel helpless – we can’t even protest because the draconian Public Order Act now allows the arrest of those merely suspected of intention of disruption.
Here’s an example of the quality of our rulers. You’ll have noticed that Rishi Sunak has conveniently been abroad for this or that meeting when various scandals were being aired in the House of Commons, but his deputy, Oliver Dowden, is regarded by the Guardian’s John Crace as a poor replacement even for the robotic Rishi. ‘Oliver Dowden, however, is the perfect fit (as deputy). A man who had never dreamed of being anything so grand as a deputy prime minister. Who would actually have been just as happy in his natural role as a number three or four. A cross between a gentleman’s gentleman and a parody character from a 1970s sitcom’. What a classic description, yet the man (as so many of them) takes himself so seriously. Not that we’ve had to witness him this week as MPs have been in recess yet again. Some may ask how he got to that position and this tweeter put it in a nutshell: ‘This is the aspect of the current crisis that isn’t talked about: the factionalism, purges, and convulsions of the Tory Party have resulted in increasingly overpromoted, underqualified minnows in high office’. It’s also yet more proof that we need an altogether different kind of person going into politics.
It seems it’s not only the UK concerned about its public service broadcaster. An acting chair may have been appointed at the BBC to replace disgraced Richard Sharp, but four key executives remain who have long had links to the Conservative Party and who clearly continue to influence the BBC’s editorial policy. And that’s not even counting high profile presenters like Nick Robinson and Justin Webb. No wonder others like Emily Maitlis, Andrew Marr and Jon Sopel felt the need to leave so they could finally speak their minds. As listener numbers for BBC Radio 4’s ‘flagship’ news programmes continue to plummet amid complaints of dumbing down, Tory bias and news censorship via omission, some at the Italian state broadcaster, Rai, have ‘accused Giorgia Meloni’s rightwing government of wanting to bend the organisation to its will and “cancel Italy’s antifascism footprints” after a series of high-profile departures…. A source with knowledge of the situation said: ‘Rai has always been influenced by governments, but with the current one there has been a quantum leap. They want to take control of Rai and change the narrative to their way of thinking, and to cancel the antifascism footprints of our country. This will mean weakening Rai and the public service’….. more departures are expected over the coming months’. It’s unfortunate that those only getting their news from the public broadcaster may not see what’s going on or see it as the threat to democracy that it is.
In lighter news, it was good to hear that Leighton House, the former home of Victorian artistFrederic Lord Leighton, based in London’s West Kensington, is on the shortlist for the Art Fund’s Museum of the Year. Having visited over the years and recently, following the latest refurb, I can testify to the its nomination. It’s such a striking place, plenty to see, now with shop and stylish cafe so I hope it fares well. The winner will be announced on 12 July and the other competitors are Glasgow’s Burrell Collection, The MAC (Belfast), London’s Natural History Museum and Scapa Flow Museum (Orkney).
Finally, The Week reports that Susie Dent, Countdown’s lexicographer, invited her 1.1m followers to nominate the hated words and expressions they would like expunged from the English language. Taking top position was ‘going forward’ (yes!), followed by ‘No disrespect, but…’, ‘like’ used as a filler, ‘reaching out’, ‘basically’ and ‘my bad’. Daily Mail writer Tom Utley added his own: ‘Let me be absolutely clear’ (when the politicians concerned were anything but) and ‘our NHS’. The last is particularly pertinent, I think, as it’s often uttered by cynical politicians in a sanctimonious tone when they are simultaneously underfunding and aiming to privatise this national treasure. Besides ‘going forward’ two expressions which make me cringe every time are ‘pension pot’ and ‘direction of travel’. Any other suggestions?!
Politics and mental health - the missing link? 