Sunday 31 December 2023

As the year ends it’s increasingly clear that nothing is working under this Conservative administration – from the NHS to railways, from the creaking justice system to impoverished schools, from the non-functioning regulatory system to our polluted coasts and rivers, everything’s worse. (It’s been suggested that it will take 10 years to clear the backlogs in the NHS and the courts). Add to this the pressures of inflation, rising debt, a flagging economy, the HS2 debacle, broken asylum system and the extent of cronyism revealed by the Covid Inquiry. Yet Sunak and ministers continue to demonstrate their inadequacy by jetting around the world pretending to be world statesmen and boasting in Parliament about policies to cut National Insurance and ‘the death tax’ – desperately grasping at straws as they prepare for election year, ‘straws’ which despite Pinocchio Hunt’s bullish talk will only benefit the already better off.  

The Conservative Party’s authority has leaked even further by further revelations of unacceptable behaviour resulting in more MPs losing their seats, triggering more byelections in 2024. Every week we see examples of reprehensible conduct, the latest being James Daly blaming the state of ‘struggling children’ on their ‘crap parents’, yet worse examples like James Cleverly’s latest gaffe carry no punishment. That is, until it’s clear that people aren’t ‘moving on’, as in the Braverman case, and the offender is eventually sacked by this weak and procrastinating PM. (The Guardian’s Catherine Bennett captured that increasingly popular and sickening politician’s habit: ‘In his time in office, Rishi Sunak has done much to popularise an intensifier favoured by men wanting to advertise their commitment to women’s interests while effacing any earlier indifference: “As a father of daughters.”)

But it could be argued he has a good excuse for putting off the decision: who would take the over-promoted Home Secretary’s place? Sunak has had to scrape the barrel so much that there’s virtually no one left. A clear example of this is appointing Victoria Atkins to the post of Health Secretary: married to the MD of British Sugar (no conflict of interest there, of course) she alienated medics and many others days after her promotion by her media round allusion to striking junior doctors as ‘doctors in training’.

But you have to seriously wonder who’s advising these people: Christmas seemed to bring out the worst in the Conservative HQ PR strategy. First we have our PM ensuring, of course, that cameras were present as he bought mince pies at King’s Cross station to hand out to key workers, setting off a succession of Tory MPs similarly tweeting their ‘thanks’ to NHS and other workers as they dropped off Christmas ‘treats’. As many X users tweeted, it would have been better to pay these people sufficiently so they could purchase their own mince pies. But no, this would have spoilt the Lord or Lady Bountiful act. Yet worse was to come: a self-promotion video in which Rishi was filmed alone in Downing Street, wandering from room to room, even recruiting Larry the Cat at one point. Sunak can’t have seen the tweets from that account.

Speaking of cronyism, the epitome has been seen on Saturday as the New Years Honours were published (actually leaked on Friday and as predicted, the Liz Truss ones were cynically slipped out at the same time). Of course there are some worthy ones, but the corruption underpinning this outmoded system is only too clear to see: at least seven Tory donors are in the list, Sajid Javid and Tim Martin (the Brexiteer Wetherspoons boss for ‘his services to hospitality and culture’!) have been knighted and the Archbishop of Canterbury has been knighted ‘for his role at the Coronation’. What a marvellous result, two outmoded institutions in one go.

The regular honours are bad enough but the peerages are a more serious issue: people have not ‘moved on’ from the elevation of 29 year old Charlotte Owen (still the subject of a press super injunction) and democracy is seriously undermined by promotion of unsuitable candidates to the second chamber. An X user tweeted: ‘It’s one thing for PMs to be allowed to hand out pointless gongs like knighthoods and CBEs etc but quite another to be able to put chums and sponsors into the Lords for life where they have the power to decide on laws’. Another said: ‘5 of the last 16 Conservative Party treasurers have [become Lords] after donating more than £3m to the party [including] Lord Cruddas, who took his seat after… Boris Johnson rejected the advice of the House of Lords Appointments Commission’. Another: ‘Liz Truss, accepted idiot, national laughing stock and unaccountable temporary Prime Minister, made many disastrous decisions, so let’s allow her to choose her own people to populate our political establishment? Next, why is Britain the sick man of Europe again?’ It beggars belief that Jacob Rees-Mogg (already absurdly knighted, of course) has gone on the airwaves to defend from criticism the elevations of Tory donors, citing services to ‘the Party’. As ever with the Tories, it’s all about The Party: their concern is not without foundation, though, as their divisions are so marked it could be the end of them, especially with Richard Tice’s Reform Party snapping at their heels. Well, we can hope…

Meanwhile, Tories may have hoped but the festive season hasn’t made us ‘move on’ from the Michelle Mone PPE scandal and the Mone/Barrowman car crash BBC interview, during which Laura Kuenssberg for once did a robust job. It took at least 20 minutes but Mone finally had to admit that yes, she and her children had benefited from the massive Medpro profits from PPE that never worked. We have to wonder who was advising the pair as apart from their appearance (he with the ill-fitting shirt and she glistening rather than glowing and with a good deal of cosmetic ‘work’ clearly done) their strategy (and the comparison has been made) wasn’t dissimilar in some respects to that of Prince Andrew in his disastrous Maitlis interview – the protestations of innocence, victim card playing and endless denial. They started with Mone stressing her desire to ‘help’ the Covid PPE effort (‘help’ that carried a hugely expensive sting in its tail), then continued with Barrowman claiming to be ‘a private person’ and that’s why he’d decamped to the Isle of Man tax haven and both distancing themselves from the vast amounts they accumulated by stressing the trusts the dosh was put into.

Before this interview Mone had finally admitted lying to the press about her involvement with Medpro but kept maintaining that it was to ‘protect’ her family from press intrusion: it didn’t seem to occur to her that this ‘intrusion’ into their profiteering was a legitimate area of public interest and the press were doing their jobs. When pressed on this Mone said, reflecting the new post-truth climate, that lying to the press was ‘not a crime’. And her longstanding denial must have made things worse for her family anyway. She also had the nerve to use the same excuse for the appalling use of lawyers to threaten those intending to go public on their findings. I wonder how the National Crime Agency investigation of this affair is coming along. One of the few cathartic aspects must be the Guardian’s unusual decision to name the lawyers involved in the intimidating tactics: their reactions were interesting. One claimed to have been ‘misled’ (great sense of personal responsibility there) and the other two pathetically played the client confidentiality card.

‘In late 2020, when the Guardian began making inquiries about Mone’s links to PPE Medpro, Jonathan Coad, a well-known media lawyer, said his client “never had any role or function” in the company. He also said “any suggestion of an association” between Mone and the company would be “inaccurate”, “misleading” and “defamatory”. Contacted for comment by the Guardian this week, Coad said he was not aware until recently that he had been misled, and apologised for unwittingly misleading the media’. Astonishingly, he claimed to be ‘a devout Christian’ and to ‘hold to the values of truth and integrity’ as faithfully as he could. He sounds about as ‘Christian’ as Rees-Mogg. We have to wonder, following the Guardian’s outing of these three, whether other legal folk will be so keen to participate in such shameful charades in the future. Another aspect of this scandal is its provision of more evidence that the gentlemen’s agreements governing parliamentary affairs aren’t fit for purpose: many, including fellow peers, have called for Mone to leave the Lords, but it shouldn’t be her choice. We need enforceable rules which would promptly remove such people who bring the institution into disrepute.

Yet another loaded tentacle of this unsavoury creature was brought centre stage with Mone feeling she was being scapegoated, leading to Mone, Michael Gove and Jim Bethell fighting like ferrets in a sack on Twitter. One of the many having denied access to their Whatsapp messages during the Covid Inquiry, the then health minister, Jim Bethell, had quoted some of Mone’s messages to him emanating from that time, prompting many to observe how selective his ‘access’ to messages had been when previously he claimed to have lost his phone and lost messages.

http://tinyurl.com/bddc98u9

This year we’ve heard much about cash-strapped councils and some have gone bust: it seems a complex picture because some of this will be down to mismanagement by people not sufficiently skilled to manage finance and large projects, but equally much will be due to the massive cuts made to local government by Westminster. In the Sunday Times Robert Colville added another explanation of why ‘local government is falling apart’. He cites ‘the frightful four’: adult social care; homeless accommodation; children’s services and school transport. Providing these is a statutory duty so it must be done, but costs ‘are shooting up’, in one case amounting to 75% of the council’s budget. ‘If we don’t find a way to reduce councils’ legally obligated spending, the frightful four will swallow the system whole’. Using the term ‘frightful four’ is a bit loaded anyway but surely we also need to consider why such costs have escalated so rapidly and the answer is clear: some at least will be due to social breakdown and the fact that despite many promises over the years the social care funding conundrum has never been resolved.

We’ve been getting used to problematic situations presented as the fault of this organization/that group of workers, etc, when actually it’s the government’s austerity measures and damaging short termism at the back of them. The latest example is the UK’s hunger and malnutrition crisis: an article by health inequalities expert Michael Marmot, author of the authoritative Marmot Reviews on social determinants of health, suggests that Britain’s hunger and malnutrition crisis could be easily solved – yet politicians choose not to. Surely this amounts to a kind of social control. An alarming number of hospital admissions have been due to malnutrition (a fact that’s gone under largely under the radar) and the latest statistics (from June) indicate that ‘9 million adults in the UK, 17% of households, experienced moderate or severe food insecurity (a massive rise from 7.3% in June 2021)’. When the government is called upon to respond to such findings, they always say they’re putting ‘more money’ into this or that (more than what and when?) and big up some half-baked measure as the answer when it’s far from adequate. ‘Unicef’s latest “report card”, which examined changes in relative child poverty between 2012 and 2021, found that the UK was the worst performer among 39 high-income countries’ – this would be good for a media interviewer to wheel out since ministers are forever talking up UK performance in this or that area when evidence doesn’t bear out their claim. ‘As 2023 ends, Britain may not be facing a famine, as people are in north-eastern Nigeria, South Sudan, Yemen or Somalia, but that is a low bar. The UK’s current levels of food insecurity will damage physical and mental health and increase health inequalities for years to come’.

http://tinyurl.com/bddea54y

By now most will have heard of the Post Office Horizon scandal, thought to be one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in this country, involving the prosecution and conviction of hundreds of subpostmasters and subpostmistresses for fraud when all along errors were due to the faulty Horizon computer system. But it’s taken a lot of work to get to this point due to Post Office denial and secrecy and, by the sound of it, government collusion. On the Today programme this last week Justin Webb had the nerve to claim that they had covered it long ago when I’m pretty sure they didn’t. The first I heard of it was in 2020 via the excellent Radio 4 podcast produced by freelance journalist Nick Wallis, though I’m told Private Eye covered the scandal extensively. It’s astonishing what Post Office senior staff got away with, especially the then CEO Paula Vennells, who maintained a long silence but when summoned by the Commons Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee maintained that nothing was her fault.

Here we see yet another example of police being asleep at the wheel: lawyers for the wrongly convicted people said during the public inquiry that there was enough evidence for police to investigate senior staff but surely there was sufficient evidence years ago. Barrister Paul Marshall said that in his view the Post Office was engaged in ‘a sustained attack on the rule of law itself’. In another boost for public awareness, next week, on four consecutive nights, ITV is screening a dramatisation, starring the excellent Toby Jones. One of the tragedies of this case is the sheer amount of distress, relationship breakdown, illness and premature deaths the victims had to go through before it even got to public inquiry stage. Let’s hope the police do their jobs, those responsible don’t continue to get off scot free and that staff are adequately compensated, although we hear, astonishingly, that the amount set aside for this has been halved.

http://tinyurl.com/4ccpteba

The Week tells (reminds?) us that modern aristocrats like to forage for mushrooms, make their own cheese and bread, keep bees and rewild their estates ‘all in pursuit of a more Romantic rural life’. Now ‘society Bible’, aka The Tatler, has endorsed a new label for such folk, one of the leaders being King Charles: ‘Bopeas’ (shudder), a contraction of Bohemian peasants, apparently ‘cultivate meaning and status in ways that expand the ideals of success beyond conventional material accumulation. It’s all about the niche, the hyper-local and the mythic’. Hmmm – only the relatively well off would have the luxury of the time and wherewithal for all these pursuits and in any case it’s easy to dismiss ‘material accumulation’ when you have it all anyway – or could. How about ‘faux peasants’?

Ironically, a source of the King’s income publicized recently could be said to be the modern equivalent of said peasants his foraging hobby aims to emulate: until recently it’s not been commonly known that bona vacantia has been allowed to persist. If you die intestate within the boundaries of the Duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall your estate goes not to the Treasury (or charity, as the duchies said) but to the Duchies themselves. Too many still aren’t aware that the proceeds from those Duchies already go straight into the royal coffers and many won’t have known about this other ancient arrangement. Apparently the money has often been used to do up Duchy properties let out commercially. ‘Unclaimed estates of former miners from the Lake District are being used to spruce up the royal property portfolio. It’s an outrageous feudal anomaly’, opines the Guardian.

Finally, some very good news from the medical field, in that a trial is now taking place of ‘a potentially groundbreaking test for sepsis’ using a technique which looks for high levels of DNA fragments associated with this hard-to-diagnose condition. Let’s hope the 18 month trial goes well because sepsis is responsible for a staggering 48,000 deaths a year in the UK.

Happy New Year and thanks, as ever, for reading!

Friday 22 December 2023

After the all too brief relief felt at Boris Johnson’s expulsion and the disastrous tenure of Liz Truss, many of us might have thought in October 2022 that we’d get more a more principled premiership from Rishi Sunak. Who’d have thought that we’d actually get an even worse brand of dishonesty and private profiteering, but this is what we ended up with. As Christmas approaches we’ve seen the lying and obfuscation around Sunak’s key pledges and other important issues outed, his reaction apart from surprise at the temerity of the ‘outers’ generally being a tetchy denial or misrepresentation.

Despite Sunak and Pinocchio Hunt constantly talking up the UK economy especially in relation to other G7 members (never challenged in the House of Commons by the feeble Speaker), today we heard that we are now technically in recession (based on two consecutive quarters of shrinkage) and economists expect the economy to ‘remain subdued’ during the whole of 2024.  Yet Hunt had the nerve to appear to contradict the authoritative Office for National Statistics: ‘the medium-term outlook for the UK economy is far more optimistic than these numbers suggest….’. Here’s an example of how the PM twists facts to make his performance appear much better than it is:

‘Rishi Sunak has made growing the economy one of his key pledges. Downing Street said the promise will be met if the economy is bigger in the three-month period of October to December 2023 than it was in the previous three months’. A wag tweeted: ‘Do not panic, there’s surely a whole team trying to figure out how to blame the small boats and the EU for this “UK at risk of recession after the economy shrinks”.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-67799713

We’ve long seen this government denying responsibility when things go badly yet leaping to claim credit when they improve and inflation is a prime example. When inflation rises, it’s blamed on the war in Ukraine, the pandemic (yes!), the ‘economically inactive’ etc, but when we get a small drop Hunt and others allude to their hard work when actually nothing they’ve done has made the slightest difference. And inflation is set to rise again in the New Year because of increasing energy costs and the just announced rail fare rises. And ministerial braggers ignore the fact that food inflation remains stubbornly high, affecting everyone. The media can also be as bad as some politicians in clarifying that inflation dropping just means prices are rising less quickly: they are still rising.

The Conservatives are clutching at straws before Christmas. ‘…overall food prices rose by 0.3% month on month and are still up annually – by 9.2%, compared with a 10.1% rate in October. The ONS also pointed out that the cost of food and non-alcoholic beverages had risen by about 27% in the past two years, compared with an increase of about 9% between November 2011 and November 2021. ’

Onto the next fib: following Sunak’s declaration in a social media video and at PMQs in November that debt was falling, the Lib Dems Treasury Spokesperson, Sarah Olney, had contacted the office of Sir Robert Chote, the chair of the UK Statistics Authority (UKSA), who ‘said Sunak’s claims last month “may have undermined trust in the government’s use of statistics and quantitative analysis in this area”…Chote’s letter noted that while it was fair to use debt as a proportion of GDP rather than absolute numbers, the “average person in the street” would most likely have taken Sunak’s statement to mean that debt was already dropping and that government decisions had helped do this – “neither of which is the case”. Besides the dishonesty of such statements, what’s surely striking is the PM’s complacent assumption that no one will check and he won’t be found out. Chote said the Office for Statistics Regulation would ‘work with the prime minister’s office to ensure further statements on debt levels adhere to our guidance on intelligent transparency’. What a joke: Sunak doesn’t DO ‘intelligent transparency’. Olney rightly said that Sunak had ‘reached for the Boris Johnson playbook and is undermining trust in politics’. He didn’t have to reach far…

http://tinyurl.com/528wbnd3

Onto the immigration fibs: we hear that ‘No 10 has dropped a proposal for an end-of-year immigration update from Rishi Sunak amid concern that key policies that are meant to “stop the boats” are running into trouble’. Not half. Having gone to huge lengths, including flying the Climate Minister back from COP in order to vote in the latest attempt at Rwanda plan legislation, which passed with a majority of 44, Sunak and right wingers seemed to lose sight of the fact that this is only the first stage: much more work to come on this Bill in the Lords and in committee. But other obstacles to Sunak’s ‘Stopping the boats’ pledge were summarized by a Tory source: ‘The backlog hasn’t been cleared, the Bibby is half-full, our small boats plan is in turmoil and we still haven’t got migrants on all of the large military sites we’re supposed to have delivered. This is supposed to be our wedge issue with Labour and instead it’s a millstone around our necks’.

Not to mention the tragic death of a Bibby occupant. In short, nothing for Sunak to boast about and a Home Office insider revealed more misleading statistical manipulation to suggest that much more progress was being made with clearing the backlog of asylum claims than is actually the case. ‘…insiders say many asylum claims from the legacy backlog have been dismissed in the knowledge that they will be resubmitted but will no longer count as legacy claims. Instead, they will be defined as “secondary asylum casework”, while Sunak’s promise to clear the backlog will be realised. An insider said this amounted to ‘fiddling the figures’.

http://tinyurl.com/2k9rkuns

And on it goes…. At Tuesday’s Commons Liaison Committee, the group comprising the chairs of all the Select Committees, Sunak is on record as denying saying that he would stop the boats when this has been his mantra for months. It seems that despite the Tory chair Bernard Jenkin’s fairly gentle questioning, others were robust, one trying to puncture Sunak’s spiel that the economy and everything else was going really well. ‘He breezed in cheery enough but, as so often, his bonhomie was only skin deep. In every smile there’s the trace of contempt. He really does not like having his time wasted by people questioning his judgment. It’s beneath him.

Labour’s Sarah Champion then asked Sunak if he considered himself to be a leader on the global stage. Rish! hesitated, suspecting a trap, but was unable to resist. Who was he to quibble with all those who waited on his every word? Because, yes, he was here to tell the truth, and the truth was that he was pretty amazing. People looked at him and thought: there’s a guy bossing it on the international scene.“That’s odd,” replied Champion, evenly. “So how come no one really takes much notice of you?”

‘Nor could he possibly tell anyone how much the Rwanda scheme would cost. It was all strictly commercially confidential. Because if other countries got wind of how much we were wasting not to deport a single refugee, they would all want to sign a deal with us. As ever with Sunak, the truth and the world can be whatever he wants it to be’.

http://tinyurl.com/2t7zv8jv

On his NHS waiting list pledge, there’s no denying that the 8m waiting list shows no sign of reducing, so again, instead of accepting responsibility, the high demand is blamed on the pandemic backlog and NHS staff strikes. Following Sunak’s no hoper Cabinet reshuffle in the wake of his eventual sacking of Suella Braverman, new Health and Social Care Secretary Victoria Atkins (whose husband is top dog at British Sugar!) did a series of car crash interviews in yesterday’s media round as a fresh tranche of junior doctors’ strikes kicked off. Apart from her vacuous waffle, she attracted opprobrium for calling the strikers ‘doctors in training’. This could have been ignorance but more likely it was a Tory divide and rule tactic as she’d already claimed credit for settling pay claims from the consultants and others. All part of the narrative which the media are mostly shamefully prepared to collude with, implying that those ‘in training’ don’t deserve what they’re claiming. But what an own goal – presumably Atkins would like to feel she could do better than her predecessor, but this is highly unlikely given her preparedness to alienate the strikers so contemptuously.   

Very few would have believed that Johnson and Sunak had actually lost the potentially incriminating WhatsApp messages at the heart of recent Covid Inquiry evidence (there will be plenty of technical experts who would be able to retrieve them but we’ve not heard what’s being planned, if anything) and now it does look that some have been lying under oath. And this seems to be taken less and less seriously. Lying has been normalized. Besides Piers Morgan’s denials in relation to the phone hacking case, both Johnson and Sunak have stuck to the same line regarding their phones and WhatsApps but two recent events are strong strands of evidence against them: first Lord Bethell (who previously had ‘lost’ his phone) suddenly appearing to find texts from that time following his outing by Michelle Mone in Sunday’s car crash Laura Kuenssberg interview (more on this next week); and second, Penny Mordaunt’s efforts to get to the bottom of disappearing messages emanating from Boris Johnson.

There are many questions still to answer but no doubt the PM has already swanned off on his Christmas break, convincing himself despite all evidence to the contrary that he’s doing a jolly good job. Meanwhile, we hear that his increasingly transparent commitment to furthering the interests of his father-in-law’s company, Infosys, has been given a boost in the form of an NHS contract. Along with 24 other companies, Infosys has mysteriously been selected for a chunk of the NHS’s 2-year, £250m “intelligent automation” contract. What’s not to like? An X user tweeted:  ‘Tories have sold everything the public owned, they’ve outsourced everything, and they’ve cut funding for everything that doesn’t donate to them. Of course we’re in recession. What can you expect?’

A shocking statistic now shows what 14 years of Tory governments have led to – the number of people in England and Wales admitted to hospital with nutritional deficiencies has tripled in 10 years, now standing at 800,000 patients. With many more attending food banks and parents missing meals so that their children can eat, malnutrition isn’t surprising but it’s shocking in a European developed country. ‘The Guardian analysed rates of 25 conditions linked to poor nutrition, including vitamin and mineral deficiencies, scurvy, rickets and malnutrition. Over the past decade, there was a steep increase across nearly all of the conditions, based on primary and secondary diagnosis in hospital patients in England and Wales’. This could easily go under the radar but it’s important that it’s recognized. A senior pediatrician said:  ‘We need to know as a nation that people’s health in this country is deteriorating… We’re storing up health problems for later in life’. Even more sickening, then, is the jollified and tone deaf Christmas coverage on numerous media channels, determined to see Christmas through a solely middle class prism.

http://tinyurl.com/2s3p8zxx

So the Prime Minister will now try to get some respite, knowing that he will return to more wrangling over the Rwanda Bill, more infighting in his divided party, at least one byelection and possibly two for utterly shameful reasons and further ramifications of Covid Inquiry questions and the Michelle Mone scandal.

Finally, I was pleased to be invited to be one of the judging panel on Radio 4’s Feedback Interview of the Year  – it was interesting, if time-consuming, seeing what the listeners had cited then listening and judging them according to three criteria. I thought the best ones were Emma Barnett’s forensic questioning of Ofsted Chief Inspector Amanda Spielman on Woman’s Hour and Nick Robinson being upended by Extinction Rebellion chair Roger Hallam on Political Thinking, Halam clearly having had issues with the entire framework of the programme. You can listen to it on BBC Sounds.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001tjlt

A happy Christmas to all and thanks for reading!

Sunday 19 November

As the Middle East crisis rages on, causing political upheaval way beyond those borders, not to mention Ukraine, the UK is experiencing a constitutional crisis which has been building for some considerable time, yet it doesn’t seem to be acknowledged as such by politicians or the media, except somewhat in the Radio 4 Today podcast. Using the Gaza protest marches as a pretext, then Home Secretary Suella Braveman ratcheted up dissent, ensuring that marches did indeed attract the very right wing thugs responsible for the violence she’d projected onto the protesters. Then the events coinciding with what’s only recently been dubbed ‘Remembrance weekend’ was enough for Tories to cynically suggest (never the case) that marchers intended to disrespect this occasion via their proximity to the Cenotaph (when they went nowhere near there), unfortunately meaning that many were taken in by this weaponising, writing sanctimonious letters to newspapers and indignantly calling phone-ins.

Braverman’s article in the Telegraph, berating ‘hate marches’ etc, surely illustrated another dangerous trend set in motion by the lawless Boris Johnson – that of disregard for party and parliamentary discipline. Braverman refused to make the changes to the article requested by Downing Street, a snub to authority decried by party stalwarts like Lord Howard. The fact is that Johnson had normalized the breaking of rules across the piece, also highlighted by veteran Labour MP Barry Gardiner during his interview by Jacob Rees-Mogg on GB News. It’s well known that Mogg despises Sunak but, following the opening stages of the interview, during which he railed against Sunak, he wasn’t expecting a vigorous ticking off from Gardiner for disloyalty. Mogg’s response was to say he was loyal to his constituents, but this didn’t cut much ice because parliamentary convention demands loyalty to one’s party leader. Mogg also probably has no idea what his constituents think, especially given his GB News gig besides his Westminster bubble.

Having been repeatedly urged to sack the disrespectful loose cannon Braverman, Sunak eventually did so, swiftly followed by Braverman presenting this humiliation as her ‘resignation’, writing Sunak a venomous letter, which, amongst other things, accused him of reneging on an agreement they had reached to secure her support during the leadership contest. It sounded as if she was over-estimating the value of this ‘support’, but if this letter was surprising, much more was to come, including Sunak’s Cabinet reshuffle.  Mostly deckchairs on the Titanic stuff, it saw the not before time departure of the lazy and disengaged Therese Coffey, the demotion of James Cleverly from the Foreign Office to Home Secretary (demotion as Cleverly had loved the jetting around the world) and the installation of an inexperienced Victoria Atkins at the Department for Health and Social Care. Just one absurdity the media seized on was her husband being MD of British Sugar, yet Atkins maintained that no conflict of interest was involved.

What no one saw coming was Sunak bringing back David Cameron from the political wilderness, and what would have had some people spitting including Nadine Dorries, giving him a peerage to enable his new Foreign Secretary role. This was yet another plank in the creation of the constitutional crisis. As many pointed out, as a member of the House of Lords Cameron cannot be accountable to the Commons – seen as yet another way Sunak has connived to avoid scrutiny.

As if there wasn’t already enough to debate, the political discourse was inflamed further by the Supreme Court’s rejection of the Rwanda plan, giving rise to the deepening crisis, Sunak seeming to lose all sense of reality by defiantly deciding to create emergency legislation in an attempt to circumvent the judgement. One of the many dystopian elements of this situation has been the number of Tories prepared to take this seriously, for example Home Office minister Laura Farris during various media interviews trying to insist that only one part of the plan was rejected and trying to normalize the Orwellian intention to legislate.

Needless to say, commentators were fulsome in their responses, some castigating the untruths behind this move and also pointing out that threatening to leave the ECHR would wreck the Good Friday Agreement. Some still stick to the line that the UK is a democracy, but it now feels more de jure than de facto. What kind of country are we living in, where our elected representatives break the law right, left and centre, line their own pockets at every opportunity, curtail free speech, fail to address the cost of living crisis and undermine the regulatory framework to the extent that it barely works?? No wonder the waiting list for talking therapy is through the roof, because these events introduce yet more uncertainty on top of financial struggles and the fact that nothing in the UK is working.

Said Martin Kettle in the Guardian: ‘The Rwanda judgment drives a coach and horses through a signature policy on migration, thus leaving the underlying cross-Channel migration problem completely unsolved. At the same time, it is also an explicit refutation of the argument that the European convention on human rights (ECHR) is the easily addressed cause of the defeat, because that is quite simply untrue. It is hard to see where the policy goes from here, other than to the knacker’s yard’.

https://tinyurl.com/5ymr4h6n

John Crace captures the heart of the crisis, illustrating how Sunak and most in his government have embraced ‘post-truth’ to get round facts, they fantasize. ‘Rishi had uncovered the secret of government. Any uncomfortable truths could just be airbrushed out of history by an act of parliament. No more would the UK be constrained by reality. If you didn’t like something, you could make a law to suit your own version of events. There was no longer such a thing as truth. Just post-truth. The world really could be how you wanted it to be. It didn’t matter if Rwanda was objectively safe. Only that the government had said it was. That changed everything’. The Humpty Dumpty of politics, where words can mean whatever you want them to mean. Former Supreme Court judge John Sumption has called it ‘a law to change the facts’.

‘He implied that the government was already well on the way to securing changes that would in fact allow it to comply with the ruling. There would be a new treaty with Rwanda and emergency legislation deeming the country “safe”, and the flights could then begin. Forget it. Even Sunak himself is unlikely to believe what he said today’. Much of this clearly about saving face but it’s alarming the lengths Sunak has gone to, especially when many can see how risible it is. Well, it would be if it wasn’t so serious. Observed one tweeter: ‘: This is the manufacture of massive distractions from Tory failures. We have a Tory government obsessed with “illegal” immigration, feeding the extremes of their voting base. That’s why they won’t address the claim backlog – they need the issue simmering in media and thus in public consciousness, rather than inflation, NHS, schools, energy etc’. Another said: ‘Our entire establishment is corrupt. The regulators don’t do their job, whether regulating sewage dumping or financial plunder and the govt and far too many MPs find personal plunder more important than pride in and duty to their nation. We have a government of vipers at war with its citizens’. Another X user made a key point about the cost: ‘How many more billions are we going to have to spend on buttressing idiotic Tory hubris?’

Sunak’s ridiculously defiant response to the judgement was clearly an attempt to claw back some authority but this could only work with loyal Tories. Crace again: ‘Now, though, they were high and dry. All vestiges of competence and credibility shredded. Just aimless husks orbiting around their depleted egos. Of no relevance to the country. Or even their friends.

… As if the courts will back off because Sunak has said so. It was the work of an entitled child. A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’. You almost have to feel sorry for the Tories picked to participate in media interviews and having to defend this nonsense. Sunak’s recent efforts to present himself as an agent of change, for example in the King’s Speech, have manifestly failed.

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Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton had allegedly told former colleagues he was ‘bored s***less’ being away from frontline politics so he must be so grateful Sunak has lighted on him as a saviour, giving him a chance to repair that problematic legacy. He will soon announce that the UK has a ‘moral mission’ to help the world’s poor and that he plans to ‘unlock’ (yes, how?) billions of dollars for foreign aid over the next 10 years. So he doesn’t have a ‘moral mission’ to help the poorest in this country, created by his government? Rather than the saviour Sunak intended, though, Cameron’s appointment could divide his warring party even more, as the right wingers are already angry that it all signals a dash for the political centre ground. ‘Cameron will say that the UK must find fresh ways to meet the UN’s sustainable development goals, including ending global hunger by 2030’. Good luck with that – can he even ensure that hunger in the UK will end by 2030?

Elsewhere commentators focus on ‘Dave’s’ legacy, which Sunak struggled to summarise when asked what his greatest achievement was, lamely suggesting a G8 summit. What Cameron is likely to be forever be associated with is ‘the holding and losing of the Brexit referendum, the accusations of familiar relations with a pig’s head in his Oxford days and more recently the pocketing of $1m (£800,000) a year for his lobbying of ministers on behalf of the distressed finance company Greensill Capital’.

We’re told that despite far reaching political changes since he left the scene, ‘Cameron’s cosy social world has remained familiar. The groups can be loosely defined as those of the west London Notting Hill (twinned with Westminster) set, where the couple have a £4m home, and then, of course, the glamorous community around the town of Chipping Norton, near where Cameron and his wife bought a cottage in 2001, and the name of which the new peer of the realm has adopted in his title’. Journalist Peter Oborne in 2011 described this ‘set’ as ‘an incestuous collection of louche, affluent, power-hungry and amoral Londoners located in and around the prime minister’s Oxfordshire constituency’. We will wait to see whether Cameron is able to move on from his feeling of ‘unfinished business’ and ‘that’ legacy but one thing’s for sure – commentators will be keeping an eagle eye on the moral dimensions of his activities.

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Yet before we write off ‘Dave’ altogether (and what’s the betting this is how he’ll be alluded to rather than ‘Lord Cameron?) and assume the appointment makes us even more of a laughing stock internationally, there’s apparently a positive view in some European circles. And we have to say that he has more gravitas about him than his dim predecessor. Helene von Bismarck is a Hamburg-based historian specialising in UK-German relations, who says that although they ‘can’t help laughing’ at this return, they welcome it, too. Why? ‘What many British remainers who resent Cameron for calling the referendum and then fleeing the scene do not understand, however, is that it is Boris Johnson who is blamed by politicians and diplomats across Europe for the post-Brexit fallout, much more than Cameron. Yes, there will be jokes in Brussels, Berlin and Parisabout Cameron and his garden shed, but it’s worth reminding ourselves of a basic point: he does not hate the EU, nor – as a new peer – does he need to impress people who do. He is neither an anti-European ideologue, nor a careerist populist who has to sell his every move to the tabloids at home’.

With the world in the state it’s in, diplomacy is of supreme importance, so Sunak’s gesture towards centrists with this appointment is seen as a helpful development. Imagine a typically angry and intransigent ERG-type bod in this role. Remember the appalling ‘Lord’ Frost? ‘At a time of crisis, the UK’s foreign secretary needs a full contacts book, a realistic view of how international diplomacy works and a personal ability to engage with counterparts. With his experience in summitry, his contacts and lack of ideological fervour, Cameron is not badly placed to do this’. Expect the jury to be out for a while.

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Wouldn’t you have thought that after everything that’s emerged in recent times about the extent of Tory corruption and of the taking of second and even third jobs, they would have stopped, but no. We have to wonder if some have used the Middle East and Ukraine wars to take attention away from the latest examples. We hear that former Conservative chair, Brandon Lewis (yes, he of the ‘limited but specific’ intention to disobey the law regarding the Good Friday Agreement) will be paid £250,000 to advise a company part-owned by two Russian oligarchs with sanctions against them. Next up is new Environment Secretary Steve Barclay, who accepted £3,000 donation from Michael Hintze, a key funder of the Global Warming Policy Foundation. This was a few weeks before the reshuffle but it’s still a massive conflict of interest.

‘The think tank focuses on questioning policy on the climate crisis, and was set up by the former Conservative chancellor Nigel Lawson, who has said that climate change is not a threat, but “happening very gently at a fraction of a degree per decade, which is something we can perfectly well live with”. The think tank has produced reviews – at odds with mainstream science – that claim the climate emergency is not happening, or downplay the extent of it’. It’s the government’s normalization of such arrangements that’s so alarming. And a source tells us: ‘Steve is fully committed to the government’s net zero aims. Protecting our environment for future generations is one of his key priorities and that includes urgently tackling climate change’. What’s the logic here?

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As if this isn’t enough, the Good Law project has revealed that a firm owned by a Tory donor has been awarded an £11.5m contract for supplying temporary classrooms for schools affected by the faulty concrete RAAC. ‘The Department of Education has asked Wernick Buildings Limited to provide “temporary accommodation and associated services to mitigate schools disruption due to rebuilding, condition and refurbishment programmes”. The company is controlled by David Wernick, who has given more than £71,000 to the Tories either through his companies or in a personal capacity between 2001 and 2021. More than half this amount – £42,000 – has been donated since 2019’. Wernick had also been the beneficiary of other government contracts during the pandemic. The Department for Education apparently told the Daily Mirror that the Government ‘will spend whatever it takes to ensure children are safe in school’. What an absurdity – this does not equate with involving Tory donors and what about the obligation to put such contracts out to tender?

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Another nail in the Tory coffin is surely Chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s appalling plan to cut benefits in order to facilitate tax cuts for the wealthy. Yet another under pressure from right wingers, Hunt has warned that “difficult decisions” need to be made to “reform the welfare state” and that there’s ‘no easy way to reduce the tax burden’. He and others are now resorting to desperate measures to shore up their flagging support in the face of their failures. We’re told that Hunt now has £13bn ‘fiscal headroom’, though this has come about through cynical measures and nothing constructive he has done. ‘Adam Corlett, the principal economist at the Resolution Foundation, said the government’s six-year freeze in income tax thresholds had “turned from an £8bn ‘stealth’ tax to a gargantuan £40bn tax rise” because of higher inflation’.

He still hasn’t addressed an earlier intention to help the vulnerable with fuel bills eg a social tariff and, typically, he was on Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg claiming credit for inflation reducing (yet they don’t take responsibility for it rising).Quite a few will be nervous about Hunt’s Autumn Statement next week and it won’t help him that former Chancellor Ken Clarke ‘told Times Radio that he did not think Hunt has any “headroom for tax cuts” and that he would risk a severe public backlash if working people and those on benefits had to pay for it.“Choosing inheritance tax at the present time might appeal to the Conservative right, but it leaves them open to the most appalling criticisms when inflation and the state of affairs is making poorer people in this country very vulnerable indeed’, said Clarke. Hunt just tweeted what we should expect on Wednesday, to which one tweeter responded: ‘Let me guess, tax cuts for the well-off funded by reducing benefits for the sick and disabled? Inheritance tax scrapped to sweeten up hard-pressed high-earners? Ideological bankruptcy’.

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You’ll be aware there’s been much attention paid in recent years to arts and museum sponsorship, especially given the extensive and discredited Sackler family disgrace and protests against institutions’ perceived seduction by the fossil fuels industry. This is even more important now that government funding for the arts has not been seen as a priority. Having shed the mantle of BP, the National Portrait Gallery (very busy since its re-opening earlier this year), which it ‘wore’ for 30 years, critics have accused them of jumping from the frying pan into the fire by reaching an agreement with Herbert Smith Freehills, which includes fossil fuels companies amongst its clients. This is to fund its portrait prize. ‘Chris Garrard, a co-director of Culture Unstained, said: “To end your sponsorship deal with BP – a major producer of new oil and gas – only to then replace it with a law firm that has actively enabled BP and others to produce more fossil fuels is a complete climate fail’.

You’ve heard of ‘greenwashing’: this is dubbed ‘artwashing’ by sceptics. But the Gallery’s director hit back. ‘In an interview with the Times, the gallery’s director, Nicholas Cullinan, said they had red lines over who it would accept money from, but museums could not afford to be activists and it was difficult to find law firms or banks without links to fossil fuels’. The Gallery is a charity and only part-funded by government so has to generate 70% of its running costs. This debate is likely to run and run as climate activism increases but so does the need for the arts to seek funding.

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Sticking with similar territory, you’ll remember the hoo ha about thousands of objects going missing at the British Museum (and others), when various unprofessional practices emerged such as there being no overall catalogue of articles in its possession. At the time politician turned journalist turned museum overseer George Osborne stuck to a defensive line, despite a source, interviewed in the media, being able to tell the story of how these losses/thefts came about. He’s now admitted ‘we failed in our duty to look after objects’. ‘The British Museum must “own [its] mistakes” and not shy away from controversy, chair George Osborne has said in a speech at the institution’s annual dinner for trustees. Acknowledging that 2023 has not been the “easiest of years” for the museum, Osborne pledged that it would be more open in addressing contentious issues such repatriation, as well as confronting its failures in dealing with the alleged thefts.“I think too often we’ve thought: let’s keep quiet; if we don’t talk about things that are difficult, then no one else will,” he said’. Museum watchers will be keen to see whether this new policy of transparency takes root: if only the same could be said for politics.

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Finally, chocolate lovers and others have long lamented the perceived decline in the quality of the goods when a huge conglomerate takes over an iconic British brand: this happened with Cadbury’s and Fry’s to name just two. We now hear that upmarket brand Hotel Chocolat, which boasts many high street outlets and a chain of cafes, has fallen prey to this scenario, allowing itself to be bought out by the US food and confectionery empire Mars, in a £534m deal. Hotel Chocolat isn’t any old brand: in 2006 its co-founder Angus Thirwell bought the 250-acre Rabot cocoa estate in St Lucia, part of the company’s mission to produce more sophisticated chocolates with ‘more cocoa, less sugar’ and to treat its farmers fairly. This is in contrast to what Thirwell considers to be the quality of supermarket chocolate: ‘boring and rubbish quality’. It seems the reason for this deal is HC’s struggle to expand into the US and Japan but not having the muscle for this which ‘big chocolate’ does have.

Thirwell sent customers a bullish email yesterday, saying that Mars has similar values and priorities to HC. He will remain CEO and they will operate as a standalone brand within Mars: ‘I would like to reassure you that our mission to make people and nature happy through re-inventing chocolate very much remains in place… Onwards with the chocolate revolution!’

It will be interesting to see how this pans out.

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Meanwhile, it should be an interesting if worrying fortnight ahead, with the Autumn Statement due on Wednesday and the start, at the Covid Inquiry, of evidence from Sir Patrick Vallance (whose diary extracts we’ve heard recently) and with Boris Johnson appearing soon. Will he or won’t he behave in the same petulant and avoidant manner he adopted at the Commons Partygate interrogation?

Sunday 5 November

As we gradually emerge from the high winds and deluges of yet another storm, there’s sadly no sign of emergence from the Israel/Hamas conflict, the appalling Covid Inquiry revelations, further examples of Tory corruption and debates about AI and the much trumpeted AI Safety Conference. The police and politicians seem to be taken aback by the strength of feeling and number of pro-Palestinian marches, officers being pressed to make more arrests under the Public Order acts and a current debate is around marches scheduled to take place not on Remembrance Day but the day before. Whatever our view of the conflict, Foreign Affairs Select Committee chair Alicia Kearns has a point when she opines that this government has failed to be a critical friend and had taken its eye off the ball by failing to appoint a minister for the Middle East.

‘Critics argue that the UK government, along with others, missed the danger signals and invested in an unconditional and one-sided relationship with Israel that did not acknowledge how different the government elected in November was to its predecessors.

Concerns that the UK Foreign Office has neglected the Israel-Palestine conflict in its tilt to the Indo-Pacific and the pursuit of trade deals across the Middle East is to be investigated by the Foreign Affairs Select Committee’. Kearns said: “I stress that this low-commitment ask would allow us to live up to our responsibilities and demonstrate meaningful resolve. Our voice is unique and will be heard, and we have a role to play in the peace process’. In my view she hits the nail on the head regarding the real reason for the government’s lack of focus because they routinely take the easy way out and direct their efforts to self-aggrandizing interventions: ‘If I am honest, it feels increasingly to me that the reason we are silent around the Middle East is because there is no Instagram diplomacy to be won. There are no easy wins’.

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Speaking of self-aggrandizement, this is exactly what this latest AI conference has been about (besides deflecting from Tory chaos, of course) despite script-churning clones like Science Minister Michelle Donelan bigging up this summit (the phrase ‘across the globe’ was doing a lot of heavy lifting) and saying they’d scheduled numbers two and three already. Sunak’s interview of Elon Musk plumbed new depths of embarrassment and sycophancy and plenty have suggested that this is yet another route Sunak is using to grab more opportunities for his father-in-law’s Infosys tech giant. A key aspect not given much air time is that although journalists were allowed to attend, no questions could be asked: if this doesn’t suggest these people being on shaky ground I don’t know what does. Channel 4 News’s Cathy Newman conducted a bullish interview of Donelan outside the Bletchley Park venue, raising the key issue of lack of coverage of regulation, to which Donelan responded that discussing regulation was not within the summit’s remit. You couldn’t make it up, except we know how antithetical regulatory frameworks are to ideological Tories.

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Concerns have been growing around this government moving more and more to the right, the latest measures seen as entering dictatorship territory. Besides wanting the inappropriately labelled ‘hate marches’ more rigorously policed, Suella Braverman has now embarrassed herself further by demonizing rough sleepers and undertaking to get tents removed, arguing that their use by the homeless (nothing to do with Tory housing policy, of course) is ‘a lifestyle choice’. We now hear of Michael Gove’s plans for broadening the definition of ‘extremism’, which would severely curtail free speech and criminalise legitimate dissent. No doubt Braverman would have liked something like this to be in place for the State Opening of Parliament and King’s Speech on Tuesday, during which there will be Not My King protests.

Although the media have been criticized for paying the Covid Inquiry scant attention up till now, it was undeniably a major news item last week, a situation set to continue as yet more damning evidence emerges of government dishonesty and incompetence. Yet again, as he’s been implicated in so many irregular government dealings, Cabinet Secretary Simon Case comes across as a Houdini-like figure, going on sick leave just before he was scheduled to give evidence. It’s clear this intervention has been diplomatic, or at least partly diplomatic, and the question must be will this let him off the hook altogether or will another way be found to extract crucial evidence from him? The fact is that, like many others around at the time, he went along with criminally negligent inattention to facts and detail, misrepresentation of ‘the science’ and the staggering incompetence of Boris Johnson.

If it wasn’t so serious it would be comical to hear former director of Communications Lee Cain say that Covid was the “wrong crisis for this prime minister’s skill set” and that they were exhausted by the PM’s dallying and changing his mind on a daily basis. ‘Anyone that’s worked with the prime minister for a period of time will become exhausted with him…Sometimes he quite challenging character to work with, just because he will oscillate, he will take a decision from the last person in the room’. The Trolley nickname seems very apt. Johnson said he wouldn’t comment on the Inquiry prior to giving evidence himself but we can imagine he’d be spitting with fury at what these witnesses were saying about him. Some of these people claim to have ‘lost’ their vital WhatsApp messages but there’s no denying the evidence of Sir Patrick Vallance’s diary. Many of us will recall the obvious discomfort emanating from Vallance and Chris Whitty as they shared the daily press conference platform with Johnson – but they chose not to speak up about their doubts and the extent they had to cover for him. It seems they waited till their knighthoods were in the bag before doing so.

Although most of us won’t be surprised, given what we already knew, amongst the worst revelations must surely be Dominic Cummings’s dismissal of most of his former colleagues, using appalling language; the evidence of former top civil servant Helen MacNamara that Johnson’s no 10 was ‘sexist’, ‘toxic’ and ‘awful’ in a way she had never experienced in government before, that there was no plan for the crisis, the sizeable number of issues the government hadn’t considered, and that she could barely think of a time when nationally imposed restrictions had been observed in Downing Street; Vallance’s diary notes of Johnson saying the virus was ‘nature’s way of dealing with old people’ as an argument against locking down and his obsession with ‘older people accepting their fate and letting the young get on with life and [keeping] the economy going’; and former NHS England Chief Executive Simon Stevens reporting Matt Hancock’s conviction that he, rather than medics, should determine who lived or died  if hospitals became overwhelmed.

Needless to say, commentators didn’t hold back. John Crace said: ‘At a time when thousands were dying alone in hospitals and care homes, the government had lost its humanity. Unable to treat its own citizens with dignity and respect. Unaware of its obligations to the country. Or even to its own employees. Just posturing and ad-libbing its way through with macho abandon…Journeymen and women more interested in fighting their own macho turf wars. All seemingly not that bothered their decisions were costing lives…Here’s a thought. Almost any of us could have done a better job than those who were meant to be running the country’.

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As if any were needed, all this is surely further proof that we largely have the wrong people going into politics. A young caller, Patrick, was on Radio 4’s Any Questions, asking why he should now trust any politicians. Absurdly but predictably, the Tory (Treasury Minister Gareth Davies) said yes, we can trust politicians! A listener tweeted: ‘MacNamara’s testimony reveals the danger of having too many over-entitled, arrogant old Etonians in government who think they have special abilities’. A Byline Times (a non mainstream news source now available in newsagents) article was headlined: ‘Boris Johnson’s Covid Catastrophe Has Exposed the Tragic Deference and Negligence of British Politics – Damning evidence from the Covid Inquiry reveals how the former PM was enabled by a system determined to look the other way’.

Polly Toynbee wrote: ‘From pensions to health to social care, this government has done precious little to prepare for an ageing population’. Detailing the rising costs of servicing the ageing population, she points out the irony of many older people being Tory voters, the government then complaining about them and demonstrating such inhumane readiness to offload them. ‘I doubt many older Tory voters will forget the terminal plans being hatched for them inside No 10, not just by Johnson but also by all those around him, who discussed them willingly’.

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In the Observer Andrew Rawnsley goes further: ‘The Covid inquiry testimony is an eviscerating indictment of Boris Johnson and a stain on the reputation of his enablers’.

‘If a government looks bad from the outside, it will be twice as rotten on the inside. I’ve found this a reliable rule of thumb over the years, but it underestimated the breathtaking depths of the dreadfulness of the reign of Boris Johnson. That looked ghastly from the outside, but was many times more grotesque on the inside’. Not half: and it’s notable that Sunak, Rees-Mogg and many others, who maintain such insouciance, are markedly implicated in all this themselves. ‘It was already established that he was a wholly unsuitable character to be leading the country through the gravest peacetime emergency in more than a century. We knew he was too selfish, too weak, too amoral, too capricious, too negligent and too frivolous. What the inquiry is adding to the familiar portrait of Mr Johnson is detailed and compelling testimony from people who were in the room about how utterly unfit – ethically, intellectually, temperamentally and in any other way you might mention – he was to be prime minister’.

So much for Covid being the ‘wrong’ crisis for Johnson’s ‘skills set’. We can’t imagine his ‘skills set’ being any use in any crisis. ‘When the country most needed a decent, diligent and decisive prime minister, we had a derelict at the helm. The UK was unprepared to handle a rogue pathogen or a rogue leader and had the huge misfortune to be afflicted with both at the same time’. In my view what’s so incisive about this article is that it doesn’t just focus on Johnson’s failings: it incorporates those of his colleagues, Tory party members, the media and others who enabled him, besides the supporting structures (eg Civil Service) any PM has to rely heavily upon. ‘The cabinet were elected ministers of the crown. Yet the “morons” even humiliated themselves by obeying orders to defend Cummings’s “eye-test” excursion to Barnard Castle. Were they spineless, clueless or simply useless? Whichever, they failed to perform their constitutional function’.

As for the Civil Service, ‘speaking truth to power has traditionally been part of the remit and the voice needed to be especially insistent when the power was being wielded so atrociously. This didn’t happen and it is not the only dismal failure by the senior echelons of the mandarinate’. Singled out for particular criticism, on the grounds that that they’re the most important officials for the PM, are the Principal Private Secretary (Martin Reynolds) and the Cabinet Secretary, Simon Case, the first not only failing to stop Partygate but who actually sent invites to one party, and the second abjectly unable or unwilling to perform the role of ‘the wise man of government, with sufficient gravitas to cajole a bad PM to correct his ways’. It sounds like the cowardly Case just opted out, on one occasion even ‘bleating ‘Am not sure I can cope with today. Might just go home.”

The fact that Johnson was ejected in July 2022 has been given as proof by some that the ‘system’ still works but, as Rawnsley points out, that’s not the case, not least because such people can do huge damage beforehand. I’ve long harped on about the need for a new (and written Constitution) and new parliamentary rules – as we’ve seen time and time again during this administration, they’re not fit for purpose. We must devise rules which are enforceable and not dependent on individuals ‘doing the right thing’. Also, voters should be able to recall MPs much more easily (numerous constituents have not been represented for considerable periods of time because their MP, under investigation or having thrown their toys out of the pram, is absent or had the whip removed) and the electorate should be empowered to demand an election in extremis, and we’ve long had extremis.

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It’s noticeable that despite what we know ie about Johnson’s delay to this Inquiry, the Tory script is to claim credit for setting it up. Deputy PM Oliver Dowden was on Laura Kuenssberg on Sunday this morning giving his usual car crash interview and was the latest to spout this version of events. A tweeter observed: ‘Dowden says it’s right to have an inquiry… Yes, but was it right for Johnson to delay the start so long that by the time the report comes out all those seen to be culpable will have long departed the political scene?’.

Meanwhile, despite his ongoing disgrace, Boris Johnson continues to take himself seriously and remains determined to make his irrelevant presence felt: not only is he getting his own show on GB News (surely the home of clapped out Tories) but we hear he’s now in Israel ‘to show support’. To keep himself centre stage, more like – who’s paying and is he now bored with Ukraine?

During Storm Babet, which killed 7 and flooded 1,250 homes, Environment Minister Therese Coffey  had already made an absolute fool of herself again, offering the excuse about inadequate forecasting that it was harder to predict because the rain was coming from the east, not the west. This deservedly resulted in derision from Lib Dems and others, who urged her to ‘get a grip’ and ‘stop blaming everyone else for her failings’. A wag tweeted: ‘Hello BBC weather, I can confirm the rain is coming from the East, got my compass out. Am wearing rain coat on right side only. Please tell Coffey I have it under control’. One of the laziest and most disengaged ministers of recent times, Coffey is once more in the frame, for Environment Agency failings. Tim Farron, the Liberal Democrats’ environment spokesperson, said: “This is a new low for an environment secretary that cannot help but say or do the wrong thing’.

Last week it emerged that the Environment Agency had almost halved water use inspections over the last five years and has even introduced desk-based inspections, which an insider said were meaningless. It sounds like the worst time for this to be happening. ‘Environment Agency (EA) officers visited people and businesses with licences to abstract, or take, water from rivers and aquifers 4,539 times in 2018-19, but this dropped to 2,303 inspections in 2022-23, according to data obtained by the Guardian and Watershed Investigations. The fall in inspections comes despite England facing a possible water deficit of 4bn litres a day by 2050 unless action is taken, and predictions that the summer flows of some rivers could dwindle by 80% in that time’.

Not surprisingly, an insider told the investigators that these measures benefited agriculture and the water companies but were ‘incredibly detrimental’ to water resources and the environment. Even more worrying is the lack of transparency around these changes: the insider said ‘these methods (including desk inspections) provide a smokescreen of numbers that suggest correct regulation is being carried out should anyone try to audit it, when in reality the regulation is meaningless’. Let’s hope that the minister is quizzed about this in the Commons as she’s the kind who regularly presents one intervention or another as being useful and constructive when it’s anything but.

Richard Benwell, the CEO of Wildlife and Countryside Link, is quoted: ‘A long-term funding drought for the Environment Agency has left it under-resourced for the water challenges ahead. Recent funding rises don’t offset the years of underinvestment in the agency.This drop-off in post-Covid inspections is highly worrying and runs the risk of failures going under the radar. Desk-based and industry self-assessments simply aren’t up to the task, as we’ve seen with the sewage pollution crisis’.

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Astonishingly, in this morass of gloom, there was some excellent news this week despite its delivery incorporating a sting in the tail. The consultation regarding the closure of railway station ticket offices netted more than 750,000 responses, which made clear how difficult being without these important resources would be for many, especially those with disabilities. The government has U-turned but this was disingenuously presented by Transport Minister Mark Harper as the government instructing the rail companies to withdraw these proposals, when they were driven by the government in the first place. The rail companies were understandably livid about this misrepresentation. It’s marvelous news for passengers and for staff who would have lost their jobs. So it was worth signing those petitions and attending those demos!

The Independent reported on the latest findings on the crumbling state of public services in Britain, ‘in a state of perpetual crisis’. Many of us have long been bogged down by nothing working and the difficulty of getting anything done, even getting a GP appointment feeling like wading through mud. ‘The Institute for Government (IfG) said the UK’s “dire” public services were performing worse than they did before Covid – and much worse than when the Conservatives came to power in 2010. In a bleak assessment, the respected think tank pointed to funding cuts during austerity and the disruption caused by recent strikes as being behind the worsening state of the NHS, schools, courts and prisons’. The report said Rishi Sunak’s refusal to negotiate over public sector pay had worsened the situation, and alarmingly but predictably, this state of affairs would leave a big mess for the next government: ‘Escaping this will not be easy and whoever forms the next government will be hindered by the short-sighted decisions of its predecessors’.

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An interesting analysis of the ‘wellness’ industry effectively shows how this has benefited from these public service deficits and austerity. The article portrays how the self-care business model cynically exploits perceptions that something is missing in our lives, making the goal unattainable to encourage customers to keep on buying in the hope of eventual transformation. One of the mechanisms hooking people in is the offer of false certainty, eg ‘I can definitely help you. This supplement is definitely going to cure your symptoms. You should try this diet. It’ll get rid of all your pain.’

In case anyone wonders why this is important the article cites authoritative sources which indicate the size of the industry and it wouldn’t have become so without the failure or unavailability of conventional medicine: ‘According to a 2019 report by the Global Wellness Institute, a non-profit advocacy organization, the industry represents a $4.4tn market. A 2021 NielsenIQ report declared health and wellness “THE single most powerful consumer force”. It’s also seen as offering the ‘illusion of control and empowerment’. It conveys a powerful and seductive message: “If you work hard enough and you buy the right things, you’ll be saved from disease and ageing and anything bad happening to you’ but what’s really needed is far harder: ‘Perhaps it is far healthier to agitate against the circumstances making us sick and miserable than it is to latch our hopes to another glossy promise’.

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Finally, it’s good news for environmentally aware coffee consumers that Marks and Spencer has become the first major high street retailer to launch a plastic-free, fully recyclable takeaway coffee cup. Made of paper fibre, it’s already available at 20 sites and the plan is to extend this to every M&S café over the next few months. It will be interesting to see if this encourages more sales at these cafes in preference to other coffee purveyors!

Sunday 22 October

Whatever we think about the Israel/Hamas conflict (and views seem markedly polarized) it’s very noticeable how mostly one-sided the response from UK politicians, world leaders and the media has been. Many more Gazans have been killed in air strikes this week and the ground invasion hasn’t even started yet. And despite President Biden’s intervention in pressing for admitting humanitarian aid, the convoys waited for days at the Egypt-Gaza border. But there has been some useful broadcasting of programmes documenting the complex history of this area, which not everyone will have been familiar with. We have to hope that escalation can be prevented. At least it’s good news that some hostages have been released and the aid convoys are finally on the move, albeit slowly.

Meanwhile, it sticks in the craw that Rishi Sunak and James Cleverly are using this as a photo opp, attempting to revive the flagging fortunes of the Conservative Party. On Friday’s late afternoon news Sunak bullishly reported that he’d met six Middle East leaders and seemed to imply that his visit would positively influence the decisions around unblocking the aid to Gaza. This kind of hyperbolic self-aggrandisement is not only a national embarrassment but, as the Tamworth and Mid-Bedfordshire byelections have shown, simply will not work. Sunak’s attempt to present himself as an agent for change is just risible. One X user tweeted: ‘An heroic Sunak en route to Israel where the atmosphere is less hostile than Tamworth or Mid Beds. There cannot be anything more sad than Rishi Sunak using the Israeli crisis to prop his failing PM career up’.

When Sunak finally turned his attention to the appalling byelection results, he seemed to underplay them, describing them as ‘disappointing’ but not unexpected ‘mid-term’. Swings of more than 20% to Labour cannot be so easily dismissed. This X user got it in one: ‘Sunak can’t even come up with an original response to what Osborne described as a prelude to Armageddon for the Tories. This is the standard statement every PM has given to every by-election loss for the last several decades. It’s not mid-term blues it’s terminal decline’. Drawing attention to the impact of these results, another said: ‘Mid Beds has been Tory for almost a century while Tamworth was party’s 55th safest seat. Terrible result for Rishi Sunak’. John Crace puts it so well, deconstructing the party chair’s media round performance as ‘deranged’. ‘Greg Hands and fellow party apologists spin themselves in circles in search of positive twist on historic defeats…. it’s not a lot of fun being chair of the Tory party these days. Just one damned thing after another. Trying to keep people’s spirits up as the party lurches from one disaster after another. It’s really not that bad, you keep saying. But it is. It really is. It’s worse than that, in fact’.

 Once Hands had made an absolute fool of himself, still saying Rishi was the man with the big ideas, ones the country was enthusiastically embracing and that he would ‘lead the party to a bright new future’, it was then the turn of other Tory stalwarts like Danny Kruger, Gillian Keegan and David Frost, whose twisted logic was based on the idea that their failure was not having been right wing enough. Not only a great beginning to this article but also a striking coup de grace by Crace: ‘Greg, Gillian, Frosty and Danny are the best recruiting sergeants Starmer could want. More and more, the Tories resemble a death cult. Scrabbling for their own extinction’.

https://tinyurl.com/2c9m6y9s

But on Saturday it emerged that, faced with boundary changes and the byelection results, Chancellor Jeremy Hunt is seeing to his own political extinction by deciding (according to senior Tory sources) that he won’t stand again. If he does actually go, who else could then follow suit? The Conservative Party is imploding. Meanwhile, a bullish Robert Jenrick appeared on Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg (actually presented by Victoria Derbyshire again), continuing to sit on the Israel/Palestine fence and struggling to defend his party’s record, dismissing the byelection results and conflating the PM’s priorities with the public’s. A tweeter said: ‘Robert Jenrick being interviewed by Victoria Derbyshire couldn’t be more out of his depth if he was set adrift mid Atlantic without a dinghy’.

Besides the mid-term malaise con, amongst the pathetic excuses given for the historic Tory losses, were suggestions that it’s local issues, ‘our people’s stayed at home’ (but why?!) and more. An Any Questions response from Labour was categorical – it wasn’t ‘local issues’, it’s one major problem, that people are fed up with this government. As a listener tweeted: ‘14 years to deliver, all we got is poorer services highest cost of living crisis on record and we are paying highest taxes than anyone has seen’. Not to mention the non-stop corruption, cronyism, lying and incompetence, the extent of which is being further revealed via the Covid Inquiry. We have to wonder what planet Scottish Conservative Andrew Bowie, doing the media rounds all day Friday, is on: ‘Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt have brought competence and professionalism back into government’. 100% delusion and denial.

Andrew Rawnsley in the Observer is even franker about the Tories’ electoral chances:

‘Unless there is a highly dramatic shift in the political weather, the byelections confirm the message of the polls that the Conservatives are heading for the exit and Labour towards government. Rishi Sunak promised his party that he could alter this trajectory. He’s approaching the first anniversary of his time at Number 10 having failed. Initially, he presented himself to the country as the fixer who could sort out Britain’s many problems. That strategy has unravelled because those problems are so palpably unfixed. None of the five pledges that he made at the beginning of the year have been fulfilled and he’s going backwards on the commitment to bring down NHS waiting lists… The prime minister’s attempt to relaunch the government and rebrand himself at the Tory conference in Manchester has flopped. Presenting himself as “the change” that Britain needs after what he called 30 years of failure has succeeded in aggravating every living former Conservative prime minister from John Major onwards. What it has not done is persuade voters to change their view of him and his party’. Let’s hope Robert Jenrick sees this article, as he is still maintaining in the face of all evidence that progress is being made on these pledges.

https://tinyurl.com/29wtzhj7

When their boss finally returns from jetting around the Middle East and elsewhere (anything than face the Commons) they will no doubt have a post-mortem (along with consideration as to whether their leader needs changing), though in public they affect puzzlement about the results. Quite a few would be prepared to help them out and ease their mystification: one tweeter said: ‘Rates of corporation tax are *not* what troubles the average British voter sat at home worrying about… 1. How to pay their bills 2.  Job insecurity 3. Our health services 4. Loss of confidence in our police force 5. Tory #corruption 6. Govt funding of foreign wars’.

Meanwhile, strikes continue and RMT has announced that rail workers at English train operating companies have voted overwhelming for another six months of potential strikes; a shocking report by the National Infrastructure Commission that underinvestment in public transport, home heating and water networks has been in the region of £30bn; a further 40 schools have been found to have RAAC; the NHS continues to crumble and the government’s deliberate undermining and weakening of the UK’s regulatory framework means that no regulator, from Ofgem to Ofcom to Ofwat is operating as it should, leading to continuing profiteering, media mismanagement and continuing sewage dumping.

https://tinyurl.com/bajhknxk

Another issue proving increasingly alarming has been the growth of a police state here, the Met and other forces failing to do their actual jobs of detecting and dealing with crime (despite some positive-sounding statistics the Tories boasted about there’s been a massive increase in recent times, including shoplifting, but fewer are reporting it, knowing it will lead nowhere) but taking the Public Order Act to absurd lengths. We saw examples of this during the Not My King and other protests and the latest example is the arrest of Greta Thunberg at the Mayfair venue of Tuesday’s Energy Intelligence Forum (EIF), which brought together fossil fuel executives and government ministers. ‘Addressing journalists before joining the protest, Thunberg said: “Behind these closed doors at the oil and money conference, spineless politicians are making deals and compromises with lobbyists from destructive industries, the fossil fuel industry. People all over the world are suffering and dying from the consequences of the climate crisis caused by these industries who we allow to meet with our politicians and have privileged access to’. Such protests should be considered a legitimate part of our democratic process, but increasingly they are cynically criminalised, such arrests also serving to deter other potential protesters.

But never mind all this, as the desperate Sunak now thinks tax cuts for higher earners and lowering stamp duty will be the answer to lure voters back to his fold. ‘A senior Tory told the Times that reducing stamp duty would be “aspirational” and improve the economy in addition to attracting middle-class voters who had left the party’. It will take a lot more than that.

https://tinyurl.com/y947sesc

Further shocking revelations are emerging daily from the Covid Inquiry, again demonstrating just how ignorant, dishonest, incompetent and reckless our leaders were. This second stage of the Covid Inquiry is examining political decision-making during the pandemic, including the timing and effectiveness of lockdowns and other social-distancing restrictions. Flurries of WhatsApp messages between the main players showed the level of confusion and incompetence: what a contrast to then see extracts from the diary notes of Sir Patrick Vallance, eg in one entry alluding to ‘chaos as usual’ after a meeting on social distancing; in another he described Boris Johnson, as ‘… all over the place and so completely inconsistent’. Last week it emerged that Boris Johnson had scrawled ‘bollocks’ on a paper about Long Covid, with which thousands continue to suffer, often without NHS help.

Apart from the inappropriate language, it’s simply not the act of a serious politician. Perhaps even worse was the implication by Cabinet Secretary Simon Case (himself thought to be too involved in various manifestations of wrongdoing in recent years) that during those months in 2020, Downing Street was in chaos and it was actually Carrie Johnson making the decisions. Meanwhile thousands were dying unnecessarily as incompetent and reckless politicians engaged in ego battles. An example of the dishonest denial of politicians at the time is Rishi Sunak declaring at Prime Minister’s Questions early last month that ‘This government put its arms around the British public’. A tweeter observed: ‘That’s one of the most egregious things Sunak has come out with. On a par with Hancock saying the government ‘threw a protective ring around our care homes’.

As Rishi Sunak continues to claim that he cannot access his WhatsApp messages of that time, his Eat Out to Help Out scheme came in for more flak and Professor Dame Angela McLean (now Chief Scientific Officer) alluded to him as Dr Death. What’s clear is how perturbed some scientists were about government policy and recklessness, clearly in this case prioritizing helping the hospitality industry and the wider economy regardless of rising infections. A tweeter observed: ‘Boris Johnson would have been an appallingly bad PM in the best of times. To have a shambolic, deeply dishonest narcissist in Number 10 during a major pandemic was catastrophic & led to tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths’. The Inquiry continues and it’s apparently possible for anyone interested in attending to ascertain who is appearing when and to book a seat for that session. Will there be any empty seats at the Johnson session? Close perusal of the current timetable suggests a gap next week – after such a long summer break, during which it could lose momentum, they’re surely not taking a half term break as well? Life doesn’t stop for half term!

https://tinyurl.com/5n8t5w9f

Regarding Covid, this article is useful and timely as cases are rising and, with no free testing, the ONS infection survey having stopped in March, boosters only available to the over 65s and the clinically vulnerable and with no government policy, we feel on our own – not for the first time, capturing the survival-of-the-fittest ethos of this government. The article quotes Professor Christina Pagel of University College London, one of the most prominent experts in this area: ‘We’re not in 2020 or 2021 and that’s a good thing. But we’re also not in 2019. We’ve still got a new disease that’s killing thousands of people each year and we’ve got long Covid’. What’s also alarming is hearing that some NHS trusts and schools are urging staff not to test and still to attend work when they could be Covid positive. Madness. And Long Covid continues to be overlooked: at the last ONS survey in March (another piece of madness was ending this) 1.9m people believed they had long Covid. So much for Boris Johnson’s vulgar dismissal of it, especially when thousands are struggling to access NHS treatment.

https://tinyurl.com/muh9pfsf

Hardly a week passes when there isn’t a new report about the poor state of the nation’s mental health – demand for NHS treatment has continued to rise markedly for years and of course this is partly connected to the poor state of the country and the cost of living crisis putting people’s finances under considerable strain. Due to longstanding underinvestment in mental health and misdirection (in my view) of those resources waiting lists continue to grow and for serious conditions like eating disorders it seems one of the methods used by trusts to cope with the demand is to raise the threshold to qualify for treatment. Meanwhile, only some can afford to pay for private treatment and, with still no statutory regulation of counselling and psychotherapy in this country, there is the risk of inadequate help or even harm because some practitioners have insufficient quality training and experience. Mental health is too important to leave to this kind of lottery.

What brought this home even more was World Mental Health Day on 10 October, yet zero coverage by the BBC. NHS bosses are calling the situation a ‘national emergency’. ‘A historic lack of investment in community mental health facilities and places in supported housing facilities means that “there is simply nowhere else for people to be referred on to quickly enough, at which point the only viable option is an admission to acute bed…People in the midst of a mental health crisis are spending up to 50 hours stuck in A&E because NHS support for them outside hospitals is so limited, the confederation said. However, acute hospital bosses voiced concern that their doctors, nurses and other staff are not well-placed to respond to all the needs of people suffering from severe episodes of conditions like depression or psychosis, because their expertise is primarily in managing physical illness’. As usual, we get a typically disingenuous statement from the Department of Health and Social Care: ‘We’re transforming our country’s mental health services and investing an additional £2.3bn annually to expand services so an extra 2 million people can get support’.

https://tinyurl.com/yuprzaaz

It was refreshing to hear about the winner of RIBA’s 2023 Stirling Prize for the UK’s best new building – the John Morden Centre, a retirement home in South London. RIBA’s press release reads: ‘An inspiring example of architecture enabling elderly living without isolation, the John Morden Centre has been designed to encourage connection and movement among residents, supporting healthier and longer lives. This 300-year-old residential and nursing facility has been given a new lease of life with treatment rooms, a hair salon, nail bar, events space and wellbeing facilities in a beautiful setting in Blackheath, London….Dedication to creating an environment that lifts the spirits and fosters community is evident at every turn and in every detail. This robust building provides comfort and warmth, with thoughtful features designed to prevent isolation. It illustrates how buildings can themselves be therapeutic – supporting care and instilling a sense of belonging. Great architecture orients people so they can thrive, and this building is exemplary at achieving exactly that’. While all of this sounds exemplary, RIBA does not state and seems unperturbed by the exclusionary quality of the place – only those having occupied managerial or leadership roles can qualify.

https://tinyurl.com/3tkt7jn7

It could be argued that our need for mental respite is stronger than ever at the moment so it was a delight to read about the amount of volunteer effort being put into running Britain’s 1500 tiny cinemas. Jaq Chell, CEO of the charity Cinema for All, which ‘supports them with everything from licensing and insurance to equipment’. Some are apparently just pop-ups in pubs or community halls. Chell says: ‘It’s a hidden world, especially in rural places: anywhere you can set up a screen you can have a cinema’. ‘She attributes the growth to a combination of lighter, more user-friendly equipment and successive changes to licensing laws, which have cut the bureaucracy for community venues with fewer than 500 seats’. The article poses the question as to why are so many more community venues opening when others are closing. As an arthouse cinema fan not interested in many blockbusters, hooray for this response, I thought: ‘We show films that are of cultural significance,” says Rod White (head of programming at Edinburgh Filmhouse). ‘There’s a whole stream of films that wouldn’t exist in this country if you didn’t have these sorts of venues that are prepared to show ones that are not commercial’. Getting a regular mention is the cafes and bars in these venues and of course these catalyse an important social connection for filmgoers. My local one is great for this, at least two film discussion groups meeting there regularly, whereas one visited a while back outside London had no café or bar and you could sense the difference. I thought this captures the essence of these places: ‘For all the beauty of old cinema buildings, film is not just about bricks and mortar: it is about ways of being as well as seeing’.

https://tinyurl.com/3fttnr24

Finally, for those preferring a different kind of escape, though unaffordable for many, there are two new hotels in London, one where room prices start at £1000 a night (Raffles London at the Old War Office, on Whitehall). An article in The Week (based on a longer one in the Financial Times) described this ‘temple of luxury’, which has 1,100 rooms, two and a half miles of corridors, 3000 people working there and three basement floors excavated to accommodate a glittering ballroom and massive swimming pool. The entire project has cost the Hinduja Group £1.4bn and it’s telling that the CV of the French MD, Philippe Leboeuf, includes the ‘three Cs’ – Claridge’s, the Hotel de Crillon in Paris and the Carlyle in New York. Some track record there. The enormity of this project is perhaps conveyed by his view that in order to find a precedent ‘you’d really have to go back to The Ritz (1906) and The Savoy (1889)’.

As if this wasn’t enough, more luxury hotels have opened recently in London or soon will, including The Peninsula, a new Mandarin Oriental, The Emory, a Rosewood and a Six Senses. It begs the question who is going to occupy all these hotels, the cheapest at Peninsula being £1300 per night? Not including breakfast, which is an additional £41 if you want ‘the full English’! The word sybaritic comes to mind – some may suggest alternatives!

Monday 9 October

Most of us must be hoping now that we don’t soon have a full scale Middle East war brewing up. Here, in the UK…..

What an absolute rollercoaster British politics has been during recent weeks, much of it intensely unsavoury and depressing, including the latest Tory (donor ‘Lord’ Bamford) being the subject of a three year HMRC investigation, a 26% rise in people asking for (sadly lacking) mental health support between 2018-22, the shameless antics of Liz Truss still trying to repair her damaging legacy, Sunak’s alleged loss of his WhatsApp messages as the Covid Inquiry recommences, the continuing housing and cost of living crises, lack of confidence in the UK economy (despite Jeremy Hunt’s bullish fibs business investment is said to be lower in the UK than any other country in the G7), the GB News debate indicating once again the weakness of our regulatory infrastructure, Suella Braverman’s incendiary ‘invasion’ speech and efforts in the US to undermine support for ECHR and the massive one shrouded for some time in opacity – the cancellation of HS2.

We learned that the PM and his government had to scrabble around overnight to string together what they thought was a convincing narrative about this (‘the facts have changed’!) as the announcement was planned for November, not mid conference, but a leak put paid to that. You can understand but not excuse why Sunak did his best to avoid making this announcement in the very city no longer to be served by the longstanding flagship infrastructure project, aka hugely expensive and damaging debacle. Politicians and commentators seem to be split on their views as to whether or not HS2 should have been continued, but I think their apparent promise that the money will be reallocated to other transport project (‘every single penny’) needs intense ongoing scrutiny.

It’s been suggested (and many will agree) that with his transparently skin-saving retreat from Net Zero, Rishi Sunak entered a sinister new downward phase, further confirmed the embarrassingly bad performances at the Tory Party Conference. One worried X user tweeted: ‘Nightmare stuff from #RishiSunak, from the delusion (‘in my first year I brought stability to government’ etc) to ‘I want a better future for our children’. Only the children of the wealthy. Far more sinister than the bumbling Johnson. We need to be very afraid’. Apart from Sunak’s desperate bid for voter appeal by claiming to ‘scrap’ measures like a tax on meat and compulsory car sharing which were never policies in the first place, it’s clear his net zero retreat is an own goal as developers are not happy with it and nor are environmental campaigners about that or the plan to restrict the installation of solar panels on farmland. Clearly, he wasn’t expecting this blowback.

‘This is the latest weakening of green policies ahead of the general election, which started when the Conservatives won the Uxbridge byelection, a result widely attributed to anger around Labour mayor Sadiq Khan’s ultra low emissions zone. Sunak recently announced that the 2030 phase-out of new petrol and diesel cars will be pushed back to 2035, as well as weakening the 2035 gas boiler phase-out, confirming it will apply to far fewer homes. The government also plans to scrap pollution rules for housebuilders in sensitive areas, where they are currently not able to add to sewage pollution without paying to improve nearby wetlands’.

https://tinyurl.com/2s3u7bcz

Polly Toynbee summed up the essence of Sunak’s own goal. ‘Restoring some semblance of solidity was his calling card, but he has just trashed his unique selling point. The man who set out to restore the tattered fragments of his party’s reputation for responsibility – wrecked by his two predecessors – has added himself to this list of the most dishonourable, self-interested prime ministers in living memory. Here’s the irony: in breaking with Boris Johnson’s green policies, he most resembles him as callow and opportunistic, willing to say and do whatever pleases in the moment. And another one: it takes quite something to make Johnson seem the more statesmanlike, allowing him to tell Sunak not to “falter” now’.

https://tinyurl.com/y2v9duek

The conference itself was surely like no other before, unprecedented for one deluded, gaslighting and misleading or downright lying speech after another, Sunak’s coming out top, of course. Not to mention the spectacle of Nigel Farage dancing with Priti Patel, something she seemed keen to disavow when asked about it the next day. It seems that the Conservatives want to lay claim to ‘a brighter future’ beckoning, when they have, increasingly transparently, plundered the Treasury, ensured the flow of funds and projects to their families (especially the Murthys) and friends and trashed the country. The plan seems to be to leave Labour with a huge debt, sewage damaged rivers and coastlines, a continuing housing and economic crisis and wrecked public services. Sunak does indeed want to change politics and ‘take the country in a new direction’ but in a profoundly destructive way, not the way we are supposed to read into such a positive sounding descriptor. As for ‘long term decisions’ – yet another piece of gaslighting as everything this government does is short-term, aimed at boosting their flagging electoral chances.

Possibly the worst and most sickening tactic he used (after which any political wife could surely be fair game for media scrutiny) was getting his non-dom wife, Akshata Murthy, to introduce his conference speech. It was telling that this tweet, based on a Guardian article by Zoe Williams, was liked and reposted hundreds of times, proving that many here are sick to death of this unelected tech bro robot, so totally divorced from the realities faced by so many: ‘…my best friend, your prime minister”? Lady, this rhetorical symmetry is way off. You chose him, we didn’t. None of us, not even the people in the hall’. Get real, Akshata Murty. You may have chosen Rishi, but none of us did’. It’s hard to know which was worse: the absolute rubbish spouted from the conference platforms all week or the cheers and clapping from the gullible Tory faithful.

https://tinyurl.com/3cbfkd3e

How disappointing for the Tories, then, that polls have shown all these efforts were for nought as their ratings are still very much down. ‘Rishi Sunak’s has achieved no positive conference bounce after trying to relaunch the Tories as the party of “change” at their annual gathering in Manchester last week. Instead Labour, ahead of their gathering in Liverpool which starts this weekend, is up three points since last weekend and now stands on 42%, stretching its lead to 13 points. Despite all the coverage of Sunak and the Tories, the latest Opinium poll for the Observer shows the Conservatives unchanged on 29%’. If it wasn’t so serious what’s been almost amusing to see this last week is Tory-colluding BBC presenters getting very frustrated when interviewing these politicians, especially the tetchy, slippery Sunak, when their normal tactic is to defend the indefensible and read out government press releases. One of the main challenges they had to put to them was effectively the absurdity of lamenting some problem or other when they’ve been in government for 13 years. ‘Many Tory MPs conceded at their conference that Sunak’s approach of casting himself as a leader representing change would be a hard sell after 13 years of Conservative government’. Not half.

https://tinyurl.com/2s3s2ew2

But one presenter who stands head and shoulders above the rest is Victoria Derbyshire, standing in for Laura Kuenssberg on her Sunday morning BBC show and pretty well demolishing in a very reasoned way not only Transport Minister Mark Harper but also Keir Starmer, some viewers felt. And this is the depressing thing: we can’t have as much faith in Labour as they would like because their policies often don’t stand up to scrutiny and there’s too much evidence of Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting being hand in glove with American health service providers he intends to do NHS deals with. If Labour is not prepared to stand against NHS privatization (and it’s already gone too far down that slippery slope) there’s not much chance of preserving it. 

One of the most galling things Sunak came out with must be: ‘There is the undeniable sense that politics just doesn’t work the way it should … a feeling that Westminster is a broken system … It isn’t anger, it is an exhaustion with politics. In particular, politicians saying things, and then nothing ever changing’. Galling because the Conservatives have been in office for so long and had every opportunity to change things and ignorant because people aren’t just ‘exhausted’, they are indeed damned angry. The Guardian’s John Crace (who, alarmingly, was denied entry to the proceedings at one point) got the measure of this conference: ‘There are only a brave few – we unhappy few – who have made it to Manchester for the Tory conference. Dead-eyed delegates anxious to be sucked into a collective delusion. If only for a few hours. Anything to shake off the reality. Interviews aren’t Sunak’s strong point. Or rather his less weak weak point. The Inaction Man jibe has really got to him. It’s broken through his narcissistic defences and we are getting to see the real Rish!. Entitled, tetchy, out of touch. Pretty much exactly as the wordcloud Kuenssberg confronted him with observed. The public have got Sunak’s measure’.

https://tinyurl.com/yf8fcduz

An interesting article by Phillip Inman (Sunak’s spreadsheet solutions for Britain are a product of his ego) suggests that the PM fundamentally misunderstands what is needed for public sector reform (it’s not all about numbers) and that his distaste and refusal of consensus building is mistaken. ‘He suggested his dictatorial drive and superior knowledge about how to transform the education system, the health system and the way we commission transport projects would be the only antidote to those misguided consensus-builders when the next election arrives…. Sunak has fallen into the trap of believing that numbers win the argument – a view which pervades the top of the financial services industry and seems to have infected the prime minister from his time in the City’. Naturally for Sunak, and unhealthily, his mechanistic approach involves no consultation with workers or experts: ‘the move ranks as another top-down declaration of intent’… Like Boris Johnson and Liz Truss before him, Sunak is signed up to the idea of “magic bullet” reform that ignores sensible analysis in the belief that public services can be transformed quickly and painlessly’.The arrogance of such an approach is breathtaking indeed, even for this deluded individual.

https://tinyurl.com/m4a92hke

Meanwhile, Sunak tweeted his intentions bullishly throughout the week, the one possibly attracting the most flak being his stylishly posed version from (yet again) the private jet: ‘This week I took long-term decisions to build a brighter future and change our country – transforming our towns, boosting our transport, improving our education and reducing cancer deaths’. Who is taken in by this when the reverse is the case? A wag tweeted: ‘This week I took short-term decisions to scrap a brighter future and block our country’s progress. This change will: keep towns disconnected and under-resourced, overload our already failing transport, do nothing for education. Aren’t I great? Here’s me in my private jet, suckers.’ Oof.

There was also the little matter of the first in a series of byelections: on Thursday Labour  won the Rutherglen and West Hamilton with a big victory over the SNP. On Any Questions the Tory, Chris Heaton-Harris, while graciously acknowledging the result, said that we shouldn’t read too much into by-election results. Funny, though, that they’re quite prepared to read a lot into it if they win, as happened with the recent bigging up in Uxbridge. The Conservatives would also not have been pleased that Channel 4 chose to broadcast its predictably horrifying Partygate dramatization during the conference. The amount of traffic at the Twitter hashtag continues to demonstrate the degree of loathing for these people who partied while the rest of us were largely cut off from social contact and so many lost loved ones and couldn’t publicly mark their passing because of travel, mixing and funeral restrictions. Another tweet reposted hundreds of times last week was this: ‘Matt Fowler, co-founder of Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice, said: “If Johnson and Sunak don’t provide the inquiry with the messages it has asked for, they need to face the full force of the law’.

Some Tories were up in arms recently at Sue Gray’s appointment as Keir Starmer’s Chief of Staff: they could also be perturbed by his latest coup, now we hear Boris Johnson’s ex-wife and leading barrister Marina Wheeler is set to be appointed Labour’s new “whistleblowing tsar” for women. Great stuff. Ministers should also feel alarmed at the announcement Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves will make this week,  that Labour would create a Covid corruption commissioner role to help recoup billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money lost to waste, fraud and flawed contracting during the pandemic. Let’s hope they don’t double down on burying or losing the evidence as we’ve seen they have form on this.

With this country plummeting to heaven knows where under this self-serving government I often wonder what the international media makes of us, apart from a laughing stock, that is. Yes, Jonathan Powell was Tony Blair’s Chief of Staff for many years but his comments in the New Statesman deserve to be taken seriously. Concerned about how a Starmer government can begin to repair the damage caused by the last 13 years, he said:

‘The damage done to Britain’s standing in the world in the past six years is far worse than the legacy we inherited from Thatcher and Major. It will not be sufficient for Labour to not be the Tories. The three main pillars of our foreign policy – the US’s strongest ally, a leader in Europe and the soft power of development – have been systematically dismantled. To rebuild effectively, a new government will need a clear strategy in place to re-engage, and a plan to restructure the security and foreign policy machinery of government to deliver that strategy. Then world leaders will truly be able to say: “Britain is back.”

The National Trust’s AGM is approaching and members will have seen that yet again (apparently this is the role of their Nominations Committee) that not only do they recommend resolutions members are invited to support (or not) but also candidates. Five individuals are recommended for the five vacancies for the governing Council yet many more are standing for election, most of them having excellent-sounding professional backgrounds, skills and commitment to the Trust and its aims. It was noticeable that some of those not ‘recommended’ were those sounding prepared to speak up and not just be a compliant presence on this governance forum. The Trust maintains that the selected five meet criteria for the skills, knowledge and experience it needs, etc, but I doubt whether they are any more impressive than the other candidates.

One proposed resolution is to get rid of the Quick Vote option, which just enables members to tick a box for these recommended candidates. Quite right those proposers, as this automatically, and with no effort on the part of the member, enables many more votes for the Trust’s chosen candidates. We can understand that some Trust machinations are needed because for a while there have been elements trying to prevent the organization reflecting its 21st century status in terms of political awareness, describing some initiatives as ‘wokery’. But this need not be a reason, as the AGM system has long been the same, to patronize members and perpetuate unfairness by disadvantaging the non-recommended candidates. Let’s hope members have the awareness and guts to understand what’s underway here and to counteract it by voting for those they feel will make the most positive difference, not just the Trust recommends. In the longer term it would be best to get rid of this patronizing, manipulative, opaque and unjustifiable practice.

Finally, on a brighter note, we hear that a 19th century icehouse on the quay at Great Yarmouth, used when the town’s fishing industry was thriving, is to be restored with the help of a £2m National Lottery grant. The intention is to make into a training centre for circus arts, as part of a wider transformation project to reinvent the town as a capital of circus and street arts. This is so important as many seaside towns in the UK have been allowed to decline over the years, because of the loss of local industries and tourism, leading to more neglect and poor social conditions for the local community. Let’s hope other neglected seaside towns will follow suit!

Sunday 3 September

Some Tories and their apologists in the media must be feeling relieved at the timing of the demise of former Harrods boss Mohamed Al Fayed and all the column inches and broadcast minutes that will absorb while they’re engulfed in the latest scandal about the faulty Raac concrete in our crumbling schools. The Department for Education issued guidance to 156 schools amid concerns over the use of reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC) in their buildings, with 104 in need of urgent action including potential closure. The question has been asked repeatedly why the government has waited until now, just a few days before the start of term, to admit the parlous state of much school (and hospital) infrastructure, only to get the non-explanation that further evidence from recent surveys came to light. Seems pretty clear they were hoping to continue as normal when this problem has been known about for at least 6 years.

But a whistleblower (and we need many more) confirms what many will have suspected all along, telling the Observer that ministers and their political advisers were ‘dangerously complacent’ about crumbling school buildings constructed with aerated concrete, and that they were more concerned with saving money than improving safety. Although the government has undertaken to pay for the corrective action and replacement classrooms, etc, we’d better believe this when we see it: the distinction between capital and revenue budgets means there will a push to offload bills onto already stretched schools. On Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg this morning Jeremy Hunt said they will ‘spend what it takes’ to resolve the situation but so often we’ve found this not to be the case, for example with Grenfell. The media need to keep a close eye on this and regularly scrutinize the outcomes.

I thought it was appalling that a list of the affected schools still hasn’t been published, the government giving the excuse that parents needed to hear the decision from head teachers first. Of course this means in some cases beleaguered heads get the flak rather than ministers. Defensive Schools Minister Nick Gibb was seen to struggle badly in media interviews, trying to defend the indefensible, and his boss, Education Minister Gillian Keegan, seems to have eschewed interviews altogether. Her avoidance can’t last long, though: she’s likely to face a grilling when Parliament resumes on Monday. That is, if she doesn’t think up some excuse not to attend, in which case sanctimonious bore Nick Gibb will doubtless be wheeled out yet again.

The whole debacle is a metaphor for crumbling Britain after 13 years of Conservative governments. A tweeter commented on the government’s defence: ‘Nick Gibb also claimed on BBC Breakfast that government is better at identifying RAAC problems than other countries. On a par with Coffey telling us they’re best in world at monitoring sewage discharges ie “We’re the best at sitting watching the country fall apart and doing nothing”’. Meanwhile, Labour has demanded an urgent audit of the government’s handling of longstanding safety fears about aerated concrete found in the roofs, floors and walls of hundreds of schools, hospitals and other public buildings.

https://tinyurl.com/4dv2m24x

Amid all this key news, though, it’s important not to overlook the government’s predictable U-turn on the Letby public inquiry, which will now be a statutory one. What a shame there was time wasted and hot air emitted before Health minister Steve Barclay said they’d ‘listened to families’ (as if…. Like they did with the Covid Bereaved Families for Justice), so they’ve effectively bowed to the inevitable. Statutory public inquiries have a reputation of being slow but surely, given the importance of the issues involved, it could be speeded up. One of the appalling aspects to have received more attention was that NHS public inquiries going back years, including the key Francis Inquiry, recommended that there should be regulation of health service managers and executives, but this has never been implemented. We can only assume that successive Conservative governments have wanted to protect from scrutiny the numerous individuals who have, amongst other things, colluded with their NHS privatization agenda. Quite rightly, it’s been suggested that this Letby inquiry will have as one of its Terms of Reference a review of previous inquiry recommendations and why they were never followed up.

Health service commentator Roy Lilley (and he won’t be the only one) said that the new inquiry report has effectively already been written, because the same issues come up again and again. One reason for the NHS blame culture (but not the only one) is the regulatory regime but I suspect too much court is paid to the Care Quality Commission and its inspections, which have been shown to send trusts into hectic mode and which take a massive amount of resource to prepare for. Lilley has suggested previously that this regime doesn’t actually work, that health and social care organizations don’t improve as a result of a bad CQC. Maybe some do, but we get the point. So much becomes about tick box exercises while the fundamental practice in the inspected areas doesn’t change. The 2010 Robert Francis Inquiry into Mid-Staffordshire trust said: ‘The report recognises that while the overwhelming majority of NHS managers meet high professional standards every day, a very small number sometimes demonstrate performance or conduct that lets down the patients they serve as well as their staff and organisations.  The group’s recommendations include replacing the Code of Conduct for NHS managers with a new statement of professional ethics and consultation on a system of professional accreditation for senior NHS managers (my underlining).

Last week another example of the role of NHS executives came to light: Sir David Sloman, then London regional director of NHS England, had offered former Countess of Chester CE Tony Chambers a job at a London trust in January 2020 ‘following a competitive process’, and the story goes that Sloman was unaware of the Chester events at the time. But how and why especially when it was known that Chambers was blocked at the time from similar jobs in the North of England? And how reassuring is this statement in response to the BBC? ‘NHS England has in the last few weeks strengthened the fit and proper person framework by bringing in additional background checks and ensuring that assessments are recorded on the national electronic staff record system so that they are transferable to other NHS organisations as part of their recruitment processes’. Another unhealthy example of revolving doors in NHS management, at the same time illustrating an apparent belief that pompous jargon replaces due process and proper scrutiny. How many knighted bureaucrats are running the NHS and what assurance can this ‘Fit and Proper Person Framework’ really provide?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-66651325

What’s also downright alarming is that (not for the first time) figures have emerged as to the numbers dying last year while waiting for NHS treatment, 120,695 people in England. This is a record high of excess deaths, double the 60,000 patients who died in 2017/18. ‘Hospital bosses said the deaths highlighted the dangers of patients having to endure long waits for care and reflected a ‘decade of underinvestment’ that had left the NHS with too few staff and beds. Healthwatch England, a patient advocacy group that scrutinises NHS performance, said the number of people dying while waiting for care was “a national tragedy”.’ We’ve long been aware of the longstanding underinvestment in the NHS by this government but these shocking figures are a stark reminder of the Tories’ non-strategy (like the school buildings debacle) of waiting till the situation is unsustainable before acting. Except in this case they won’t because they’ve long wanted to privatise the entire NHS so it’s in their interest to ‘prove’ its failure.

As we enter the third quarter of the year, there’s been some relief that energy prices are coming down, but this isn’t much of a comfort given energy companies’ blatant profiteering and their notorious standing charges. Ofgem has lowered its price cap by about 7%, from £2,074 to £1,923 for the average household. It should be cause to celebrate, even if the decrease is relatively slim but households will still end up paying large amounts as the government has not offered the financial support it did last winter. Yet again we’re struck by the lack of genuine regulation, whether it’s for water, energy, utilities or organizations like the Information Commissioner’s Office, which are so poorly resourced they can’t perform their roles in a timely and effective manner.

Rishi Sunak’s mini reshuffle in the wake of Ben Wallace’s resignation has also generated much debate, some Tories defending Grant Shapps’s record as a minister and suitability for his Defence Minister promotion, others expressing doubts at his lack of military experience. But hey, we’re told he has a private pilot’s license so that will do the job, won’t it? The Guardian’s Helen Pidd rightly asked if he was the right person for a role involving national security given his use of three false names to front a dodgy business then lying about it for years. He’s also an avid Tik Tok user, which should raise security questions given its Chinese ownership. Sunak’s very obvious choice of loyalists (including the inexperienced Claire Coutinho as new Energy and Net Zero Minister, background prior to politics of private school, Oxford, investment banking, and right wing think tank) indicates the unsafe ground he feels he’s on, with good cause, as apparently some Conservatives are plotting to replace him.

Journalist John Crace sums up how bad things are looking for Rishi: ‘PM’s autumn agenda will be one of desperate hope after months of one bad headline after another’. NHS and rail strikes continue, the ‘small boats’ issue is going from bad to worse (800 arrivals on Saturday), Theresa May has published a ‘deranged’ book in which she claims she aimed for a Brexit which would be acceptable to Remain voters, and possibly the worst thing this government has ever done (now panicking as the election gets closer?) – a relaxation in environmental rules for housebuilding, which prompted very strong reactions including the RSPB’s unexpected tweet starting with ‘LIARS’ x 3. BBC News stated that current Natural England rules mean 62 local authorities cannot allow new developments unless builders can prove their projects are “nutrient neutral” in protected areas, including Somerset, Norfolk, Teesside, Kent, Wiltshire and the Solent. The government announcement about scrapping the rules ‘has provoked a furious backlash from environmental campaigners’.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-66666435

This is a view most except house builders and Tory donors (often the same people) would agree with, yet an apology was issued subsequently and later we found out why: a trustee with quite a mixed bag of interests, Ben Caldecott, criticized the tweet because of its ‘political’ nature, but these days it’s difficult, if not impossible, for organizations to avoid politics. Questions have been asked as to how Caldecott was made an RSPB trustee in the first place. So there we have it: increasingly those speaking the truth are silenced if this truth is unpalatable to the government.

https://www.smithschool.ox.ac.uk/person/dr-ben-caldecott

A tweeter commented: ‘Our buildings are collapsing. Our rivers are full of sewage. Our air is polluted. Our NHS is in crisis. Our streets are full of homeless people. Our children go hungry. If you want to see the results of 13 years of Conservative rule. Look around you’. It captures yet again how we cannot feel safe with this government in office. But all was not lost, Rishi may think: at least Nadine Dorries had resigned and the publication of her book delayed due to numerous sources and legal issues which needed verifying – it will now appear a month after the Conservative Party conference she’d planned on coinciding with. Let’s hope the media boycott this deluded work of fiction. And in any case Rishi won’t have to face much of the flak himself this week as he’s flying east to the G20 summit in New Delhi, where he can feel important for a few days. But as Andrew Rawnsley said in the Observer, the Global Britain ‘swaggering braggadocio’ of the previous two PMs has been ‘smashed by contact with geopolitical reality’ and ‘quietly consigned to oblivion by Mr Sunak’.

https://tinyurl.com/bdzjav8t

Further pithy observations about the state of the nation come from Rafael Behr, who describes the state of our governing party as ‘out of ideas and afraid to admit its mistakes finds comfort in pursuit of traitors, scapegoats and in conspiracy theory….Denouncing policy failure from the pulpit of incumbency has become a speciality of the Tory right. Lee Anderson, deputy chair of the party, says immigration is “out of control”. A chorus of backbench MPs laments that high taxes are suffocating economic growth. The Conservative party is appalled by the state of a country it has been governing for the past 13 years’. It’s an extraordinary state of affairs, when a government refusing or pretending not to see its own creation of these problems persists in blaming a ‘malignant blob’, made up of ‘the opposition, lawyers, judges (European and domestic), immigrants, charities, environmental activists, the BBC, the civil service, universities, the Office for Budget Responsibility’ (choose whichever one or few fits the example). This blindness is important because this ‘analysis shapes the thinking of many Tory MPs. It will set the tone for Sunak’s general election campaign because it is the only explanation for underachievement that doesn’t require contrition from the ruling party’….Failure inflates the myth of an all-powerful enemy, which begets bad policy, which fails, confirming the strength of the invisible foe. This is the conveyor from ideology to conspiracy theory’. Behr suggests that Sunak is not riding this conveyor himself but watching it and apparently powerless or unwilling to disrupt it.  

https://tinyurl.com/2cpwbr9t

Meanwhile, Boris Johnson hasn’t let up in his narcissistic attention-seeking attempts to still play PM, tweeting from foreign climes from where, alongside a local politician he’s meeting, he posts nonsense about their ‘shared vision’ on this or that. His Daily Mail columns seem to be getting worse, this week’s about the late Queen, in which he recalls his meetings with her, his recollections (remember, though, ‘recollections may differ’?) somehow managing to suggest that she was impressed with this chancer: ‘It was because of her humanity and sympathy that you felt, as PM, that you could really open up to her, tell her absolutely everything….’. Err, right: I doubt whether he ever did that. No doubt Mail readers will lap this up, perhaps another reason why the deluded #BringBackBoris was yet again trending on Twitter this morning.

https://tinyurl.com/ycktu3nr

The media have also reported on the humiliating trip to China made by the over-promoted Foreign Secretary, James Cleverly, who seems to have got as far as ‘expressing concern’ to the Chinese about this or that, which they steadfastly ignored. He said that anything was on the table as long as it didn’t threaten national security – no worries about the shocking human rights record, then? Journalist Simon Tisdall provided a pithy summary: ‘The foreign minister set off with the aim of both ‘standing up for our values’ and securing profitable trade. He failed at both…The galling bottom line is that the government wants it both ways – to stand up for “British values” while trading profitably – and as a result fails to advance either objective’. But never mind, there’s bound to be somewhere else cropping up soon which ‘needs’ Cleverly to jet off to: this is what he thinks being Foreign Secretary is all about, not having the nous or skill for nuanced diplomacy.

An interim director (Sir Mark Jones – background of Eton, Oxford then curatorial roles) may have been appointed at the British Museum but the reputation busting scandal of the theft of 2000 items and the almost more worrying fact that the Museum as a whole has no documented catalogue of its collection have generated more debate about how the problems need to be resolved. Several commentators have rightly said that this august institution has primarily one job (which it clearly didn’t do) – to document and care for its collection – and anything else is an add on, perhaps almost a gimmick. It’s not only the BM in the frame for poor documentation and ineffective stewardship and management – it could be others, too. Simon Jenkins has suggested deaccessioning, a growing strategy for museums but one which some may regard as heresy for the BM.  

This is the kind of plain speaking I like – no doubt some would shudder at his questioning of this sacred cow: ‘Museums are essentially phoney. Few of their objects were made for them but rather to be owned, used, enjoyed and traded….The British Museum is such a beloved institution that no one ever asks what it is about. Little is about Britain – instead it has at least 8m mostly archaeological objects gathered from across the globe, barely 1% of which are on show. The fact that a few hundred of these appear to have vanished is hardly surprising. Nor is it shattering, given that no one seems to have known the objects ever existed’. Some thinking outside the traditional curatorial box is needed. ‘Osborne claims to need £1bn for urgent repairs and to reorder his tired permanent-display rooms. This sum is never going to come from the government’s capital works grant of just £75m a year for all museums. The museum has to find the money itself or it is bust’. It will be interesting to see whether any new direction will be taken with this interim director and perhaps by now a more enlightened George Osborne, or whether they’ll fall back on ‘nothing can change until the new director is in post’.

https://tinyurl.com/25772ew5

On Radio 4’s Today programme during August you may have heard the Saturday episodes which featured guest editors with interesting and useful themes. Yesterday’s was the plight of seaside towns and the difficult issues dogging them beyond the sunny beaches. The guest editors were interesting and articulate, focusing on the South Wales resort of Tenby but citing issues which many towns, seaside or not, would also be facing, such as the lack of young people, the number of jobs paying less than the minimum wage, the difficulties of recruiting workers and lack of public transport meaning those workers often had to cut short a shift because of the times of last buses and trains. Perhaps the main issue facing such attractive places is the lack of affordable housing due to the prevalence of second homes and Airbnbs. I know people who use Airbnb frequently but who seem to have zero awareness of the issues accompanying their use.

Almost 20% of Tenby properties are second homes despite the Welsh tax intervention, some at sky high prices eg £1.5m, unaffordable for locals. One angry tweeter protested: ‘Wales is not for English retirees’. I don’t know what the answer is but this is surely what our well paid politicians are for – to devise thought-out solutions and not just allow such an unsatisfactory (very distressing for some) to go on unchecked.

Finally, on a brighter note, also in Wales, it was cheering to hear of an initiative, one of many in the Bannau Brycheiniog (Brecon Beacons) National Park, featured in the BBC’s Countryfile recently: feeling that ‘our biodiversity is going through the floor’, a number of farmers are working on projects leading to a more sustainable future, one of which involves giving local young people a stake in the place. At present 46% of the area’s food is imported and one of the farmers wants 120 acres to be used for growing fruit and vegetables, thereby leading to less dependence on external sourcing. The idea was to kickstart small scale farming by splitting the purchased land into small plots for locals to cultivate, ‘aiming to restore nature, balance the needs of the people who live, work, and visit the area, whilst ultimately leading Bannau Brycheiniog into a more sustainable future’. Not to mention the mental health benefits such projects bring with them. But at present, no government is doing enough to encourage such enterprise, which should surely take place all over the country. This one farmer was emphatic that the government needs to review the infrastructure for small farmers so young people can be employed locally. Said he:’ In 10 years time people shouldn’t have to ask if food is local – they should expect it!’

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001q292/countryfile-bannau-brycheiniog

Bank Holiday blogpost

Time is rushing on and as we approach the summer Bank Holiday, there’s no shortage of news so there’s zero excuse for the media resorting to Silly Season mode. Large numbers of migrants are still arriving here despite the government’s ‘small boats’ policy and, embarrassingly, Small Boats Week; ministers seized on what they present as a reduction in inflation but it was only prices rising less rapidly, not to mention data showing private sector salaries having increased by 16%; more evidence has emerged of creeping NHS privatization; the decision to restrict the new Covid jab to those over 65 represents further inroads into the NHS model and poses considerable danger because of a powerful new Covid variant hitting London; there’s more flak for the royals following the King’s and Prince William’s decisions not to attend the World Cup in Australia despite William being FA President; and yet more corruption, for example crony contracting for more migrant barges and Sunak and others’ investments in vaccine and other health companies bent on infiltrating the NHS.

But what has shaken the country to the core is the conviction of multiple child murderer Lucy Letby (7 babies, attempted murder of 6 more and questions still hanging over 30 more babies) following a long and arduous trial, which led to her being given a whole life sentence. Despite various suggestions being made to ensure Letby heard the victim statements and her sentence as she’d refused to come into the dock for this, these came to nothing and there was widespread condemnation of her cowardice in not facing the court. Needless to say, despite many calls for the law to be changed so that the convicted would be forced to hear their sentence read out, the government just said they would ‘look at it’ and bring it into legislation ‘in due course’. Besides acknowledging the magnitude of this tragedy for the parents concerned, attention initially turned to the ‘independent public inquiry’ to follow and again, needless to say, despite even some Tory ministers pressing for a statutory inquiry, which would compel witnesses to give evidence and swear an oath in court, the government is still sticking to the non-statutory decision. One of these is sanctimonious bore Nick Gibb (Schools Minister), who described this option as the ‘appropriate’ one which would enable parents to get the answers they needed, etc, when it manifestly will not to do that without compulsory witness attendance. A question here is, does the Minister think we’re stupid to be taken in by such a cynical line, or is he too stupid to understand this format’s limitations?

To add insult to injury, he (and others) wheeled out the same old clichés heard at such times, which should surely be a giveaway verging on the unacceptable, ie ‘lessons need to be learned’ and ‘this must never happen again’. But it does. A key quote in this whole terrible episode came from former prosecutor Nazir Afzal, who, pressing hard for a statutory inquiry, said: ‘The only time we hear ‘lessons need to be learned’ is when they haven’t been learned’. Others have also pointed to the wadges of previous inquiries undertaken, reports written, which then sit on a shelf and gather dust with no monitoring as to whether or not their recommendations have been implemented. This led some to suggest (essential, surely) that a key term of reference for this new inquiry should be an assessment of previous NHS inquiries and the outcomes of their recommendations.

What seems to have been overlooked somewhat is the terrible effect of all this on the NHS whistleblowers, who found out to their cost that fear of reputational damage to the Trust and to senior staff trumped patient safety issues. (These fears were cited as the reason for not calling in the police, instead commissioning two reviews).

It beggars belief that doctors including paediatric consultant Dr Stephen Brearey repeatedly drew attention to their concerns but were effectively silenced and not taken seriously. Listening to him being interviewed on Radio 4’s Today programme on Tuesday, I was struck by how natural, straightforward and convincing he sounded, compared with the cynical wordsmithing we’ve become familiar with from politicians and staff in executive positions. Amongst those who were guilty of the silencing are three seniors (and this is a common syndrome) who moved around the revolving doors NHS, one of whom now having been suspended from their current post and three who retired, one now living in France. It’s these people who should be compelled to give evidence and if they are found guilty of criminal acts they could be liable for the loss of their generous NHS pensions.  

The one recently suspended from her current role (Director of Nursing for Rochdale Care Organisation, part of the Northern Care Alliance), Alison Kelly, former nursing manager at the Countess of Chester hospital, has tried to turn the blame on Dr Brearey, and the former CEO, Tony Chambers, extraordinarily, instructed senior doctors to write a letter of apology to Letby on 26 January 2017 for repeatedly raising concerns about her. The apology was ordered on the basis of two external reviews, which executives felt exonerated Letby. But neither review was designed to examine whether she, or any other member of staff, was responsible for the deaths and both recommended that several deaths be investigated further. The fact that these ‘reviews’ failed to address the key issue so reveals the culture of pushing the problematic under the carpet. One of the mysteries of life is surely how those culpable of such strategies think they will permanently get away with it. Letby was only arrested and suspended by the hospital in 2018, three years after Dr Brearey had first raised the alarm.

This (from Dr Brearey) was the Independent’s quote of the day on Wednesday, reflecting an appalling state of affairs:

‘I think our experiences aren’t uncommon in the NHS, that you go to senior colleagues with a problem and you come away confused and anxious because that problem is being turned in a way in which you start to realise that they’re seeing you as a problem rather than the concern that you have’.   https://tinyurl.com/47au7jh7

Remarkably quiet so far have been the usual NHS and satellite organizations often called upon by the media to give their views, namely the CQC (regulator), the Department of Health and Social Care, NHS England, the NHS Confederation, NHS Providers and NHS Employers. They should be summoned to give evidence on various issues including the fragmentation of the NHS, which has led to damaging competitiveness between trusts, the culture of secrecy, blame and bullying, the promotion and protection of managers known to be ineffective and the clear disrespect for expert clinical staff. Remember when Michael Gove famously said ‘I think we’ve all had enough of experts’? This appalling attitude has filtered down from the government into various areas and professions and now we see the results of that. In my view Letby’s parents should also be called, since, extraordinarily, they had threatened the Trust with referral to the General Medical Council if Lucy was not reinstated on the neo-natal unit she had been taken off. What on earth were the parents doing getting involved? It amounts to unacceptable infantilisation and interference.

Education Minister Gillian Keegan has now joined those rightly saying that NHS managers and executives should be regulated and held to account in the same way that clinicians are. Absolutely right, but how does she think this could ever happen under her government, with its ideological aversion to regulation of any kind? You also have to admire her irony bypass, because, as we’ve found so often in recent years, MPs aren’t regulated or held to account either.

This case raises so many issues besides those immediately in front of us, for example the quality of managers and executives across the entire workplace, quite a few of whom are inadequate, bullies or worse, yet somehow get to ascend the greasy pole. Having spent most of my working life in the public sector including the NHS, I have witnessed (and suffered the effects of) numerous examples. In some organizations it seems customary to promote people for their technical ability and malleability, despite their lack of people skills. In others (a more frequent syndrome, probably) those who ‘get on’ are often those prepared to compromise their principles, perhaps even abandoning their moral compass, to bully and harass to get results and to curry favour with those in positions to help them advance. Some time ago it was suggested that the lack of management education in this country was at fault, that more should have MBAs as they do in the States, but I don’t know whether this qualification in itself is sufficient to enable good managers.

The confusion, secrecy and alleged incompetence surrounding the thefts at the British Museum (chair is one George Osborne) further bear out the evidence of inadequate management across the board, some suggesting that the right people aren’t selected to head up organizations. What’s the betting many are selected via cronyism and for their potential for colluding with cover-ups, should they be required.

It’s really worth reading NHS commentator Roy Lilley’s piece on the Letby case, which analyses the causes and what needs to change. ‘Letby is the case no one wanted to believe was true. That was the problem. Along with the un-holy trinity of cognitive bias, confirmation bias and group think. … Reputation management is upmost in most managers’ minds. The first whiff of a problem… the instinct is to circle the wagons. 

Don’t let NHSE’s regional apparatchiks anywhere near it. Keep the press away and heaven forfend… the police’. You can see the abdication of responsibility in several areas. The Chair at the Countess, at the time was Sir Duncan Nichol, former boss of the whole NHS. He says the Board was misled by managers. I say, it was the Board’s job to ensure they were not misled by managers. Ask; why, what, really, show me, prove it, tell me again, how, if, what about? A Board is not a showcase or a club. It is an engine room, a test bed and a proving ground. Put those three killer components together and you can see why it is; all the ‘speaking-up’ guardians, red-flags, Patient Safety Incident Response Frameworks, well-led frameworks , medical examiners and never event blah, blah will never trump human behaviour’.

https://tinyurl.com/2xfp46x7

It’s also worth reading this one, as a picture of the revolving doors NHS, a syndrome lending itself to the creation of then moving from messes or, in this case, disasters. Chief Executive Tony Chambers ‘resigned from his £160,000-a-year role in September 2018, three months after Letby was arrested, saying the past months had been “particularly challenging” and it was the right time for the hospital “to focus on its future and for me to explore new opportunities and the next stage of my career”. He went on to work for several other NHS trusts as interim chief executive after leaving the Countess of Chester hospital’. That piece of management-speak about exploring new opportunities is very telling. What comes across very strongly with the chronologies of all these five executives  are the long delays before taking action on concerns expressed to them yet the speed with which they subsequently leapt to blame others. Not to mention benefits accrued during those journeys: we’re told the former medical director retired on a pension pot of £1.8m.

https://tinyurl.com/mr4cj4yv

The NHS management organizations might have been quiet during the immediate wake of the Letby trial conclusion, but, as so often, organizations like NHS Providers are brought forth to comment on NHS issues in general and strikes in particular. This was the case on the Today programme, as another consultants’ strike started: Sir Julian Hartley, head of NHS Providers, said that the ‘ongoing impact of disruption means waiting lists are likely to rise’. No sh*t: you or I could have said this. As discussed above, the Letby case has focused more attention on the rise, in recent years and facilitated by this cronyism government, of well-educated managerial types with little hands-on experience rising up organizations, moving around and no doubt cultivating influential contacts. Questions were asked this morning as to what Hartley’s qualifications are, one listener tweeting: ‘We can see why Sir Julian Hartley has his job. Ability to deflect and dissemble without providing any answers. Prime committee fodder.’ Another said: ‘Hearing the interview with the NHS boss on Today makes me think we need a rethink about who we place in leadership positions of organisations. Are we really hiring the right sort of people into these roles simply because they’ve lucked into senior management roles in the past?’

Following Cambridge, Durham and an MBA, we’re told his career in the NHS began as a general management trainee, before working in a number of NHS management posts at hospital, health authority, regional and national level. This sounds to have been a vital element in his advancement: described as a ‘highly experienced leader’ he was invited in 2019 by Dido Harding (of Track and Trace infamy)Julian Hartley to lead the new workforce implementation plan for the NHS. He was then knighted in the (2022) Queen’s Platinum Jubilee Honours list. The media should be thinking much more carefully about whom they invite onto ‘flagship’ news programmes because their contact books can be remarkably narrow and predictable.

Meanwhile, Rishi Sunak is back from his long holiday in California but appears to be running out of steam fast. His robotic repetition of the first answer he gives in media interviews regardless of subsequent questions suggests he’s not had his batteries changed. And he still hasn’t taken action on Nadine Dorries, still squatting on her Mid-Bedfordshire seat (and its salary and those of her daughters) while doing zero work in that constituency. Dorries says she won’t go until she gets an explanation as to why she didn’t get the peerage. Good luck with that as she has no entitlement to one. But is Sunak intending to allow the status quo until the next election? That’s a lot of public money wasted. He’s increasingly seen as a weak caretaker prime minister, though he’s hardly taking care of anything except his own interests and those of cronies. The Guardian’s John Crace captures the situation: ‘…At best, the country was totally indifferent to his efforts. At worst it was hostile. Now he was reduced to ever more meaningless photo ops with people bewildered to know why he was there. It wasn’t as if he had anything new to say. How much longer could he go on announcing things that were probably never going to happen? Even he could see he was at his best when he was doing nothing. The invisible man’.

https://tinyurl.com/4vmvvcad

Amongst other things Sunak is under the microscope for yet more corruption and conflicts of interest. It’s been known for a while that he broke parliament’s code of conduct by not declaring his wife’s shareholding in a childcare company benefitting from government policy but no action was taken (no surprise there) because the breach was said to be ‘inadvertent’. Not to mention the involvement of Tory donors in migrant barge procurement.

But there are more examples, such as a private healthcare firm handed a government contract to reduce regional NHS waiting lists being linked to a No 10 policy adviser. Bill Morgan, a founding partner of the PR and lobbying firm Evoke Incisive Health (EIH), joined Downing Street as a health policy adviser last November to help drive through NHS efficiencies.

‘InHealth, a fee-paying client of EIH when Morgan was a founding partner, has since been awarded a contract as an independent sector-led diagnostic centre, to run the south-west network…. Morgan is also a member of the elective recovery taskforce (ERT) convened by the health secretary, Steve Barclay, to cut waiting lists’. Although we’re told ‘Morgan no longer works for Incisive Health and has no financial connection or continuing interest in his former employer or InHealth’, this doesn’t alter the position which pertained when the contract was awarded.

It’s no surprise to know that the NHS had already increased use of the private (often euphemistically called ‘independent’) sector by more than a third since April 2021 and it seems these community diagnostic centres are a good example. There are more than 100 across England but of 13 more to be launched, 8 will apparently be run by the private sector – NHS privatisation no longer by stealth but in plain sight. The one near me, opened by Therese Coffey during her very short stint as Health Secretary last October, certainly doesn’t work as effectively as it might: GPs didn’t know about them, or understand the key facts as to how they worked and the wording on the CDC leaflet is confusing. Effectively, despite being billed ‘walk in’, they aren’t, unless you want to wait two hours for a blood test. I drew the attention of the overarching NHS trust to these issues and they just said GPs had been informed, etc, but it seems no checking has been done to see if there’s effective communication between the CDC and primary care and that includes the local Healthwatch.

https://tinyurl.com/4fv4cd8j

More broadly re the NHS, ‘in the past two years, private equity firms have struck 150 deals for UK healthcare companies, according to figures reported by the Financial Times. These firms have bought up ambulance fleets, eye-care clinics and diagnostics companies. Last month, it was reported that one such firm acquired a staffing agency that employs NHS doctors and nurses, betting that the painful backlog of rescheduled appointments will be good for business’. The title of this article by Hettie O’Brien gets it in one: ‘Private equity has its sights on the NHS – and with it our faith in public services altogether’. It’s worth reading the whole thing, which explains what private equity firms actually do how they came about and, alarmingly, the hold they now have over our health and care services and, of course, it’s all about cynical profit making from vulnerable people. ‘When high-octane finance starts moving into hospitals and nurseries, it’s a morbid sign that other opportunities for productive investment have been exhausted. Rather than financing new ideas, investors are capitalising on the basic necessities of life’.

‘Under the guise of reform, politicians have broken the NHS up into smaller pieces like Lego bricks, creating new opportunities for private providers to step in. The lines between “private” and “public”, “citizen” and “consumer”, have become so scrambled that it is difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins’. And, of course, the confusing blurring of these lines is part of the overarching cynical ideological strategy. I find it extremely worrying that, by the time of the next election, this process of undermining and breaking up the public sector will be so much advanced, perhaps so much so it will be difficult for these private inroads to be rolled back.

https://tinyurl.com/ycjyteta

One of the latest examples is the absurd and false economy decision not to provide Covid jabs to the under 65s, forcing the concerned to ‘go private’, those companies often having links to the Conservative Party. The timing is even worse because a dangerous new variant has been found in circulation, and with many more unvaccinated people this could spread even faster as we go into autumn and winter. But it could be even worse than that as we’re told the private vaccines won’t be ready for the autumn booster programme. ‘A UKHSA (UK Health Security Agency) spokesperson also told the Times: “We have spoken to manufacturers we’re in contract with and made it clear we won’t prevent them initiating a private market for Covid-19 vaccines; rather, we’d welcome such an innovation in the UK. As far as we’re concerned, the ball is in the court of the manufacturers to develop the market with private healthcare providers.” What kind of unregulated mess is this?

https://tinyurl.com/2p8zkv6s

As we reach the height of the traditional summer holiday season, news of unreliable airlines, heat and fires in Europe and elsewhere, strike-bound railways, knotty issues of second homes and Airbnbs distrupting local housing markets and sewage discharges into rivers and along coasts, it could feel that no holiday option is straightforward. Sad, then to hear (but a no surprise false economy) that the government has markedly reduced funding to the Canal and River Trust from 2027 and that the cash-strapped Youth Hostels Association is selling 20 of its 150 hostels, with question marks hanging over another 30. These places have long enabled a holiday opportunity for those who may otherwise be unable to afford it. The decision is yet another resulting from government action or inaction, eg the cost of living crisis and the post-Brexit decline in school trips from Europe.

No doubt some will be staying at home, for financial or any of the above reasons, but the trouble with that is every day perhaps being faced with jobs needing doing around the house and garden if you have one. It reminds me of an expert saying not so long ago how important it was to actually be in your garden (relaxing and enjoying it etc) as opposed to solely working on the garden. Easy to fall into as gardening jobs never stop even in a small patch.

An interesting article poses the gardening conundrum, long acknowledged as good for our mental health but also with the potential for our self-laceration. This writer is surely talking about our competitive spirits and how gardening (those endless tv programmes might not help with this!) can become performative, so if your roses or tomatoes die it must be your fault! ‘On top of embarrassment at my ineptitude, I’ve experienced anxiety, disappointment, shame and self-loathing: all the good stuff. Plus, seething envy – why does no one talk about garden envy?’

https://tinyurl.com/ynrx9fw6

I hope you manage to have a decent Bank Holiday and keep ‘garden envy’ at bay!

Sunday 13 August

August is traditionally known in the media as ‘the silly season’, compensation for the apparent lack of news coming in the form of reporting trivia. But despite most of our MPs including our PM remaining resolutely On Holiday despite the disasters unfolding around them there’s been no shortage of news, the main item of which must be the mismanagement of and strong feelings about the migrant barge, Bibby Stockholm. Yet another project in which the supplier is a Tory donor, it’s been said to be costing far more than cruise ship or 4 star hotel accommodation, its use delayed by inadequate fire safety checks and now the first migrants aboard have had to disembark due to concerns about possible Legionnaire’s Disease risks. No wonder #SuellaLegionella has been trending on Twitter and a senior Tory has called for Braverman to be sacked. This is such a humiliation for the government, which would rather spend far more than necessary and not process asylum claims in order to provide meat for their racist supporters, to deflect attention from their wrecking of this country and to satisfy their ideological dogma. Two tweets get it in one: ‘The easiest way to ‘stop the boats’ would to be a build an Asylum Centre in Calais which the French have said we can do a million times. Of course that would offer a LEGAL way to apply for Asylum, so the Conservatives won’t do that’. ‘If Sunak really wanted to stop the boats, he’d have done something to stop the boats. He could take the smugglers’ market away at a stroke by taking up France’s offer of processing facilities near Calais. But he wants enemies on the beaches for election time’. On Radio 4’s Any Questions a disgusted George Monbiot called it ‘the politics of cruelty’.

This government’s approach to migrants is so disingenuous because the Tory script they all wheel out in interviews dictates the use of inflammatory language like ‘illegals’ (with which the media is often prepared to collude), ‘jumping the queue’ etc when we know that except for those from Hong Kong and Ukraine there have been no ‘legal routes’. Full Fact tweeted: ‘In a video, the Prime Minister said he was “ensuring that the only way to come to the UK for asylum will be through safe and legal routes”. There are currently no safe and legal routes by which to travel to the UK for the purpose of claiming asylum’. We reached a new low this week when the Deputy Chair of the Conservative Party, Lee Anderson, publicly said that asylum seekers not wishing to be housed in barges should ‘f*** off back to France’ and was subsequently defended by his colleagues and the Prime Minister. Not all, though: the Independent reports that some Tories were ‘unnerved by a lurch to the right on immigration’, branding Anderson ‘a fascist peddling cheap populism’. But it could get worse because the government is seriously considering leaving the European Convention on Human Rights, which would put us in the same basket as Russia.

Like Rishi Sunak’s transparent and disingenuous retreat from net zero and issuing of new oil and gas licences, this strategy is another which is cynically about next year’s election. No wonder at least one commentator has asked what kind of prime minister would make such a foolhardy policy just to try and ensure he gets elected next year? But the signs of desperation on the part of many Tory MPs are already clear to see: some of the tweets emanating from such luminaries as Grant Shapps and Greg Hands are just embarrassing, often deflecting onto the Opposition eg claiming to have written to Keir Starmer to condemn what they dishonestly allege as Labour’s role as ‘the political arm of Stop Oil’. But the strategy also smacks of corruption because prior to jetting (!) to Scotland, it was revealed that Sunak’s father in law’s company (Infosys) had done a massive deal with BP and the CEO of Shell also joined Sunak’s new business council, Shell being an Infosys client.

One of the many examples of media collusion with the government is presenters and newsreaders not making clear that the ULEZ (Ultra Low Emission Zone) policy was not originally London Mayor Sadiq Kahn’s, but Boris Johnson’s, as it had been a condition of receiving pandemic funding for Transport for London in 2020. The expansion is Khan’s policy but there’s good reason for this, not least the tragic deaths of both children and adults living near traffic clogged roads.

But again with this government, self-interest is the order of the day. During their tenure so much has emerged about MPs’ donations from unsavoury sources, and now it’s emerged that during her time as Environment Secretary Theresa Villiers did not declare her extensive shareholding in oil conglomerate Shell. A tweeter again got it in one: ‘Climate change will not be a priority for the Tories, because many of them still receive donations from fossil fuel lobbyists, and secretly own shares in fossil fuel companies. He who pays the politicians, plays the tune’. It’s alarming, too, that following the Sunak constituency house demonstration, Environment Minister Therese Coffey, in her wisdom, stopped DEFRA from engaging with Greenpeace. Greenpeace said Sunak’s government ‘will go down in history as the administration that failed the UK on the climate crisis while ministers pursued a dangerous culture war’. Greenpeace has advised civil servants and contributed to policy for decades and their sudden ejection from the table has caused marked concern within Greenpeace and elsewhere that environmental policy could suffer as a result. It’s also surely proof (like Coffey herself blocking any critics on social media) that this government wants an echo chamber, not divergent views however constructive.

https://tinyurl.com/2fmvb7bb

As if all this wasn’t enough, we also had the scandalous situation of the innocent Andrew Malkinson finally released from prison after 17 years being expected to pay back some of his compensation payment for board and lodging during his time inside (a system now overturned), the shocking data breaches at the Electoral Commission and police service of Northern Ireland and yet more emerging about the billions lost to fraud and incompetence by this government. ‘The Labour party said analysis of recently published figures showed that a decline in the value of the Bank of England’s assets – over which the Treasury acts as a guarantor – was a huge loss to taxpayers, “equivalent to 10% of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2022, or the entire GDP of Scotland and Wales combined”’ (ie the assets created to rescue the banking sector after the 2008 financial crash are thought to have lost around £251bn in value). The shocking figures were apparently cynically slipped out on 20 July, coinciding with the three byelections and start of the parliamentary recess, so it was obviously calculated to go unnoticed.

https://tinyurl.com/23kuddzd

The undeniable fact is that this government is wrecking the country and this is terrible for our mental wellbeing: there’s not a single sector of the economy or public life that hasn’t been ruined or seriously disadvantaged by this administration yet we feel powerless to do anything about it while we wait at least another year before getting the opportunity to throw them out. Journalist Raphael Behr put it very succinctly last week. The subject of the article is the asylum seekers policy but his ‘verdict’ applies across the board of government operations.

‘This is what politics looks like between now and the next election. Ministers simulate the business of serious administration but with a singular focus on trapping and unsettling the opposition. The statute book is cluttered with laws drafted for use as campaign slogans, regardless of whether they can be made to work in practice. Here we are all now detained, condemned to the in-between zone where a prime minister has run out of road but not yet arrived at defeat; a country stuck in the purgatory of non-government’.

https://tinyurl.com/3mm4psdx

Meanwhile, it doesn’t stop there: industrial action continues, the RMT and junior doctors scheduling more strikes dates, yet the government in all its ideological intransigence shows no sign of addressing the strikers’ concerns. Unfortunately, with the NHS, it plays into ministers’ hands as their agenda is increasingly clearly to drive the service to collapse at the same time as upping private sector involvement. On top of the marked rise in patients seeking private medical treatment because of long waiting lists (said to have risen to 7.6m but I had read 8.3m somewhere) you might know that the private sector has stepped in to ‘help’ those who can’t afford it, by means of Buy Now Pay Later medical loans. The Observer found that ‘In some cases, firms appear to be aiming their marketing at those desperate for help and low on cash, offering “quick and easy” approval with “immediate” access to funding…One diagnostics firm, MRI Plus, promotes BNPL plans for MRI scans. “Why wait in pain? Slash your waiting time for treatment on the NHS … Book now and pay later with Klarna,” it said in a recent newspaper ad. Patients can delay payment for 30 days or split it into three interest-free instalments’. Right, Bob’s your uncle, then, except these schemes could easily lead the already strapped into debt.

https://tinyurl.com/5n8w8ytu

Every week we see further evidence of the need for complete reform of constitutional and parliamentary rules. This week it was found that over £10m was ‘earned’ from MPs second jobs, almost half of which was accounted for by Boris Johnson. The amounts earned continue to rise and nothing is done to stop this when being an MP should be a substantial job in itself, with no time for these additional gigs. Of course we know how these can be accommodated: because they’re not doing their first jobs including responding to constituents, holding constituency surgeries or even visiting the area. ‘The rise in incomes over the past year appears to have been partly driven by a minority of Conservative MPs taking on very highly paid work, from lucrative consultancies to well paid media gigs for the rightwing GB News channel, as well as Rupert Murdoch’s TalkTV’. Apparently a ‘crackdown’ on this racket was promised 18 months ago so what’s happened? Nothing. Labour’s Richard Burgon proposed a bill last year to prevent this taking of second jobs (some even have three or four) but it seems to have come to nothing. I wonder why…. Many will be prepping for losing their seats next year.

https://tinyurl.com/44mbya4t

Boris Johnson loyalist Nadine Dorries must be the worst case, not having had anything to do with her constituency and not appearing in the House for over a year, yet continuing to bleat about not getting the peerage she’d absurdly been allowed to expect. But instead of resigning so that the mid-Bedfordshire people could be once more represented, she’s hanging on for the salary and in order to cause Rishi Sunak maximum embarrassment when she does finally go. So it’s rather interesting and intriguing that Labour MP Chris Bryant, a lively chap who talks sense, is now citing an 1801 rule compelling Awol MPs to attend Parliament or face a byelection. ‘But Mr (actually now Sir Chris) Bryant said it would be “perfectly legitimate” to table a motion when MPs returns in September saying Ms Dorries, or anyone else who failed to show in the Commons for six months, must attend a date or be suspended for 10 sitting days or more. The proposal is outlined in his new book, Code of Conduct: Why We Need to Fix Parliament – and How to Do It’. Let’s hope he does table that motion. Meanwhile could it be the battle of the books in September? Bryant’s is soon to appear but Nadine’s book (The Plot: The Political Assassination Of Boris Johnson) is set to hit the shelves just days before the Conservative Party conference. Of course there’s nothing cynical about the timing.

https://tinyurl.com/23s4na8b

What also went down very badly in some quarters was Pensions minister Mel Stride’s suggestion (with no hint of irony) that the ‘economically inactive’ over 50s could get jobs as Deliveroo riders. What does this remind you of? Norman Tebbit and his ‘get on your bike and look for work’. For too long this government has been scapegoating these people (about 8.6m of them, more than 3.4m over 50 but below retirement age), with this label, suggesting, alongside the Bank of England, that they’re putting a strain on the labour market as employers struggle to recruit and that they’re contributing to high inflation. ‘In an interview with the Times during the visit (to London Deliveroo HQ), Stride said these flexible jobs offered “great opportunities” and that it was “good for people to consider options they might not have otherwise thought of”’. How patronizing is that? Can you see Stride and his colleagues taking up such a job in the gig economy, which he idealises for its ‘flexibility’? No, I thought not. Typical Tory stance of recommending for others what they wouldn’t dream of doing themselves, although it won’t be that long before many of them are out of a job. ‘Asked whether he would consider retiring early, Stride, 61, said: “I’m very happy doing what I’m doing at the moment. Of course, as we know in politics, nothing is certain, so who knows where I’ll be in many years’ time – but I very much hope and aspire to be continuing to do this job, because it’s the greatest job in the world.” Good luck with that.

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We have to wonder whether Stride saw the revealing and poignant article by a 57 year old, who’d taken such a job. Although Deliveroo reported a 62% increase in couriers over 50 since 2021, the 57 year old interviewee described himself as ‘shattered, constantly tired’, and, not surprisingly, said that the long hours, lack of a pension or holiday pay and occasional violence from the public impacts his mental health. He called Stride’s remarks ‘naïve’ and said it was as if the minister wanted a return to Dickensian working practices. But we can’t be surprised at such complacency as Stride, like so many of his colleagues, has never had a proper job (and having run his own publishing company isn’t the same as working for an employer).

https://tinyurl.com/2xx95cjt

In the Observer Andrew Rawnsley rightly asks: Is this parliament the worst ever? Let’s agree Westminster badly needs reform. There’s something rotten about the state of the Commons. A record number of MPs have been sanctioned and/or resigned their seats in disgrace…. In the past nine months alone, we have seen defenestrations from cabinet of a deputy prime minister, a party chair who had previously been chancellor and a home secretary. This unmagnificent trio is made up of Dominic Raab, Nadhim Zahawi and Suella Braverman… It is not just cabinet names who have brought our politics into disrepute. The rollcall of shame also includes an alarmingly high number of junior ministers and backbenchers. It is a startling fact that more MPs have been sanctioned by the Commons and/or resigned their seats in disgrace in this parliament than in any other in history’. Rawnsley cites a poll which shows that a big majority of the public have become deeply cynical about their elected representatives: no surprise there given the last few years. ‘MPs as a body desperately need to restore public respect and trust. The voters do not expect parliament to be a communion of saints, but it is extremely toxic for our democracy when they think of it as a cesspit of sin’.

https://tinyurl.com/bdh277wx

News of budget household goods store Wilko’s collapse has hit some hard and the gap it would leave on our high streets could make these resemble even more mouths with broken teeth (boarded up windows etc). While 12k jobs are at risk, one customer described herself as ‘heartbroken’. It could lead to even more uncertainty for the staff that although Wilko (founded in 1930) is in administration they remain trading for now.CEOMark Jackson, said: ‘We left no stone unturned when it came to preserving this incredible business but must concede that, with regret, we’ve no choice but to take the difficult decision to enter into administration. We’ve all fought hard to keep this incredible business intact but must concede that time has run out and now, we must do what’s best to preserve as many jobs as possible, for as long as is possible, by working with our appointed administrators’.

But a different picture emerged behind the scenes, as it emerged that ‘despite its problems, owners of the chain, led by the Wilkinson family, took £3m in dividends in the 12 months to the end of February 2022’. Today it emerged that £77m was paid to the owners and shareholders during the last decade. How is it possible to continue paying dividends when the company is making losses?? According to the GMB union, the company also failed to invest in technology for online shopping so it’s not surprising during difficult economic conditions that these two major factors played a key part in the collapse. Better nip round to your local branch to stock up while you can. One of the surprises during the ensuing debate has been coming across people who have never heard of Wilko – they will have done by now.

https://tinyurl.com/55f3yrtm

Finally, and returning to the opener, the Guardian has written interestingly about the ‘silly season’ concept. ‘In the UK, it’s called the silly season. In Germany it’s the Sommerloch (summer hole); in French la période creuse (the hollow period) or la morte-saison (the dead season) – when an absence of actual news produces an over-abundance of maronniers (perennial media chestnuts).In Dutch – and other languages, including Danish and Polish – the period is called, for reasons not entirely clear, cucumber time: komkommertijd, agurketid, sezon ogórkowy’. In the UK this year there’s so much news, mostly undesirable and occasioned by this government, that it seems we have no ‘cucumber time’ right now. We can but hope, though, as we’re promised better weather for the rest of August and the extended parliamentary recess should ensure that at least some of the incumbents keep schtum!

Sunday 30 July

You almost have to feel sorry for beleaguered PM Rishi Sunak – while his MPs swan off on holiday for weeks on end, he doggedly continues trying to defend his government’s terrible record despite most of the problems being of his own making. He’s been slammed for taking no genuine interest in green policies or the climate emergency; NHS and rail strikes continue; the cost of living and mortgage crises show no signs of abating amid strong indications of energy and retail sector profiteering; his Illegal Migration Bill might have passed, with appalling measures, but with no Rwanda flights even possible till January; he chose to enter the Nigel Farage/NatWest fray and besides the recent byelections humiliation he could be facing more, including the Mid-Bedfordshire seat of Nadine Dorries, who clings on earning that large salary despite not appearing in Parliament for over a year and attracting a lot of criticism to boot. Sunak’s weakness has been increasingly apparent, including his refusal to deal with law breaking Braverman, Dorries and the other Tories breaking parliamentary rules by interviewing each other on GB News.

On the subject of Awol mid-Bedfordshire MP Nadine Dorries, her conduct is increasingly attracting negative criticism and now her local council and constituency association have publicly complained about her absenteeism. She hasn’t been in the Commons for a year, hasn’t held a constituency surgery since 2020 and therefore she’s not doing the job she was elected to do. Today Radio 4 played an interview clip of her Nadinesplaining (following her failure to resign, as she’d promised) that she needed some time to ‘process her thoughts and things’, that she was an author producing a book a year and has her tv show. If she was doing her actual job she’d have no or little time for such things. We hear her book about the bringing down of her hero, Boris Johnson, called The Plot, will appear in September. I can’t wait to see the reviews but meanwhile, her antics are a good reminder of the need not only for a written Constitution but also new parliamentary rules, allowing locals to unseat a non-functioning MP. I’ve suggested to political investigators like Pippa Crerar, Paul Brand and the Good Law Project that they explore this increasingly common problem of inactive MPs, those who’ve not officially stood down but who are MPs only in name.

Rumour has it that the Tories are trying to identify a new leader – good luck with that as they’ve already scraped that barrel. There was some hope, with Rishi, that we’d finally see some decent governance after the Johnson and Truss chaos, but no, things have got worse, if anything. This is the government that’s been said to preside over £58m of fraud between 2020-21 and a government which has recently admitted what we’ve known all along – that Boris Johnson’s much trumpeted 40 new hospitals schtick was a piece of spin. But Rishi plods on, still robotically reeling out his five failed priorities during every media interview and apparently hoping for ‘an economic sweet spot’ around next May when they imagine circumstances might be more favourable for them.

But the failing getting the most attention is Sunak’s lack of urgency and even interest in the climate emergency. Parliamentary sketch writer John Crace sums this up in his article headline: ‘Forget climate change – reelection is Sunak’s only burning issue’. The catalyst, though he’s never been that engaged with the climate emergency, was the Uxbridge election turning on the ULEZ expansion policy. ‘After the byelection in Uxbridge last week, which Labour lost principally because of Sadiq Khan’s ultra-low emission zone policy, Sunak has declared a bonfire of the Tories’ green agenda. He had never really believed in it – despite most of the country supporting climate crisis measures – and had now declared it to be just a woke indulgence… Getting the Tories re-elected in 2024 is far more important than making sure the world survives for future generations’.

But even Crace has ‘misspoken’ here because (shockingly ignored by the media last weekend) the original policy was not Khan’s but a Boris Johnson policy which the then Transport Minister in 2020 (Grant Shapps) made the condition of the Mayor receiving pandemic funding for cash-strapped Transport for London. Tories claim to be committed to tackling the climate emergency but their ongoing support for fossil fuels and apparent retreat from the net zero goal is evidence to the contrary.

https://tinyurl.com/2p93b2r6

I think it’s really striking that 92 civil societies have written to Rishi Sunak demanding that the UK maintain its climate finance undertaking. Back in 2019, it undertook to spend £11.6m but these groups have been alarmed by news reports that the government could step back from this, citing ‘fiscal burdens from the pandemic’ and the war in Ukraine. (Not their own mismanagement of the economy and failure to address massive fraud, of course). After reminding the PM what the undertaking was, the letter goes on to spell out the dimensions of what’s at stake and the moral dimensions of this issue: ‘The world cannot afford such tragedies from short-sighted decisions.

While fossil fuel companies in the UK enjoy record-breaking profits, it is impossible for the world to comprehend claims from this government that the UK cannot afford more than 0.5% of gross national income to contribute towards global efforts to address poverty, nature degradation and loss, and climate change. This government has chosen to cut Official Development Assistance (ODA) while at the same time drawing on it for climate finance, which civil society has repeatedly warned is both unsustainable and unjust….. Climate finance is not a handout, but a debt we owe to countries and communities that have been made vulnerable to climate change, while the UK has benefited from burning fossil fuels. We have a historical responsibility to address the harm caused and to play a leading role in financing a global just and equitable transition away from fossil fuels and towards resilience. This is not aid and climate finance should not have come from the ODA budget in the first place. It is also in the UK’s enlightened self interest to prevent further climate breakdown…’

https://tinyurl.com/yneky9wv

Almost on a level with the climate emergency issue has been this government’s apathy with so many causes and those in need (one of the latest being the contaminated blood scandal and kicking compensation down the road) but their jumping to attention regarding the Nigel Farage and NatWest debacle. ‘More curious is the way that senior Tory politicians – from Rishi Sunak down – have joined in the clamour to get Rose and the Coutts boss fired. Sunak has not called for heads as water bosses pump sewage into rivers and streams. But for l’affaire Farage, Sunak pulls out all the stops. The Brexit elite looking after one another. Jobs for the boys’. But this is also thought to be the Tories’ fear of Farage splitting their vote  and therefore choosing to placate him.

Such is the dislike of Farage that many have complained about what’s seen as excessive media coverage of Farage’s woes and that Farage didn’t care about people being debanked until it happened to him, etc. While this may well be true, I think it overlooks the fact that Farage, using his public profile, has usefully exposed the longstanding arrogance and lack of transparency displayed by both the BBC and the banks. Two resignations resulted from Farage’s investigation and we have to wonder, regardless of our views of Farage, who else could have achieved this? No doubt many of the previously debanked have objected but have been successfully fobbed off. It’s nevertheless worrying that yet again, it’s thought political interference has been another key element. ‘There is a real sense of disquiet that political pressure has led to a midnight exit for such an important banking CEO’ an official at the City regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority, told the Guardian. ‘They should have allowed due process’….But we know how much respect this government has for ‘due process’: in some situations they shamelessly cite it when trying to avoid acting but ignore it when it suits them.

https://tinyurl.com/yc56xf46

Another element which doesn’t seem have had much media coverage is the revelation that the GB News owner and presenter Farage have both profited from shorting the NatWest share price prior to the resignations. This matters because the losses (£1bn off the bank’s market value) will be shared by the taxpayer, as the government holds 39% of the bank’s shares, having bailed out the group during the 2008 financial crisis. ‘Sir Paul Marshall’s hedge fund Marshall Wace has a 0.59% short position in NatWest, according to regulatory filings first unearthed by the Telegraph… NatWest shares have lost 8.4% of their value in the past week as the company has come under fire for how it handled Nigel Farage’s account with exclusive bank Coutts. That represents close to £2 billion in market capitalisation, meaning Marshall Wace has gained around £11.7 million in that time period by betting against the bank….According to the Telegraph, the decision to bet against NatWest was likely made by a computer based on analysts’ reports, rather than being linked to any association with Farage’. But this still isn’t a good look for him or for GB News, which survives, astonishingly free of toothless regulator Ofcom sanction for various activities such as Tory MPs interviewing each other on air which contravene broadcasting regulations.

https://tinyurl.com/2s3m9tpt

Farage may be widely disliked in some quarters but this new website he’s launching to help others through the data request process could be the start of inroads into the arrogance and lack of transparency of so many organisations in recent years. Every day we hear stories of customers struggling to get redress from retailers, service providers and others, but just getting stonewalled. It would be good to know what Martin Lewis thinks about it.

https://tinyurl.com/bdfhy6h9

But Rishi Sunak continues to brazen his way through this and numerous other calamities, perhaps still imagining it will be ok when he reshuffles his Cabinet following the summer recess. Good luck with that as there’s nothing left of the vacuous barrel to scrape. Unusually and counter to protocol, James Cleverly went public to make crystal clear that he wanted to ‘stay put’ as Foreign Secretary, deludedly suggesting that this was a job he was good at. He’s certainly good at jetting around the world and making statements of the bl….n obvious but there’s little evidence of his capacity for original and insightful thought or to act promptly in crises or resolve difficult foreign policy issues.

None of this news, from the inaction on climate change to the cost of living crisis, is good for our mental wellbeing, the effects of each situation being aggravated by the incompetent and corrupt government time and time again proving itself unable to deal with them. It’s even more alarming what’s happening in the mental health field, following on from Met Police chief Sir Mark Rowley declaring in May that from 31 August his force would no longer deal with mental health crisis calls. . There’s been a considerable rise in demands on the police: In Merseyside, calls of this kind have increased from 7,629 in 2017 to 28,039 in 2022 – a 313% rise. It could be argued that the police have their own jobs to do and that for far too long the NHS (itself under-resourced, of course) has relied too heavily on the police to respond to emergency calls. But now policing minister Chris Philp has broadened this to all the police forces in England, the only exceptions being ‘whenever there is a risk to public safety and if there is a crime’. At the time of Rowley’s announcement mental health professionals and others were already pointing out the faulty logic underlying this decision, as many situations are a grey area and 999 call handlers could be left uncertain where to direct them.

‘Police officers who find themselves with non-criminal mental health incidents will be urged to hand over cases to health workers within an hour rather than spending far longer escorting them to hospital or another safe place and staying with them before handover – for as long as 14 hours in some cases’. And wouldn’t you just know that this strategy has to have a snappy title (Right Care, Right Person)? It ‘looks likely to create tension between police and health services over the speed of rollout and the resources available to ensure vulnerable people do not fall between the cracks’. But those cracks are already appearing because it states that police forces will decide the RCRP timeframe locally but after liaising with health and other professionals. This will surely lead to different arrangements and timeframes all over the country, though Philp has said he wants it all up and running within two years.

The doubts expressed by mental health charity MIND are similar to those of other mental health organizations: ‘[It] goes nowhere near offering enough guarantees that these changes will be introduced safely – there is no new funding attached and no explanation of how agencies will be held accountable. It is simply impossible to take a million hours of support out of the system without replacing it with investment, and mental health services are not resourced to step up overnight’. For its part the Royal College of Psychiatrists said that this must not be a step towards discontinuation of police involvement in such emergencies, reminding us that there are legal powers held only by the police which apply in some situations (eg the power to take someone from a public place to a place of safety) so there must always be a police role. Mental health services have long been under-resourced: it’s probably unlikely but it would be good to think that this initiative will lead to a proper conversation about how those with mental ill-health should be helped and proper funding to go with it.

Meanwhile, this is the kind of hypocritical statement we get from the mental health minister, Maria Caulfield: ‘Anyone going through something as awful as a mental health crisis deserves to know they’ll receive the best possible emergency response. It’s vital the right people who are trained and skilled to deal with the situation are on the scene to assist’. It is indeed ‘vital’ but the personal accounts of so many point to the support often not materializing and the Conservatives have never funded mental health as they need to in order to make delivering the right treatment the norm.

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This and other funding shortfalls make even more of a nonsense the fact that the Royal Family have effectively had quite a hefty pay rise. It must have been anticipated that the public would largely be unhappy about this amid the cost of living crisis, to the extent the Treasury spun the figures as a pay cut for the royals, when, In fact, their grant is due to increase from £86m to £125m in 2025. Former Cabinet Secretary Lord Turnbull, who had been heavily involved in royal finance, condemned the dishonesty. ‘You get people writing in saying: ‘Isn’t it a good thing that the king is so sensitive to public opinion that he has waived some of the money he could have had?’ I think it’s bollocks. It is deliberate – that’s really what makes me so cross about it. It is a deliberate attempt to obfuscate how the thing works’. Apparently a Treasury spokesman said the amount will be reviewed in 2026, with a view to bringing it back down in 2027. We will believe that when we see it.

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Many public transport users have been up in arms at proposals to remove staff from railway station ticket offices, alleging that ‘only’ a small percentage of passengers buy their tickets this way. But just leaving us to websites and a bank of machines is no substitute, failing to take account of complex ticketing and of the needs of those with disabilities. And what happens when the machine isn’t working? An angry tweeter said: ‘180 million journeys (per year) are facilitated by ticket offices”. The Government and the Train Companies are saying FU to 180 million people. To them you are just a number, and a number that counts for nothing’.

At least we now have till September to comment on these ‘proposals’. The rail companies say their plan is to move the staff from inside offices to concourses etc where they can be more helpful, but this sounds like a con. Just this week a ticket office team leader let drop that they’d been told they’d lose their jobs. Instead, these companies might recruit people at much lower pay, on limited hours and without the knowledge gained often over years by the current staff and without the tech the offices currently have. Let’s hope as many as possible will respond to these consultations and take part in the protests being planned.

When you think you’ve seen it all there can be further surprises or should that be shocks? In this week’s Boris Johnson column for the Daily Mail, his subject is the much-publicised Barbie film, in which the film critic manqué suggests (hopefully tongue in cheek but you never know with this narcissist) what the real message of the film is, a message which has so far eluded the critics. He reckons ‘it’s a satire on the tragic plastic sterility of Barbie the doll and a great ­Mussolini-esque rallying cry for human fecundity’. But I thought the most interesting sentence in this column was his irony by-pass statement of what he’s allegedly gained from getting older: ‘But I have reached the age when you can not only absorb what is going on but also actively enjoy yourself, even when you are half (or completely) asleep’. Doesn’t this just capture his irresponsible modus operandi in government?

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 ‘Looking on the bright side….’ – there can be plenty of good things in our daily lives but it often seems that when we come to major, world-changing issues, there’s not much positive to report on. So it’s interesting that this piece interviews 13 experts in their fields from the climate crisis to culture wars, all of whom present evidence to the contrary, at least in part. I was struck by the echo chamber one, that the proportions of left leaning and right leaning ones were perceived as so small and this is further evidence of how much the mass media messaging can have a corrosive effect, spinning a narrative we’re brainwashed into thinking reflects reality.

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Finally, an interesting development which should give wildlife a better chance of survival: a ‘swift brick’ produced by a Derbyshire brick maker, with design input from the RSPB. These have a small hole in front, a grippy entrance enabling swifts, an endangered species, to land, a concave dish to facilitate nest building and internal channels for drainage. These can be laid alongside regular bricks in new buildings and a petition to make their use compulsory in new UK housing projects will be debated in Parliament. Has anyone told Michael Gove?