You are currently browsing the daily archive for June 13, 2023.
The next two posts show why British politics is the world’s best soap opera.
There it was Friday evening, June 9, 2023. Millions of Britons had downed tools for the week and were relaxing. However, the night was newsworthy, as was the whole weekend.
Nadine Dorries resigns
My far better half and I were watching GB News, when news broke that the Conservative MP Nadine Dorries was standing down with immediate effect. During Boris’s premiership she had been Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). Pundits said that it was because she was not on Boris Johnson’s honours list, something that every outgoing PM can do. The list involves damehoods, knighthoods or promotion to the House of Lords.
That didn’t make sense to me. Dorries has a very comfortable majority of 24,000+ in her Bedfordshire constituency. She’d win re-election comfortably. Furthermore, the proper thing to do for a sitting MP who wishes to stand down is to announce before the next general election (GE) that he or she will continue to serve until then. This is normally done when political party local associations open up selections for candidates for the next GE. This process is currently going on in the Conservative Party in preparation for 2024.
An MP’s top priority is serving his constituents’ interests.
Therefore, it seemed unusual for someone of Dorries’s years — she’s a grandmother at a proper grandmotherly age, unlike the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party — to resign full stop and trigger a by-election.
It being a Friday and Dorries being of little interest to us, we took in the news and moved on with our respective programmes in the late evening.
Shock at 10
I watched more GB News.
Sometime around 10 p.m., Mark Dolan announced that Boris Johnson was also standing down as an MP with immediate effect.
Dolan, spontaneously and aptly, devoted the next hour of his show to analysing what this meant and what would happen next.
Meanwhile, GB News’s main competitor, TalkTV, was showing the best of Piers Morgan’s show. Furthermore, Nadine Dorries’s regular Friday night show on the channel was nowhere to be seen:
Then again, so few people watch TalkTV, it made little difference:
Guido Fawkes says there is an alleged reluctance on the part of TalkTV teams to work on Fridays:
The television team at the Baby Shard do not like working Fridays, so they instead put out rehashed content from Piers Morgan Unwatched that does nothing for the station’s already dire ratings. When Boris resigned, the few viewers of TalkTV would have been unaware.
Then again, the channel has access to other news sources from the Murdoch stable of media outlets, of which it is a part:
… the station having extensive access in the building to news journalists from The Sun and The Times, who could have delivered down the line live coverage. The pre-recorded content meant the station suffered the humiliation of being the only channel to not cover the resignation until the next day.
As such, TalkTV’s ratings tanked once again (red emphases Guido’s):
The Friday evening shows, as a consequence, all got next to nothing ratings on BARB.
Even if they can explain away this shambles as bad luck because of the unfortunate timing, things are coming to a head at NewsUK: the comprehensive and continuous drubbing by GB News, the embarrassing figures, and content that the TalkRadio side of the business wants to drop even though they get it free from TalkTV. Insiders say a crisis meeting to discuss the dismal performance of TalkTV is coming…
But I digress.
Why had Boris resigned so suddenly? Why trigger a by-election? Would he re-enter Parliament as MP for another constituency? If so, how soon would that be — for 2024 or some other time in future?
The questions were many from Mark Dolan’s guests, as were the answers. As even the best informed could only speculate, there is little point in going into them.
At the heart of the matter was Partygate, and the House of Commons’s Privileges Committee seems to have decided — their findings have not yet been made fully public — that Boris deliberately misled MPs about gatherings he had during lockdown. From this, it seems they wanted to suspend him from attending Parliament, something that could trigger a petition in his constituency which could bring about a by-election. Boris’s resignation cuts to the chase. He will bring about the by-election himself rather than be humiliated futher by the Privileges Committee.
At 8:22 that evening, The Spectator posted his first-person explanation, ‘Why I quit Parliament’ (purple emphases mine):
I have received a letter from the Privileges Committee making it clear – much to my amazement – that they are determined to use the proceedings against me to drive me out of parliament.
They have still not produced a shred of evidence that I knowingly or recklessly misled the Commons.
They know perfectly well that when I spoke in the Commons I was saying what I believed sincerely to be true and what I had been briefed to say, like any other minister. They know that I corrected the record as soon as possible; and they know that I and every other senior official and minister – including the current Prime Minister and then occupant of the same building, Rishi Sunak – believed that we were working lawfully together.
I have been an MP since 2001. I take my responsibilities seriously. I did not lie, and I believe that in their hearts the Committee know it. But they have wilfully chosen to ignore the truth because from the outset their purpose has not been to discover the truth, or genuinely to understand what was in my mind when I spoke in the Commons.
Their purpose from the beginning has been to find me guilty, regardless of the facts. This is the very definition of a kangaroo court.
If it all sounds rather Trumpian, that is the intention. Boris, like Trump, must be got rid of, because the Establishment do not like what he wants to do for the people.
This is all about Brexit, going all the way back to Boris’s election as Conservative Party leader in July 2019 and that year’s December general election in which his slogan was ‘Get Brexit done’.
Of course, the UK does not have a presidential system. We vote for an MP to represent our interests. However, just as the June 2016 Brexit referendum was the largest plebescite in the history of the UK, so was the GE in that the Conservatives won a stonking majority of 80 seats.
In many ways, Boris was the author of his own downfall with the Downing Street gatherings. Lockdown rules were ultimately his, after all, even though they were debated in the Commons. His seeming violation of them was a convenient way for the Opposition to get him out of the way and to thwart Brexit.
Civil servants, such as the senior one, Sue Gray, who oversaw the investigation into Partygate, were not on his side, even though they are supposed to be impartial. Boris thought Sue Gray was impartial, but a few months ago it transpired that Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer had already invited her to be his chief of staff going into the next GE. She duly accepted and will begin her new job when civil service rules allow her to do so.
Boris’s article continues:
… I was determined to believe in the system, and in justice, and to vindicate what I knew to be the truth.
It was the same faith in the impartiality of our systems that led me to commission Sue Gray. It is clear that my faith has been misplaced. Of course, it suits the Labour Party, the Liberal Democrats, and the SNP to do whatever they can to remove me from parliament.
Sadly, as we saw in July last year, there are currently some Tory MPs who share that view. I am not alone in thinking that there is a witch hunt underway, to take revenge for Brexit and ultimately to reverse the 2016 referendum result.
My removal is the necessary first step, and I believe there has been a concerted attempt to bring it about. I am afraid I no longer believe that it is any coincidence that Sue Gray – who investigated gatherings in Number 10 – is now the chief of staff designate of the Labour leader.
Nor do I believe that it is any coincidence that her supposedly impartial chief counsel, Daniel Stilitz KC, turned out to be a strong Labour supporter who repeatedly tweeted personal attacks on me and the government.
Boris also included a veiled message for Rishi Sunak:
When I left office last year the government was only a handful of points behind in the polls. That gap has now massively widened. Just a few years after winning the biggest majority in almost half a century, that majority is now clearly at risk.
Our party needs urgently to recapture its sense of momentum and its belief in what this country can do.
We need to show how we are making the most of Brexit and we need in the next months to be setting out a pro-growth and pro-investment agenda. We need to cut business and personal taxes – and not just as pre-election gimmicks – rather than endlessly putting them up.
We must not be afraid to be a properly Conservative government …
We need to deliver on the 2019 manifesto, which was endorsed by 14 million people. We should remember that more than 17 million voted for Brexit.
Boris returned to the Privileges Committee:
The Conservative Party has the time to recover its mojo and its ambition and to win the next election. I had looked forward to providing enthusiastic support as a backbench MP. [Labour MP] Harriet Harman’s committee has set out to make that objective completely untenable.
The Committee’s report is riddled with inaccuracies and reeks of prejudice but under their absurd and unjust process I have no formal ability to challenge anything they say.
The Privileges Committee is there to protect the privileges of parliament. That is a very important job. They should not be using their powers – which have only been very recently designed – to mount what is plainly a political hitjob on someone they oppose.
It is in no one’s interest, however, that the process the Committee has launched should continue for a single day further.
So I have today written to my Association in Uxbridge and South Ruislip to say that I am stepping down forthwith and triggering an immediate by-election.
I am very sorry to leave my wonderful constituency. It has been a huge honour to serve them, both as Mayor and MP …
He summarised his achievements as PM:
getting Brexit done, winning the biggest majority for 40 years and delivering the fastest vaccine roll out of any major European country, as well as leading global support for Ukraine.
He concluded:
It is very sad to be leaving parliament – at least for now – but above all I am bewildered and appalled that I can be forced out, anti-democratically, by a committee chaired and managed, by Harriet Harman, with such egregious bias.
That evening, The Spectator also posted a round-up of various MPs’ reactions to the resignation. Not surprisingly, Boris loyalists and others who support Brexit praised him, while Remainers, such as retired MP and former Chancellor George Osborne, did not. The reaction of opposition MPs come as no shock.
Earlier that day, the magazine published Boris’s full honours list as an outgoing PM. Absent from the list is Nadine Dorries.
Also absent from the list is Shaun Bailey, the London Assembly member who stood against Sadiq Khan in 2021’s mayoral race. The Evening Standard, The Telegraph and The Guardian reported that Boris had awarded him a peerage, so I hope that still stands, for reasons explained below. He is a good man, one of common sense. He is also a family man in the best way possible. He would be a fine addition to the House of Lords.
The Spectator gave this analysis of Boris’s list:
The Prime Minister has approved Johnson’s list. It includes a peerage for former No. 10 special adviser Charlotte Owen, who at 29 will become the youngest ever life peer. There are also knighthoods for Simon Clarke [MP] and former Tory chairman Ben Elliot [big fundraiser]. This is a slimmed down version of the original list – reported to include Johnson’s father Stanley – which officials advised the former prime minister to trim after it came in at nearly 100 names.
It is still not without controversy. The sitting MPs – Nigel Adams, Alister Jack, Nadine Dorries and Alok Sharma – tipped for peerages are absent. The expectation is they will be given peerages after they retire from the Commons so as to avoid tricky by-elections. However, Nadine Dorries has decided to spark one anyway – quitting as a Tory MP today in a parting shot to Sunak. That means a by-election in Mid Bedfordshire, which has a majority of 24,000. Any secret agreement between Johnson and Sunak to delay the peerages to avoid politically unhelpful votes could no longer be valid. Will Dorries still get a peerage? Her former Tory MP colleagues have wasted no time in kicking her out of their all-MP WhatsApp group.
As for the names on the list, they are largely made up of former aides and colleagues of Johnson and show the former prime minister rewarding loyalty above all else. The majority of MPs on the list – such as Andrea Jenkyns and Jacob Rees-Mogg – are long-time Johnson loyalists. Plenty of aides who served during partygate have made the list, including a damehood for former Head of Operations Shelly Williams Walker and OBEs for former director of communications Jack Doyle, his successor Guto Harri along with press secretary Rosie Bate Williams. Johnson’s righthand man Ross Kempsell, in his early thirties, has received a peerage while Sarah Vaughan Brown who served as an adviser to Johnson’s wife Carrie receives an OBE.
MPs’ reactions on Twitter
Boris loyalists voiced their praise and disappointment on Twitter.
Former Home Secretary Priti Patel posted a photo of happier days in 2019:
Longtime Conservative MP Michael Fabricant expressed his deep disappointment:
Sir James Duddridge MP said that history would remember Boris fondly:
Red Wall MP Marco Longhi remembered Boris’s kindness to him as a new MP, elected in 2019:
Another Red Wall MP, Brendan Clarke-Smith, expressed his gratitude to Boris for the 2019 result. He, too, began his parliamentary career that year:
On Saturday morning, June 10, Guido Fawkes — Paul Staines, in real life — appeared on GB News’s current events show which Conservative MPs — and Mr and Mrs — Esther McVey and Philip Davies host.
Guido explained to them how the Privileges Committee worked in this instance with its new powers. In addition, even with a majority of Conservative MPs on it, most of those were anti-Boris, making the whole process a stitch-up:
The committee had decided the outcome before they even met to discuss Boris:
Guido agreed with Boris’s assessment:
The founder of Guido Fawkes has blasted the privileges committee as having an “inbuilt anti-Boris majority” in a critical assessment.
Paul Staines told GB News that Boris Johnson will have felt the whole privilege committee set-up was a “kangaroo court” …
“I felt that at the very beginning, if you look at it, you had [Labour’s] Chris Br[yan]t [who] was originally going to chair it.
“He had to go because he had tweeted so much hatred of Boris.
“Then you have Harriet Harman, who is a divisive figure and had already decided in public statements that Boris was guilty.”
He continued: “And this sort of story that’s going around that it’s got an inbuilt Tory majority.
“Charles Walker [Conservative] is an obsessive hater of Boris.
“Andy Carter [also Conservative], we’ve got documents where he said Boris had to go in 2022.
“That committee had an inbuilt anti-Boris majority.”
Guido had more that day on the anti-Boris Conservatives. I will include the other two:
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- Sir Bernard Jenkin was a leading Brexiteer and Guido remembers him fondly. Unfortunately Bernard is not fond of Boris, in the days before his resignation from the premiership, Bernard told him he should leave with grace rather than being “forced out like Donald Trump clinging to power”. Which seems like he has already made up his mind.
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- Albert[o] Costa was and presumably still is a strong backer of Penny Mordaunt to become prime minister. He resigned from Theresa May’s government because he thought May was not protecting EU citizens rights in post-Brexit Britain, sounding very much like the remainy lawyer. Guido doesn’t think he was that keen on Brexit or Boris.
Later that day, Jake Berry MP voiced the frustration of millions of Brexit-supporting Britons:
Those who saw Labour-supporting Lord Sainsbury’s tweet must have been incensed, considering how stacked the House of Lords is against Conservative policy, especially Brexit:
Saturday’s news — Nigel Adams resigns
While we were still processing the news about Boris, in the middle of the afternoon, a third Conservative MP resigned: Nigel Adams, who served in the Cabinet Office between 2021 and 2022.
He, too, resigned with immediate effect:
As ever, Guido was quick off the mark with the news:
Three by-elections…
Nigel Adams was a Boris loyalist who tried to dampen the fury over Partygate early in 2022:
He came from humble beginnings, which one would not know from seeing him in Parliament. He is well spoken and made good points in parliamentary debates. Brendan Clarke-Smith thinks similarly:
Recognising another colleague from similar beginnings, albeit in mining, Adams congratulated Lee Anderson on becoming Deputy Party Chairman in February 2023:
I’ll leave the final word about Nigel Adams to Lord Lancaster:
What The Times knew
The Sunday Times featured a bombshell report on the weekend’s news: ‘How a call from The Times triggered turmoil for Tories’:
The immediate events that precipitated Boris Johnson’s resignation as a Tory MP last week began with a phone call from The Times.
On Thursday evening this newspaper told Nadine Dorries, the former culture secretary, that her name was not on Johnson’s resignation honours list, which was due to be published the following day.
It was the first that Dorries had heard of it and her initial reaction was one of disbelief.
“I was totally stunned,” she said yesterday. “I thought that it was mischief-making from within No 10 in the last few minutes, that it was someone trying to cause trouble with a story that would discredit me.
“I spoke to Boris. He was in Egypt. He said it’s … it’s not true. He said I’ve had assurances from Sunak, he wouldn’t lie to me.”
When the list was published on Friday afternoon it was clear that Dorries and two other Tory MPs nominated by Johnson — Alok Sharma and Nigel Adams — would not be getting peerages. For Johnson, it was the final straw.
Relations with Rishi Sunak were already at breaking point — Johnson believed the prime minister was betraying his legacy and was infuriated by the Cabinet Office’s decision to refer him to the police over new allegations that he had broken lockdown restrictions.
Then there was the Privileges Committee:
Johnson also knew he was about to face a damning report from the privileges committee asserting that he deliberately misled the Commons over the Downing Street parties scandal.
The proposed sanction — a 20-day suspension — would be more than enough to lead to a by-election in his constituency of Uxbridge & South Ruislip. Johnson chose to quit instead with the parting shot of a vitriolic 1,000-word resignation statement.
Returning to the honours list, it has been alleged that senior civil servant, Simon Case, came up Boris’s plan in July 2022:
The genesis of last week’s events lies in the dying days of Johnson’s premiership when he began to consider his resignation honours list. Soon after he quit he discussed the matter with Simon Case, the cabinet secretary, who came up with an “elegant solution” regarding giving peerages to sitting MPs.
Under the plans those MPs would be conferred delayed peerages, which they would take up after the next general election. Dorries said Case spoke to her about the plan last autumn. She claimed: “He said there is a plan, we can have an asterisked system. There is precedent. We put an asterisk to your name that says holding until after the election. He said ‘I think that plan will work’.”
A source close to Case said it was untrue that he was behind the idea. The insider said the cabinet secretary had been asked if senior politicians could use the “model of deferred peerages”. He said it was a matter for the House of Lords Appointments Committee (Holac), which vets peerages.
Holac disagreed on some of Boris’s suggestions and did not give a reason.
In February 2023:
The honours list was submitted to the Cabinet Office in February, shorn of those nominations. The political ramifications were explosive.
Johnson and his allies claim they repeatedly sought reassurances from the government but none were given. “No 10 deliberately withheld information,” Dorries said. “Nobody in No 10 spoke to me, Alok Sharma or Nigel Adams. We heard nothing. Something went seriously wrong in No 10.”
A Downing Street source said Johnson was aware the names had been removed. The insider said it was a “confidential process which must be free from outside influence” and the MPs would not have been informed.
When reports of Holac’s decision emerged last month, Dorries said she was reassured by a cabinet minister that she would not need to stand down as an MP to take a peerage. The minister suggested Case was working on an accommodation and their names would be on the list.
I do not understand how an MP could also be a member of the House of Lords or vice versa. I’ve never heard of such a thing, because, historically, Tony Benn had to renounce his hereditary title to become an MP. It passed back in recent years to one of his sons who now sits in the Lords. In another example, if Brexit champion Lord Frost wanted to become an MP, he would have to renounce his life peerage before becoming a candidate.
The Sunday Times described the tension between the Johnson and Sunak camps over the honours list:
Johnson, however, was concerned enough to press James Forsyth, Sunak’s political secretary [also best man, close friend and former political editor of The Spectator], for a meeting with the prime minister in his office more than a week ago. What was said in that 45-minute meeting remains a source of contention. Johnson claims he came to a “gentleman’s agreement” with Sunak that he would call off hostilities in return for his resignation honours list being waived through. He says that Sunak assured him the list he submitted, including the nominations for peerages, would be honoured. The MPs would be “re-vetted” by Holac and get their peerages at a later date and standing down. “It wasn’t a big deal in the meeting,” an ally of Johnson said. “The message from Sunak was ‘don’t worry, I will put your list through intact’.”
No 10 disputes this version of events. It says Johnson asked Sunak if he could over-rule Holac or promise they would get the peerages in future — an apparent confirmation that he was aware their names had been taken off the list.
Downing Street claims that Sunak made clear he did not want to discuss the peerages and when pressed signalled that he would put through the list sent to him by Holac.
Sunak is understood to have said that he would not “make any promises”, adding: “I don’t want to you to leave this room thinking I have made a promise to you because I don’t want to fall out with you down the line over it.”
A source close to Sunak said: “The prime minister made it clear to Johnson that . . . he would follow the process and precedent for approved peers and would not be involved any further.”
After the meeting Johnson told Dorries that she and the other MPs on the list would be getting peerages. He continued to reassure the MPs after The Times published its story on Thursday night. The former prime minister now believes he has been betrayed. He and his allies have taken to calling it the “swindler’s list”, with Johnson accusing Sunak of “sophistry”.
No 10 rejects this claim. A source said: “Any suggestions of promises made or guarantees given are categorically untrue.”
Sunday news shows
There was no escaping Boris on the Sunday morning news shows.
Boris’s former advisor Guto Hari (pron. ‘Gheeto Harry’) said that Boris seized control of the Privileges Committee situation before its members could humiliate him:
Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg said that it was not improbable for Boris to re-enter politics at some point, even as Conservative Party leader:
In the biggest news announcement, Nigel Farage said he would welcome working with Boris on a new initiative to support Brexit and true conservative values. He told GB News’s Camilla Tominey that, while he had not spoken personally with the former PM, he had talked at length with a few close friends of his about the idea:
He said that Boris’s time with the Conservative Party could be drawing to a close, hence his offer:
Monday meant more Boris
Boris dominated Monday’s morning news round.
Lord Marland said that whatever Boris pursued would be a success, if only because of his worldwide popularity:
However, most pundits and reporters were looking at the situation between Boris and Rishi.
GB News’s Darren McCaffrey said that three by-elections taking place at once would be a real headache for Rishi as polling for the Conservatives is so bad:
It’s a shame that the three MPs resigned. They have comfortable majorities. Even if the media say that Boris would not have won re-election, Lord Ashcroft’s poll last week begs to differ:
According to him, most voters supported Boris, as Guido points out:
Voters in Uxbridge were also asked their opinion of his record as Prime Minister: just 29% had a negative opinion with 41% saying he was “good” or “great”. By a net margin of 13%, voters also have a positive perception of his record as a constituency MP.
Well, it’s anyone’s game now, including Nadine Dorries’s and Nigel Adams’s constituencies.
However, there is much more to follow in part 2 — all being well — coming tomorrow.
Churchmouse Campanologist 