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Yesterday’s post covered Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation as First Minister of Scotland on February 15 and the reasons for it.
The story continues.
More reaction
When Jacinda Ardern stood down in New Zealand, British conservatives wondered if Sturgeon would follow suit.
After all, the metropolitan elite adored both female ‘saints’, mothers of their respective nations.
On Thursday, February 16, The Telegraph‘s Jenny Hjul pointed out (emphases mine):
In her eight-plus years as Scotland’s First Minister, Sturgeon has been loved and loathed in equal measure at home, something she acknowledged in her press conference. But beyond her domain, she has been regarded in many circles as an almost saintly presence, a pioneer of progressive causes, and a beacon of pure, strong leadership.
To the frustration of her critics in Scotland, she has been able to pull the wool over the eyes of London liberals in particular and garnered a good press over her botched handling of everything from Covid to the fall-out from Brexit.
In her parting, parallels will no doubt be drawn with that other recent quitter, and Sturgeon idol, Jacinda Ardern. Like the former premier of New Zealand, the SNP leader’s attempt to portray her departure as an honourable exit will be taken at face value by those who understand little of the domestic politics that have made her position untenable in the long-term.
Sturgeon, like Ardern, banged on about running out of steam, about the pressures of the job and the constant scrutiny. And she flagged up what she saw as her achievements (“Scotland is a fairer country”), while regretting that she could not bring more rationality to politics. “If all parties were to take this opportunity to try to de-polarise public debate just a bit,” she pleaded.
This is rich indeed from a politician who has thrived not just on driving divisions between Scotland and the rest of the UK but on polarising opinion north of the border.
Far from being democracy’s champion, her party has shut down dissenting voices while claiming to represent the whole of Scotland. Under her tenure, Scotland has become all but a one-party state, with many public bodies, and civic and cultural organisations captured by SNP groupthink.
Sturgeon said her decision to stand down had crystallised over the past few weeks, perhaps since Ardern’s resignation showed that even great (by their own reckoning) leaders have their limits. But more likely it is because her grip has gone – over her party, which is divided and growing rebellious, and her country, which is further away than ever from voting Yes …
To her wider fan club, she may have relinquished her crown with grace, but to those who know her better it is her final face-saving gesture.
The Gender Recognition Reform Bill, which the British government vetoed by using Section 35 provisions for the first time, has caused a split within the Scottish National Party. On Thursday, February 16, The Times reported that Party members’ views are divided on the legislation:
The Scottish government has until April 17 to decide whether to appeal against the UK government’s veto of the legislation, which would allow people to self-identify their gender and lower the age of transition to 16.
The SNP’s ruling national executive committee will meet tonight to decide the rules and timetable for the leadership contest, raising the prospect that there may not be a new first minister in place before the key call has to be made …
“I think it dies in its current form,” a senior SNP source said. “The sensible approach would be [for the new leader] to get round the table [with the UK government] and find a compromise on the bill.”
The party is split on the bill, meaning whatever happens it will be controversial. Opening talks with Conservative ministers will anger those who lobbied for the bill to be pushed through with little compromise.
However, there is a significant number of elected representatives and grassroots members who are concerned about fighting a court case when a recent poll found that 50 per cent of voters in Scotland back the UK government’s position …
Mixed reactions
When Liz Truss was Prime Minister, she labelled Nicola Sturgeon an ‘attention seeker’ and, as such, someone to be ignored. She never contacted Sturgeon.
Rishi Sunak was different and got in touch soon after he entered No. 10. He was rather gushing on her departure:
President Trump, on the other hand, viewed Sturgeon differently:
The day she resigned, he posted a statement on his 2024 campaign website:
Good riddance to failed woke extremist Nicola Sturgeon of Scotland! This crazed leftist symbolizes everything wrong with identity politics. Sturgeon thought it was OK to put a biological man in a women’s prison, and if that wasn’t bad enough, Sturgeon fought for a “Gender Recognition Reform Bill” that would have allowed 16-year-old children to change their gender without medical advice. I built the greatest Golf properties in the World in Scotland, but she fought me all the way, making my job much more difficult. The wonderful people of Scotland are much better off without Sturgeon in office!
Catalogue of failures
Is Trump right?
While he is no fan of the former US president, Scottish Conservatives leader Douglas Ross would agree with those sentiments.
On the morning of February 15, the sun was shining in the north east of Scotland, where Ross, an MP and MSP, was campaigning for candidates in an upcoming by-election. The sun was shining:
That was at 9:46. In just over an hour, the sun would shine even brighter with the unexpected news of Sturgeon’s resignation.
The following tweet represents the political disconnect among the Scottish public between those who thought Sturgeon was a disaster and those who thought she was a saint:
I will certainly miss First Minister’s Questions which always began with a Sturgeon-Ross face-off. In the last two sessions, Sturgeon was unable to answer Ross’s question about sexual identity — 12 times, no less.
The evening that she resigned, Ross wrote in The Telegraph about her catalogue of failures:
She is, rightly, regarded as a formidable politician. But equally, it’s hard to dispute that, by obsessing over independence, she has always governed in the nationalist interest, rather than the national interest.
Any rational analysis of her record as First Minister would have to conclude that it’s one of failure.
On education, the policy area she asked to be judged on, it’s dismal. Scotland tumbled so far down the international league tables that we were withdrawn from them to save face.
For a self-avowed “progressive”, Nicola Sturgeon’s abject failure to eradicate the poverty-related attainment gap, as promised, is a damning indictment of her reign.
Then, there’s the increased violence in our classrooms and the first teacher strikes in almost 40 years.
On her watch, Scotland’s NHS is on its knees with record waiting times for treatment and burnt-out, exhausted staff. The root cause is dismal workforce planning by successive SNP health secretaries, including Nicola Sturgeon who cut the number of funded places for homegrown medical students at Scottish universities.
Similarly, on transport, the ledger is grim. The ferries scandal is the most egregious case of wasteful public spending in the devolution era, with the latest cost estimates (£450 million) showing it’s set to overtake the Scottish Parliament building as a money pit.
But it’s about so much more than taxpayers’ cash being squandered. It bears two other hallmarks of the Sturgeon government: remote Scotland being an afterthought and secrecy.
Meanwhile, the death toll on two of Scotland’s vital trunk roads, the A9 and A96, continues to rise while the SNP, in thrall to the anti-car Greens, drag their heels on long-standing promises to expand the dual carriageways, and our trains remain over-priced and unreliable under nationalised ScotRail.
The First Minister has grown increasingly out of touch with the public mood in recent months, leaving her successor with dilemmas over whether to ditch or amend flawed policies, such as the National Care Service, the Deposit Return Scheme and, of course, gender self-ID.
By tying herself in knots over the latter, she was left in the absurd position of being unable to refer to a double rapist as a man.
That, coupled with her dismissal – indeed, smearing – of those who warned that her Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill threatened women and girls’ safety betrayed her “I know best” arrogance.
Arguably, Nicola Sturgeon’s greatest failing is Scotland’s drug death epidemic, which has mushroomed to such an extent under her that fatality rates are now the worst in Europe by an enormous margin.
“We took our eye off the ball” was her slip-of-the-tongue mea culpa for those appalling statistics. But it could, and should, serve as her wider epitaph.
Coronavirus measures
Ross did not mention, or perhaps he agreed with, Sturgeon’s draconian coronavirus policies.
From the start, she did things more radically than Boris Johnson. For whatever reason, the BBC televised her lengthy lunchtime coronavirus press conferences throughout the UK, when her policies pertained only to Scotland.
Her right-hand woman was Devi Sridhar, an American public health researcher who is the chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh. The BBC frequently interviewed Sridhar for all the UK to see and hear, a subtle attempt to get every other Briton on board with Scotland’s draconian policies.
In April 2020, the SNP’s then-Westminster leader Ian Blackford MP wrote to Boris to delay full Brexit because of the pandemic.
On Sunday, April 5, The Express reported:
In his letter, Mr Blackford urges Mr Johnson to seek an extension to the current transition period in a bid to focus resources and efforts on tackling the pandemic – claiming failure to do would be “beyond reckless”. He added: “We are not asking you to change your views on Brexit – we are simply asking you to recognise reality.”
“This isn’t about fighting old battles or rehearsing old arguments – it’s about recognising the needs of people right now.”
Fortunately, Boris ignored him.
However, that same day proved that the SNP was not whiter than white. Sturgeon’s chief medical officer Dr Catherine Calderwood had already broken lockdown restrictions twice by travelling to her weekend home from Edinburgh.
Sturgeon did not act and even initially refused Calderwood’s resignation.
If she had stayed then Ms Sturgeon and, probably the British government too, would have had to face the fact that for many politicians, the media and for huge sections of a terrified and angry general public, it will be this doctor – and not the nation’s battle against a killer virus – who would have become the main issue. Dr Calderwood would have been the story, not coronavirus. And in the harsh world of politics, that’s what ultimately counts.
She admitted that not once but twice she drove the 40-odd miles to her second home at a time when she is on our TV screens and in our newspapers constantly urging the rest of the population to stay at home and not to go off on non-essential trips to the countryside.
Whichever way you cut it, and although the First Minister insisted that she still depended on this lady’s medical support, her foolish actions threatened to drive a coach and horses through the official advice – advice that Dr Calderwood helped draw up – on which the nation depends to beat this virus.
Ms Sturgeon was extraordinarily generous in refusing initially to accept Dr Calderwood’s offer to resign and for insisting, somewhat ingenuously, that everyone makes mistakes. That is true, of course, but the reality is that for this senior official, this was no ordinary slip-up.
On the contrary, on two successive weekends Dr Calderwood decided to get into her car and do what she’s been telling the rest of us not to do – and take a non-essential trip away from the city of Edinburgh to her holiday home in the Fife seaside village of Earlsferry. Trips that earned her an official and extraordinary warning from the police …
Moreover, what is already sticking in the craw of many people is that this is someone who has been a firm advocate of the severe restrictions imposed on the rest of the population who has decided to ignore them to visit her second home.
That this second home is in one of Scotland’s most expensive seaside villages, much favoured by Edinburgh’s better-off classes, will also not be lost on her critics.
SNP politicians said the doctor had to go, at which point Sturgeon relented:
She hoped that would have enabled the doctor to hang onto her position albeit in a backroom role but I’m certain that this experienced politician would have known that it was a hopeless situation.
That view was magnified by the ferocious level of protests she received from leading SNP politicians who said they were reflecting serious unease amongst the party faithful about Dr Calderwood’s behaviour.
The hypocrisy of it all!
That month, an allegation surfaced that England was stealing Scotland’s PPE supplies, a claim which Sturgeon retracted mid-month but, according to one Conservative MSP, allowed to continue spreading north of the border. On April 15, The Express reported (with a video of one of her press conferences):
At Ms Sturgeon’s daily briefing, she promised to seek urgent clarity on reports that Scottish care homes were being given a lower priority for supplies of personal protective equipment. Claims of PPE priority for England surfaced on Monday and came from Donald Macaskill, the head of Scottish Care, which is the body representing private care homes in Scotland. He told BBC Radio Scotland the UK’s four largest suppliers had said they were not sending to Scotland and instead prioritising “England, the English NHS and then English social care providers”.
Andrew Neil mocked the First Minister of Scotland and tweeted: “Nicola Sturgeon told GMB [Good Morning Britain] that she accepts assurances that NHS England did not demand PPE suppliers give preference over Scotland …”
Jamie Greene, Scottish Conservative MSP for West Scotland tweeted: “They’re still spouting the story, contrary to the language now being used by the FM, Health Secretary, and Clinical Director.
“If you’re going to manufacture a grievance, at least coordinate it. Even their target audience is boring of the needless (dangerous) scaremongering.”
UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock spoke to health ministers from different UK nations on Tuesday afternoon and insisted it had not instructed any company to prioritise PPE for one nation over the others.
Sturgeon often wanted to appear to be ahead of the curve as a means of scoring political points targeting Boris’s policies for England. Unfortunately, he caved in all too often and followed suit.
On April 23, The Mail reported:
Ms Sturgeon has repeatedly gazumped Number 10 during the coronavirus crisis as she has moved on key issues before ministers in London.
Previous examples include announcing a ban on large social gatherings, closing schools and saying that the original three week lockdown would be extended.
That article laid out Sturgeon’s plans to reopen Scotland soon.
Three days later, she was unable to give any further clarity, despite her announcement. As the reply says, when Boris hesitated, he was accused of obfuscation while Sturgeon was praised for her notional transparency:
Incredibly, on May 5, Sturgeon was pictured shaking hands with Bill Gates. It was okay for them, when no one else was allowed to do so. And look how close they were to each other. More hypocrisy:
Then it emerged that, like Boris, who at least had the excuse of attending Brexit transition meetings, Sturgeon also missed COBRA meetings about the pandemic. In fact, she missed six of them. This came from one of the Scottish papers:
England and Wales effectively re-opened by early July, although with masks, social distancing and some visiting restrictions in place. Scotland lagged behind.
Already on July 10, it was becoming clear that Scotland’s coronavirus policies were not working, as Tom Harwood wrote in The Telegraph:
Looking at Nicola Sturgeon’s polling popularity it’s easy to forget that the Scottish First Minister presided over a care home coronavirus death rate double that of England. It’s easy to miss the fact that Scotland has been significantly behind England when it comes to the rate of testing too. As Labour’s Shadow Scottish Secretary Ian Murray told a private zoom meeting at the end of May, “all of these things in Scotland are in a lot of instances worse than what’s happening in England but Boris gets the blame and not Nicola Sturgeon.”
How then has she managed to get away with it all so unscathed?
One answer is simple. The Westminster media bubble is so often so busy naval gazing that politicians elsewhere in the country escape the scrutiny placed on No 10. Few in the Westminster village are concerned with what’s going on 400 miles north in Holyrood. This obviously allows much Scottish scandal to slide under the radar when it comes to national attention. But this explanation is to downplay the cunning strategy of the SNP Government, and its not so secret weapon. Nationalism.
Sure enough, on July 12, Sturgeon announced she was considering a mandatory quarantine of all English visitors to Scotland. Guido has the video:
On July 23, The Spectator published ‘Nicola Sturgeon’s care homes catastrophe’:
Nicola Sturgeon is fond of telling Scots that the prevalence of Covid-19 is ‘five times lower’ in Scotland than in England. Or at least she was, until the Office for Statistics Regulation released a statement calling her data source ‘unclear’ and adding that ‘we do not yet have evidence to support the validity of these comparisons’. The SNP has been retailing the notion that Sturgeon’s response to the pandemic far outstrips that of Boris Johnson. The public may be on her side, but the facts are not.
… In England and Wales, deaths in care homes have accounted for 28 per cent of all fatalities involving coronavirus. In Scotland, the figure is 47 per cent. English and Welsh homes have lost 3.7 per cent of their residents to the virus while homes in Scotland have lost 5.6 per cent. This is all the more remarkable since the care home population south of the border is almost 12 times the size of that in Scotland.
One explanation is the SNP government’s hive-like mentality. Dissenting views were pushed aside or ignored altogether …
Far from supplying an exemplar for others to follow, the Scottish Government has demonstrated the consequences of wrong-headed policy-making, spurning of expert counsel, and a failure to be transparent. The case for a public inquiry into what went wrong in Scotland’s care homes, and in the decision-making at the top of government, is surely undeniable. With Covid-19 apparently under control at present, now is the optimal time to review policies and processes in case a second wave is looming down the line.
On July 31, Sturgeon announced a travel ban between Scotland and the north west of England:
She announced on the BBC:
I am today advising, strongly advising, people in Scotland to avoid travel to the areas affected in England… and also to ask people from these areas from these areas not to travel to Scotland.
Guido noted:
1,892 years on, Hadrian would be delighted she’s picking up where he left off…
On August 5, Sturgeon effectively locked down the City of Aberdeen, although she did allow people to go to work and educational institutions. According to one person, this was because one bar was not following the rules:
On October 1, Sturgeon was slow to act on then-SNP MP Margaret Ferrier (now an Independent), who travelled by train from London to Scotland and back again, even though she knew she had the virus. By the time this appeared, Ian Blackford had suspended the whip:
The whole of the UK knew about Margaret Ferrier, who remains an Independent to this day. People were angry:
On October 7, Sturgeon announced a semi-lockdown, although she said schools would remain open and adults could leave the house:
On October 11, Sturgeon’s government was failing to use its full testing capacity. It was only using half:
While hospitality establishments in England and Wales had been serving alcohol indoors since the summer and, later in 2020, with food only, Scotland opted to ban strong drink altogether until October 27 that year. Devi Sridhar probably played a role in that, too:
On November 23, Sturgeon closed the Scottish border to the rest of the UK.
Guido told us:
This weekend, in what must have been a dream come true to nationalists, Scotland closed its border to the rest of the UK. The move came as the most densely populated parts of Scotland moved into ‘Tier 4’ – lockdown in all but name. It is currently illegal for anyone from the rest of the UK to enter the country without a reasonable excuse. Scots are also forbidden from traveling to other parts of the UK. A dream come true for the more extreme SNP supporters.
People who enter or leave Scotland illegally are now being hit with £60 fines. Travel within Scotland is also restricted, with those living in Nicola’s Tier 3 or 4 areas prohibited from leaving their local authority without a reasonable excuse. Guido gets the feeling some political tribes are secretly enjoying this pandemic…
On December 17, Sturgeon got stroppy with the Scottish Mail‘s political editor Mike Blackley for asking whether the self-isolation time could be cut, as was planned in the rest of the UK.
Sturgeon shot back:
Yeah, because that’d really help ’cause that would spread infections even further and that would not be doing any favours to businesses.
Guido has the video:
On December 22, Sturgeon was photographed maskless chatting to two women at a pub. They did not have masks, either, but at least they were eating, so had an excuse. Sturgeon apologised only because she was sorry she got caught:
The story caused quite a stir:
The following day, Sturgeon apologised in Holyrood:
She said she was kicking herself harder than her worst critic would:
The author of the Scottish blog Lily of St Leonards pointed out the hypocrisy not only of the mask violation but, more importantly, Sturgeon’s criticism of Boris’s continuation of Brexit negotiations:
Sturgeon is not merely a hypocrite about masks, she is also a hypocrite about transition periods.
Imagine if Sturgeon had been given her wish and there had been an independence referendum in 2018 and she had won it. There would have been a transition period. Let’s say it was due to end in March 2020. Scottish Independence Day would have been April the First. Would Sturgeon have really extended the transition period because of the Covid outbreak? But what if she had extended it and Scotland had continued to receive money from the Treasury? When would the transition period end? When we no longer needed the money? It’s another word for never.
While condemning the British Government for not extending the transition period with the EU due to Covid, Sturgeon is still planning an independence referendum for 2021. If we must extend the transition period because of Covid, why does she suppose it is sensible to have a referendum on breaking up Britain? We have had four years to prepare for leaving the EU. Sturgeon doesn’t even have a plan for independence that takes into account the economic damage of 2020.
Brexit is massively easier to achieve than Scottish separatism. It doesn’t involve setting up a new state. It merely involves us returning to what we had been for centuries until the early 1970s.
The winter saw a resumption of semi-lockdowns throughout the UK, in England as well as in the devolved nations.
Schools had to close just as pupils and students returned from Chrismas holidays in January.
It was thought that President Trump, having lost to Joe Biden, would be taking a golfing trip in Scotland in order to avoid handing over the presidency to him. Sturgeon put her foot down.
On January 5, NPR reported:
Scotland First Minister Nicola Sturgeon says President Trump wouldn’t be allowed to visit Scotland to golf during its pandemic lockdown, responding to speculation that Trump might travel to a Scottish golf resort rather than attend President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration.
“We are not allowing people to come in to Scotland without an essential purpose right now and that would apply to him, just as it applies to anybody else,” Sturgeon said after being asked about Trump on Tuesday. “Coming to play golf is not what I would consider to be an essential purpose.”
Sturgeon was responding to questions spurred by a report in the Scottish newspaper The Sunday Post, which cited a source at Prestwick Airport as saying the facility has been told a U.S. military Boeing 757 aircraft will arrive on Jan. 19, the day before Trump’s term expires and Biden is inaugurated …
As for the chance that Trump might use an international trip to one of his golf resorts to avoid the handover of power, Sturgeon said she has not been told of any of Trump’s travel plans.
In the event, the whole world knows that Trump stayed in Washington …
Also on January 5, Scotland had not decreased the required number of days for self-isolation, as Guido reminded us:
On 22nd December, England’s Covid rules changed so infected individuals can stop isolating after seven days rather than ten, so long as they test negative on day six and seven. Six days ago Wales followed suit, and a day later Northern Ireland copied the change. Leaving one obvious outlier…
It now looks like Sturgeon will confirm the cut, with a statement expected later today and her deputy John Swinney saying yesterday that their administration is “actively considering” reducing the self-isolation period.
Meanwhile, the vaccine rollout began.
On January 28, The Mail reported that Sturgeon sided with the EU in saying that the UK had too many vaccine doses and the EU too few:
Nicola Sturgeon was accused of taking the EU’s side in the bitter vaccine row today as she vowed to publish details of the UK’s supplies despite Boris Johnson ordering her to keep them secret.
In an extraordinary move, the First Minister risked undermining Britain’s position, with Brussels heaping pressure on firms to give the bloc a bigger share of the stocks.
Despite the PM warning that the information must be confidential to protect the rollout, Ms Sturgeon told Holyrood she will release it from next week ‘regardless of what they say’.
The timing of Ms Sturgeon’s intervention was particularly provocative given that it came as Mr Johnson was on an official visit to Scotland to make the case for the Union.
Tory MPs vented fury at Ms Sturgeon – who wants Scotland to be independent and rejoin the bloc – saying she is ‘obviously more inclined to help the EU than she is the UK’.
Tory MP Peter Bone told MailOnline: ‘The simple truth is she has a tendency to support the EU rather than the United Kingdom.
‘It is wrong, her behaviour. I would have thought she would praise the success of the UK because Scotland shares in that. If she was in the EU and not part of the UK she would still be waiting for her vaccines. Get behind the UK government and stop playing petty politics.’
The row erupted as tensions between Britain and Brussels over vaccine supplies escalated again as the EU warned drug companies it will use all legal means to block the export of jabs from the continent unless manufacturers deliver the shots they have promised.
The EU’s vaccination rollout continues to lag far behind the UK’s, with the bloc now desperately scrambling to boost supplies – but deliveries have slowed due to production problems.
Brussels has publicly slammed AstraZeneca for failing to deliver on its contract with the bloc and has even asked the firm to divert jabs from Britain.
Now it has emerged that European Council President Charles Michel has said in a letter to four EU leaders that the EU should explore legal means to ensure it receives the jabs it has bought.
On March 9, the Scottish Sun reported that Sturgeon was relaxing social gatherings — provided they were small, outdoors and close to home:
NICOLA Sturgeon has confirmed plans to allow four adults from two households to meet outdoors from Friday.
The First Minister also revealed older children can mix again in groups …
“And, in addition, we will make clear in our guidance that this will allow for social and recreational purposes, as well as essential exercise.
“Meeting will be possible in any outdoor space, including private gardens.
“But please, do stick to the new rules. Gatherings must be a maximum of four people, from two households. And you should only go indoors if that is essential in order to reach a back garden, or to use the toilet.
“And, for now, please stay as close to home as possible.
“We hope to be in a position to relax – at least to some extent – travel restrictions within Scotland in the weeks ahead, but it is not safe to do so just yet.”
By April 2021, with the UK’s schools still closed, Sturgeon was planning a phased re-opening in Scotland. In 2020, there were problems in marking exams with so much of the school year out the window. To be fair, other UK nations implemented similar policies with similar disastrous results. In 2021, Sturgeon stipulated that no exams were to be set. Understandable, but teachers needed some sort of assessment for pupils and came up with something called the Alternative Certification Model, which allowed teachers to mark pupils on what they observed in class. Sturgeon did not like the proposal and offered no alternative solution, leaving head teachers to come up with their own plans while trying to avoid the word ‘exam’:
At that time, booze and most hospitality was once again off the menu. Although Sturgeon followed Wales’s Prif Weinidog (First Minister) in relaxing some restrictions, hospitality was not one of them:
This was less than a month before local and national elections (for Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland) took place.
On April 13, Guido Fawkes noted that Scottish hospitality was suffering badly (red emphases his):
Sadly for Scotland’s hospitality sector, Guido’s tip-off that the Scottish government was to bring forward its unlocking of hospitality didn’t materialise. Last night, Scotland’s hospitality sector was warning the two-week lag north of the border would cost up to £20 million…
While Sturgeon often boasted at her televised briefings that Scotland had the best plan and the lowest infection rate as a result, it turned out that she was wrong.
On April 30, Guido posted that Scotland had the highest infection rates per capita in the UK:
Guido told us:
Statistics from the ONS this afternoon reveal Scotland is lagging significantly behind England, Wales and Northern Ireland in their Covid prevalence rate. Wales has the lowest rates by far, with one case per 1,570; followed by England’s 1,010; and Northern Ireland’s 940. Scotland, however, is well behind the rest of the country’s progress, at one in every 640. Sturgeon’s so-called ‘good pandemic’ has always been a smokescreen of spin, rather than epidemiological success…
On May 21, Sturgeon forgot to be politically correct and call the Indian variant by another name:
Guido observed:
A rule which apparently never applied to the Kent variant in the first place…
The Spectator thought along the same lines:
… newly appointed health secretary Hamza Yousaf was on hand to claim that ‘a reason why we are calling it the April-02’ variant is because it is ‘important for us not to allow this virus to divide us as communities and people.’
Clearly the SNP feel no such qualms about doing so with the people of Kent.
On May 27, Boris’s former adviser Dominic Cummings explained to a parliamentary select committee how Sturgeon sabotaged UK-wide coronavirus COBRA meetings.
Nicola Sturgeon undermined the UK’s four-nations approach to tackling the coronavirus crisis by “babbling” about high-level meetings, Dominic Cummings has claimed.
Boris Johnson’s former senior adviser accused the first minister of undermining meetings of Cobra, the disasters committee, by announcing the outcome of discussions at media briefings.
Sturgeon held her televised briefings daily at 12.15pm during the pandemic, so they were often directly after a UK-wide crisis meeting.
Cummings told the Westminster science and technology committee and health and social care committee that the online Cobra meetings became shams because other participants feared what Sturgeon would say on TV. This resulted in decisions not being made because of distrust, he added.
“The last Cobra meeting I can even remember downstairs in the Cobra room was essentially a Potemkin [fake] meeting because it was with the DAs [devolved administrations] and what happened was, as soon as we had these meetings, Nicola Sturgeon would just go straight out and announce what she wanted,” Cummings said.
“So you had these completely Potemkin meetings without anyone actually digging into the reality in detail, because everybody thought, as soon as the meeting is finished, everyone’s going to just pop up on TV and start babbling.”
On June 1, Sturgeon said that the scheduled reopening of Scotland could be delayed because not enough people had been vaccinated. Once these people get hold of maximum control, they don’t give it up easily:
On June 9, Sturgeon backed out of a Scotland-specific coronavirus inquiry, as did Mark Drakeford for Wales. A UK-wide inquiry would go ahead instead:
Guido pointed out that the SNP’s May 2021 local/devolved election manifesto had promised one (because of the high rates of care home deaths):
Both Mark Drakeford and Nicola Sturgeon are facing backlash after seemingly cowering out of conducting their own, nation-specific Covid inquiries. Despite it being in the SNP manifesto, Sturgeon is now being warned not to break the pledge after backtracking away from the commitment. The SNP manifesto promised a Scotland-specific inquiry “as soon as possible after the election”, however the first minister’s spokesman told the press on Sunday that the government “was yet to decide whether Scotland needed an inquiry at all, insisting she would first wait to see the terms of reference of a proposed UK-wide probe instead.” As slippery as a Sturgeon…
In Wales, Mark Drakeford didn’t commit to an inquiry in his election manifesto, and is sticking to his refusal. Being pressed during first minister’s questions yesterday, he told Tory leader Andrew RT Davies that the UK-wide inquiry being set up by the PM would be sufficient.
On June 29, Sturgeon had another travel ban in place between Scotland and the north west of England. Manchester’s mayor Andy Burnham forced her to overturn it. She never consulted him on the matter.
Burnham called the ban hypocritical:
Guido explained:
… Health secretary Humza Yousaf confirmed in Holyrood today that the ban between Scotland and Manchester, Bolton and Salford will lift tomorrow. Sturgeon brought in the ban without approaching Burnham and without consultation. Mad with power…
Yousaf claims the restrictions are being removed “due to changes in the epidemiological position for those areas.” The ban on travel between Scotland and Blackburn will remain in place, however. Guido imagines locals in Blackburn won’t be too keen to travel to Scotland anyhow, given it’s experiencing its largest Covid wave since the start of the pandemic…
On August 3, Sturgeon began lifting restrictions throughout Scotland. However, as Guido reported, some would stay in place for quite a while:
… the “number of mitigation measures” include
-
- Mask mandates which Sturgeon expects will ‘likely (…) be mandated in law for some time to come.”
- An ongoing requirement for indoor hospitality venues to collect the contact details of customers.
Sturgeon added:
It is important to be clear that it does not signal the end of the pandemic or a return to life exactly as we knew it before Covid struck.
On August 25, Sturgeon announced that Scotland would be conducting its own coronavirus inquiry, independent of the UK-wide one. A change of heart from what she said earlier.
Nicola Sturgeon has said Scotland will launch its own judge-led public inquiry into the handling of the pandemic by the end of the year …
One of its central aims will be to investigate “events causing public concern” — specifically the excessive death rate in Scottish care homes.
Sturgeon and Jeane Freeman, the former health secretary, have both admitted that discharging 1,300 elderly people from hospitals into care homes without robust testing at the start of the pandemic had been a mistake. More than 3,000 people died in care homes, a third of all the deaths in Scotland …
Sturgeon said the Scottish government would continue to liaise with the UK government about its own inquiry.
Did that ever take place? I don’t know. Certainly, no questions that I’ve heard have been asked in Holyrood.
Eventually, Scotland re-opened, long after England and some time after Wales.
Conclusion
From this litany of errors, including nationalism, hypocrisy and power-grabbing, we can see that Nicola Sturgeon was — and is — no saint.
More to follow on her other mistakes next week.
Anyone who missed previous entries in this series can find them here, here and here.
Every time I read about Prince Harry, I cannot help but think of the story of Jacob and Esau.
Mess of pottage
Esau sold his birthright for a mess of pottage (Genesis 25:29-34). Harry, too, sold his place in the Royal Family for ephemeral media coverage. Who knows what will happen to him in future years?
Like Jacob and Esau (Genesis 27:41), Princes William and Harry are embroiled in a feud, one which the current Prince of Wales is handling with dignity. All being well, in time, perhaps they will mend fences, as Jacob and Esau did (Genesis 33).
The expression ‘mess of pottage‘ is still used today (emphases in purple mine):
A mess of pottage is something immediately attractive but of little value taken foolishly and carelessly in exchange for something more distant and perhaps less tangible but immensely more valuable. The phrase alludes to Esau‘s sale of his birthright for a meal (“mess“) of lentil stew (“pottage“) in Genesis 25:29–34 and connotes shortsightedness and misplaced priorities.
It seems pertinent because on January 20, 2023, The Telegraph featured an article, ‘Meghan stays in the shadows as Prince Harry flies solo on Spare publicity blitz’:
“We’re like salt and pepper,” Meghan opined in an interview. “We always move together” …
But, since Christmas, Prince Harry has been left to soak up the limelight alone.
As he embarked on an unprecedented publicity blitz to promote his memoir, Spare, this month, Meghan has remained below the radar – and sent a clear message: This is Harry’s project, not mine …
While the Duchess has backed her husband to the hilt over this deeply personal outpouring, she was not quite the driving force behind the project that many have assumed.
Sources suggest that media-savvy Meghan was slightly more circumspect about the concept of a memoir and may have raised gentle concerns about whether it was the right move.
A January 23 article in the New York Post reported on the article:
Prince Harry’s wife Meghan Markle had previously expressed worries that his recent bombshell memoir “Spare” could ruffle the wrong feathers.
The former actress, 41, had raised “gentle concerns” about the book, wondering if it was the “right move,” sources recently told the Telegraph.
Meanwhile, on Saturday, January 21, The Express reported ‘Royal Family news: Palace have “pulled a blinder” as Harry and Meghan “plan” destroyed’:
The Royal Family have “pulled a blinder” by not publicly responding to the recent bombshell claims from Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, with an expert destroying the Sussex’s “ill-conceived game plan” …
More than a week after Harry’s book was released, both Buckingham Palace and Kensington Palace have yet to make any comment on the claimes made by the prince.
Edward Coram-James, a PR, reputation and crisis management expert and CEO of Go Up, claimed this shows the Royal Family had a strong “game plan” in place and were prepared for any such accusations, while blasting Harry and Meghan’s strategy as “ill-conceived”.
He told Express.co.uk: “What should the Royal Family do in response to these claims? In a word: nothing. They have pulled a blinder.
“The biggest mistake that they could make would be to respond to any of the allegations. They are simply not serious enough allegations to warrant them breaching their long held code of silence.
“Breaching that silence will imply guilt. Remaining silent gives an air of maturity and remaining above the fray.
“The Royal family have had a game plan and, unlike the Sussexes, whose game plan has appeared ill-conceived and often strayed from, the royals have toed the line throughout.”
Mr Coram-James poured cold water over the accusations made by Harry in his book, adding the Royal Family have only taken a “mild bruising” and “never came close to being on the receiving end of any knock out blows”.
He continued: “The Royal Family know that it will all blow over soon enough, as the news cycle moves on and today’s news becomes old hat.
A scathing, painfully accurate Spare review
My reader Katherine sent in two articles from Dominic Green about Spare. Thank you, Katherine!
These are the best yet.
‘The Tragedy of Prince Harry’ is Dominic Green’s scathing, painfully accurate review of the book for The Washington Free Beacon. I cannot commend it more highly to my readers. It’s long and captivating from the start.
As such, I will excerpt it as briefly as possible:
This is not Prince Harry’s autobiography. It is a biography of a character called “Prince Harry,” assembled from conversations with the real Harry by a ghostwriter, J.R. Moehringer. It is to autobiography as one of those Philip Roth novels where the main character is called “Philip Roth” are to fiction, only less tedious. It is fascinating in its way, though not in the way the real Harry intends. It is a collaboration between two unequal partners, one an accomplished ventriloquist, the other believing that he has finally found his voice.
Harry recorded the audiobook, so he knows exactly what is in Spare. He wants us to know that animals give him spirit messages from the beyond. These are usually sent by his late mother Diana, Princess of Wales, who died violently in 1996, when Harry was 12 and his older brother William was 15. The messages begin when Harry is 14. He and William are on safari in Botswana, eating dinner in their tent, when a leopard appears. “Everyone froze,” Harry says. “Except me.”
“I took a step towards it. … I was thinking about Mummy. That leopard was clearly a sign from her, a messenger she’d sent to say, ‘All is well. And all will be well.'”
The leopard lied. Harry is not well. He and William are traumatized by Diana’s death. Their father, now Charles III, struggles to comfort them, and sends them to boarding school. Harry refuses to believe that Diana is dead. He tells himself that she is hiding in a Swiss chalet, and she comes to him in his dreams. Soon, Harry is binge-drinking and smoking weed. Smoking a fat one with his mates in a bathroom at Eton, perhaps Britain’s top boarding school, Harry looks out on the moonlit grounds and meets his spirit animal …
Green provides the passage from Spare, which involves a fox. Harry sees it as a portent some years later:
In 2008, more than a decade later, Captain Harry Wales, now serving as a gunner on an Apache helicopter in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, is camped for the night, drinking hot chocolate and watching the radio. Around one in the morning, a flurry of messages about “Red Fox” come through …
Green gives us the relevant paragraphs then continues:
An Australian magazine had got hold of the story that Harry was in Helmand. He was a target for the Taliban, so his superiors decided to extract him, for his own safety and that of his fellow soldiers. At 24, his active military career was over. The Army made the “spare” a leader, and valued his talents. It gave him a purpose for the first time, and kept him busy enough to forget his sorrows.
The ensuing years see Harry floundering:
Nearly a decade will pass until he meets Meghan Markle in 2016. These are the lost years. The spirit animals fall silent, and Harry self-medicates. He drinks and smokes weed every day. He does coke, magic mushrooms, ayahuasca, and LSD in an effort to lift the veil of reality and stroke the lost leopard. He falls out of night clubs, too drunk to walk. He picks fights with photographers and his own bodyguard. He has panic attacks whenever he meets the public. He stays in Courteney Cox’s house when she is away, drinks loads of tequila, takes loads of mushrooms, and hallucinates that her toilet is speaking to him.
Harry does not explain why Courteney Cox’s talking toilet was a hallucination, but the spirit animals are real. At this point in his life, he cannot explain anything to himself. He is so overwhelmed with loss and grief that he cannot recall his mother. He is trapped in a “red mist,” a rage that he directs at his feeble father Charles, his scheming stepmother Camilla, his cold, conformist brother William, and above all at the British press, which he blames for his mother’s death.
Diana is a leopard, Harry is a fox. Charles is a cowardly lion. William has surrendered his “autonomy,” so he doesn’t get an animal at all. Kate is the bitch who takes William away from Harry. Alone, he unravels further. By 2013, he cannot control his panic attacks and agoraphobia.
Harry is tormented by the death of his mother, which seems to dictate his reality.
Green tells us the truth about Diana, a name that means ‘huntress’, yet the huntress turned into the hunted:
After divorcing Charles and leaving the royal security envelope, Diana fell in love with an Egyptian playboy, Dodi al-Fayed. It was a Fayed chauffeur who crashed that car in Paris, by speeding downhill into the underpass so fast that the Mercedes limo took off, hit one side of the underpass, then ricocheted across into a concrete pillar. Three of the four passengers died. The survivor was the bodyguard who, being a mere mortal, had worn his seatbelt.
Harry cannot name al-Fayed; he calls him “Mummy’s friend.” He does not mention that Diana dumped William and Harry in Scotland with the grandparents, so she could pursue her summer romance with Dodi. Nor does he mention Mummy’s earlier lover, Dr. Hasnat Khan, whom she smuggled into the Kensington Palace apartment she shared with William and Harry. Like Oedipus, Harry is blind to Mummy’s true nature. Diana manipulated the press, too. Before she was taken from Harry, she abandoned him.
Princess Diana was hunted by the jackals, but the Diana she was named for, the Greek goddess, was the huntress. She pursued fame in revenge for Charles’s faithlessness, staging teary confessionals for the cameras and driving the pack of paps at him and his family. Charles retaliated with his own staged confessions. Harry now retaliates with his. The Windsors survived Edward VIII’s dalliances with Wallis Simpson and Hitler. They survived Charles and Diana’s war for public sympathy. They will survive Harry’s assault, too. But will he?
Harry is sure that Meghan never ‘googled’ him and that it was just a sublime coincidence that she wore his mother’s favourite perfume, but Green reminds us of the facts:
Meghan’s childhood friend insists that Meghan was an avid reader of royal biographies, especially about Diana. Meghan was photographed outside Buckingham Palace when she visited London as a teenager. When William married Kate, Meghan blogged about the “pomp and circumstance surrounding the Royal Wedding,” and the “endless conversations about Princess Kate.”
A 2014 photo shows Meghan, sitting in an airport with her laptop, reading about Elizabeth II. In Tom Bower’s recent book Revenge, Meghan’s former business adviser Gina Nelthorpe-Cowne attests that Meghan told her, “I’ve googled Harry. I’ve gone deeply into his life.” Harry tells us that he googles Meghan as he falls in love, but he insists that she, like Diana, is entering the royal circus as a naif. His first “marathon” Instagram session with her happens to fall on what would have been Diana’s 55th birthday. Who is the naif here?
Harry has followed in his mother’s sad footsteps:
Harry and Meghan flee from Britain because they believe that his family is colluding with the press against them …
For the first time, Harry must fend for himself. Like Diana, he has left the royals’ state-funded and highly professional security envelope …
When their children are born, Diana is in the room too. At night, when Meghan and the kids are asleep, Harry slips out and gets high on his own. The clear night sky over Montecito reminds him of the stars over Africa. The Red Fox communes with the spirit of the leopard, but he is never safe. There is no clarity in this freedom. There is no real guidance, either. Meghan, his savior, is pushing him back into the limelight.
Harry must fund his family’s security or risk bringing Diana’s fate upon Meghan and his children. The only way to save them is to sacrifice himself: to sell his story, to seek out the hated camera, to sit with the hated journalists, to dissolve himself in the flashbulbs, to be lost forever in their refractions, and join his mother. “Keeping people tuned to the show, that was the thing.”
Like Hamlet, Harry has now hoist himself on his own petard, the hot wind of his rage and resentment. Like Hamlet, he will fall on his own poisoned sword. Harry, his father’s dim, damaged, delusional, doomed “darling boy,” has sold his family and his soul. Meghan and Moehringer have served him on a platter, like a roast swan at a royal banquet. There is no return after this, only the final act of the tragedy.
On January 19, the Wall Street Journal published Green’s article about Harry’s personal beliefs and how they tie in with those of his contemporaries with regard to Christianity: ‘Prince Harry’s Pagan Progress’.
This, too, is excellent. Excerpts follow:
Harry’s father, King Charles III, may be supreme governor of the Church of England, but when it comes to the inner life, Harry, who was born in 1984, is a typical millennial. Pew Research reported in 2010 that Americans 18 to 29 were “considerably less religious than older Americans.” Twenty-six percent of millennials said they had no religious affiliation, and they were also less likely to pray every day than members of Generation X (41% vs. 54%). Yet the percentage of millennials claiming “absolute certainty” in God’s existence (53%) wasn’t far off the figures for baby boomers (59%) and Generation X (55%) when they were young.
For Harry’s grandmother Elizabeth II, personal faith was indistinguishable from her constitutional duty. King Charles describes himself as a “committed Anglican Christian,” and Harry says he set a “deeply religious” example and “prayed every night.” Harry attended church regularly as a child, obligatory given the Windsor family’s alliance with the church.
Harry was 12 when his mother died in a car crash in Paris. The Christian rites at her funeral in Westminster Abbey couldn’t console him. His only regular contact with the Bible came when a teacher, punishing teenage misdemeanors, delivered “a tremendous clout, always with a copy of the New English Bible.” This, Harry writes, “made me feel bad about myself, bad about the teacher, and bad about the Bible.”
Instead, Harry turned to the animal world:
At around 15, Harry experienced a ritual induction into manhood. Guided by Sandy, a family retainer, he shot a stag. Sandy slit the dying animal’s throat and belly and told Harry to kneel. “I thought we were going to pray,” the prince writes. Instead, Sandy pushed Harry’s head inside the carcass and held it there. “After a minute I couldn’t smell anything, because I couldn’t breathe. My nose and mouth were full of blood, guts, and a deep, upsetting warmth.”
“So this,” Harry tells himself, “is death.” Yet he’s ecstatic. “I wasn’t religious,” Harry writes, “but this ‘blood facial’ was, to me, baptismal.” Finally, he has lived the “virtues” that had been “preached” to him since childhood. Culling the herd is being “good to Nature” and “good to the community.” Managing nature is “a form of worship,” and environmentalism is “a kind of religion” for his father. For the first time Harry feels “close to God.”
This pagan rebirth carries strong symbolic overtones for Harry. Monarchy is a survival from the earliest times. So is the hunt, with its symbolic echoes of religion’s roots in animal sacrifice and seasonal rites. The Windsors live in urban captivity, but their spiritual home is the Scottish Highlands, where the stag is the monarch of the glen. Diana shared her name with the Greek goddess of the hunt—and Harry writes that she was “hunted” to her death, the cameras still “shooting, shooting, shooting” as she lay trapped in the wreckage.
Green concludes:
Harry’s narrative of resurrection bears formal resemblance to the Gospels, but its content owes more to Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell and the Californian gospel of self-care. His neopagan progress is that of many millennials—especially those who, like Harry, are white men with no college education. By 2017, Pew found that 38% of Americans 30 to 49 were “spiritual but not religious.” Sixty-seven percent of the unchurched were “absolutely certain” of God’s existence, and 24% “fairly certain.” Fifty-seven percent prayed “at least daily,” but 76% “never” participated in group study or prayer. Like Harry, they are solitary and syncretic, inward travelers with no direction home.
‘Faustian bargain’
On January 9, UnHerd posted an article about Spare: ‘Prince Harry’s Faustian Bargain’.
Its author, Darran Anderson, says:
… The most telling line, which reaches towards the heart of the matter, comes back to the Faustian nature of fame and particularly the media’s gaze and how that can distort, “After many, many years of lies being told about me and my family, there comes a point where, going back to the relationship between, certain members of the family and the tabloid press, those certain members have decided to get in the bed with the devil” … Again and again, in his recollections in interviews and writing, Prince Harry comes back to the media as a baleful destructive force in his life …
What is particularly illustrative and sympathetic about Prince Harry’s relationship with fame is that it was not chosen. In the traditional Faustian transaction, the would-be genius or celebrity sells their soul, knowing that the cost is damnation and believing that the gains will be worth it. With the royals, fame is hereditary, which is as much of a curse as a blessing. The transaction is one-sided. No deal is made and yet the individual assumes precisely the same debt. In a world, even a country, where children are born into horrendous poverty and deprivation, it’s difficult to have sympathy for someone born into immense privilege. Yet it is warranted, given that child we watched walking along forlorn at his mother’s funeral did not choose any of this.
The problem is that Prince Harry is now a man and no longer a lost boy. Though he has chosen an arguably noble route of walking away from an environment that had shunned him, and he has the right to speak his mind and tell his own story, he has not walked away from fame. Sympathy, like any resource, is finite …
It is even more understandable to wish to escape the glare of the lens that played a part in the death of a beloved parent. Having chosen Meghan and America, Prince Harry had the chance to transcend fame and to effectively defeat the presence that has seemingly haunted his life. He could go semi-privately into any number of ventures. Harry was not, after all, a signatory to the Faustian pact. One of the most tragic aspects to what has been unfolding is not just the painful reality of a family schism, but rather that at the brink of escape, Harry decided to return to the table to sign the contract.
… The point where sympathy dissipates is with this issue of fame, the courting of it rather than the walking away. This is where the public’s role in the Faustian bargain comes in. This is what differentiates celebrities from the rest of us, the point of departure, and the judgement can and may well be merciless. By aiming for the echo chamber of the terminally online and the patronage of the American establishment, the wider sympathy is lost. It is especially frustrating as the prince had a chance to get out.
Harry’s case is not helped by a mixed tone of grievance and sanctimony. One moment, he is referring to the killing of Afghan militants as a game of chess, the next he is engaging in flagellation about his previous lack of social consciousness. At its worst, it seems distasteful and condescending, the opposite of a spiritual confessional. It undoes the undoubtedly brave work of speaking about trauma, autonomy, or even his right to speak. As George Orwell put it, “Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful”, but here even the disgrace feels performative. It feels grubby and out of touch, both too intimate and too remote. It feels, in other words, like fame …
Summer of 2019: too much PDA
Returning to the summer of 2019, where I left off, articles were circulating about the inability of the couple to keep their hands off each other in public.
On August 11 that year, The Sun reported:
MEGHAN Markle and Prince Harry’s friends have “stopped inviting” the couple to dinner parties because they “frown upon their PDAs”, insiders have claimed.
According to the Mail on Sunday, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex make a point of sitting together at events – even if their host has seated them separately.
Meghan’s excuse was that she finds dinner party etiquette:
too “exclusive” and “traditional”.
Tough. You sit where your hosts seat you. In Britain, it often means splitting up couples at table to enliven conversation. No one with any manners minds that.
Harry’s friends found his wife’s American attitudes tiresome:
Along with ignoring the seating plans, insiders have also claimed that the Duchess is openly affectionate with her husband on these occasions which causes Harry’s friends to “roll their eyes” at her “American ways”.
What’s more, Harry’s inner circle has “stopped inviting her to dinner” over the “frowned upon” PDAs (public displays of affection) at the dinner table.
The Sun lays out dinner party etiquette for the uninitated. This would be useful for the Duchess:
While it might not seem like THAT big a deal to sit next to your partner at a party, the high society occasions Meghan and Harry have been attending ask guests to follow the three rules of “placement”.
To avoid sounding too “common” or American, the first rule is that “placement” must be pronounced the French way which involves emphasising each of the three syllables.
The second rule dictates that couples should NOT sit together in case any affectionate behaviour puts others off their meal.
And in order to truly grasp the rules of “placement”, guests must always sit where they have been asked to achieve the perfect, balanced high society table.
‘Snubbing protocol’
And there was more.
Meghan wanted to hold Harry’s hand when it was clearly not the done thing:
Shortly after she married into the Royal Family last year, Prince Harry refused to hold Meghan’s hand at a royal event out of respect for The Queen.
Because she wore jeans to Wimbledon in 2019, she could not enter the Royal Box:
An insider claimed Meghan was a “nightmare” during the visit when her security guards infamously BANNED guests from taking photos of her and her casual attire meant she wasn’t allowed to watch the action from the Royal Box.
They told The Times: “They couldn’t invite her into the Royal Box because she was wearing jeans.”
On August 19, the Mail reported on what the editor of Majesty, Ingrid Seward, had to say about the Sussexes’ protocol breaches:
Ingrid Seward, editor of Majesty magazine, suggested that the Sussexes’ attempts to move away from tradition might ‘bother’ the Duke of Cambridge, 35.
Appearing on Saturday’s Channel 5’s documentary William & Harry: Princes At War?, Ingrid suggested that Harry and Meghan had ‘snubbed protocol’ in a way that was unexpected from royals.
She said: ‘I would think it might bother William a little bit, because he might see the way that Harry and Meghan do things as being detrimental to the business of the monarchy as a whole.’
The couple have faced a growing backlash over the summer over their privacy demands, including holding a top secret christening for son Archie and refusing to tell the public who his godparents are …
Critics have hit out at Meghan recently for ‘considering herself more of an A-lister than a member of the royal family’, after she selected a handful of celebrity friends for the cover of Vogue.
Speaking about Harry and Meghan ‘snubbing protocol’, Ingrid said: ‘It wasn’t done in a very royal way, or the way we’d come to expect.’
The ‘eco-lecturers’ and their private jet flights
Between August and September 2019, the Sussexes took several trips on private jets.
There is nothing wrong with that other than Prince Harry used one of those flights to deliver a lecture in Italy on how everyone had to cut back on air travel in order to save the environment.
On August 15, The Sun reported on Piers Morgan’s disgust at the couple’s hypocrisy. At the time, he was still co-presenting Good Morning Britain. The British public were also disgusted:
PIERS Morgan has criticised Meghan Markle and Prince Harry after they took a private jet to Ibiza for a six day break – despite the Duke warning of the “terrifying” effects of climate change.
The GMB presenter, who has previously criticised the couple, took to Twitter following the news where he made a dig at the Sussexes.
Sharing an article about their trip, he wrote: “Saving the planet, one private jet at a time.”
Many were in agreement with Piers, dubbing the “eco-warrior” couple hypocrites following the holiday.
One wrote: “You’re absolutely correct, virtue signalling and full hypocrisy!!”
Another agreed adding: “Utterly ludicrous! If you’re going to take private jets, fine but then don’t preach about climate change. Hopeless!” …
According to local reports Harry and Meghan flew to Ibiza with their son Archie Harrison to celebrate her 38th birthday on August 4.
The jet created seven times more C02 per person than any one of nine daily scheduled flights from London to the Spanish holiday isle.
Harry and Meghan, who took baby son Archie, landed in Ibiza on Tuesday last week – along with publicly-funded Met Police protection officers.
Five Spanish security officers then whisked them to their secluded luxury private villa.
The family returned to the UK on Monday.
It was the second time that the prince had used a private jet in two weeks after he flew to Sicily to attend the Google Camp to deliver a “barefoot speech” on saving the environment the week before.
But Harry has been accused of hypocrisy over his use of private jets following his speeches urging everyone to “take action” on climate change.
In a post on his SussexRoyal Instagram site in July, he wrote: “With nearly 7.7 billion people inhabiting this Earth, every choice, every footprint, every action makes a difference.”
… Buckingham Palace refused to comment on the Ibiza trip.
On August 19, the Mail reported on another private jet trip, to Nice:
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex were embroiled in another hypocrisy row today after being pictured leaving the south of France over the weekend in a fourth trip by private jet in just 11 days.
Prince Harry and Meghan, who have been outspoken on environmental issues in recent months, generated an estimated seven times the emissions per person compared to a commercial flight when flying home from Nice.
Photographs of the royal couple and three-month-old Archie showed the family stepping on board the Cessna 680 Citation Sovereign jet on Saturday at about 3pm local time, having arrived in France three days earlier.
Royal experts said the British public do not want to be ‘lectured on climate change by those who don’t do follow their own advice’, while MPs said the trips do not ‘fit with their public image’ they project as eco-warriors.
The couple are believed to have visited the £15million palatial home of Castel Mont-Alban owned by Sir Elton John and his husband David Furnish overlooking the Promenade des Anglais during their holiday to the French Riviera.
The trip to Nice came shortly after Harry and Meghan, who married in May last year, had returned by private jet to the UK from Ibiza after a six-night break on the Spanish island to mark the Duchess’s 38th birthday.
Veteran royal watcher Phil Dampier gave his views about the anger of Britons about the flights and the Sussexes’ behaviour as a whole:
They are not unique – other royals have taken private jets, but they have been criticised over the years as well.
I certainly don’t believe they are getting a bad press because the British public are racist.
It is simply that people don’t like to be lectured on climate change by those who don’t do follow their own advice.
Some families slave away all year to afford one nice holiday and they shouldn’t be made to feel guilty about harming the planet when Harry and Meghan are swanning about in luxury.
It’s really sad to see all the goodwill that people had towards this couple disappear in such a short space of time.
They really need to understand quickly the damage they are doing and take steps to turn it around.
They could start by taking on some of the 1500 patronages of the Queen and Prince Philip, and get out there and do some run-of-the-mill royal jobs and shake a few hands.
Meghan gives the impression she wants to live like a Hollywood star protected by publicists, agents and lawyers and that’s not how the royal family works.
It only survives because there is give and take and the public- who are paying for it – want it to succeed.
If they lose the public’s support they are in trouble.
Sir Elton John stepped in to stop the turbulence, as it were.
The Mail reported:
Sir Elton John today confirmed he had paid for the Duke and Duchess of Sussex to fly to and from his £15million mansion in Nice by private jet for a holiday ‘inside the safety and tranquillity of our home’.
The 72-year-old singer claimed he had ensured Prince Harry and Meghan’s flights to and from the French Riviera last week were carbon neutral by making the ‘appropriate contribution’ to a carbon footprint fund.
That angered people all the more. Who among us can do that?
More flights followed until early September.
The Africa tour
That autumn, the Sussexes toured southern Africa, an official trip of goodwill towards the Commonwealth countries.
They left behind strained relations with their Palace staff.
Even Africa, a place the Queen thought the couple would enjoy, considering Harry’s Sentebale charity was there, could not bring them happiness or escape:
While there, they gave an interview to ITV’s Tom Bradby, who also interviewed Harry about Spare in January 2023. Where they are concerned, Bradby is more a friend than an objective reporter.
The interview with Bradby aired in October 2019, while the then-Duke and Duchess of Cambridge were touring Pakistan, another initiative to show goodwill towards the Commonwealth.
Valentine Low, author of 2022’s Courtiers, wrote:
The first real intimation the public had that all was not well in Meghan’s world came in October 2019, when ITV released a trailer for its documentary, Harry & Meghan: an African Journey. As Meghan spoke to Tom Bradby in a garden in Johannesburg, she spoke about how she had struggled with life in the spotlight as a newlywed and as a new mother. Almost as if she were trying to hold back tears, she said she had found it hard and added, “And also, thank you for asking, because not many people have asked if I’m OK. But it’s a very real thing to be going through behind the scenes.”
The trailer came out while William and Kate were on a tour of Pakistan. The resulting coverage inevitably overshadowed reporting of the last day of the Cambridges’ tour. The Cambridge team was not happy and saw it as a deliberate attempt to knock the Cambridges out of the headlines. Relations between the two households became quite tense.
When the documentary came out, it also showed how far Harry and William had drifted apart. Asked by Bradby about the rift between him and William, Harry chose not to deny it, but said instead, “We are certainly on different paths at the moment, but I will always be there for him, as I know he will always be there for me.”
William, back home after the Pakistan tour, appears to have been taken aback at such a stark portrayal of his brother and sister-in-law’s unhappiness. He realised they were in crisis. The day after the documentary aired, William whatsapped his brother to ask if he could come and see him. This put Harry and Meghan into a spin. What should they do? Initially, Harry was in favour. Then he spoke to his brother again and asked him who he would tell. William explained that he would have to clear his schedule, which would mean telling his private secretary. At that point, Harry said don’t come. He was so concerned that William’s team would leak the visit to the press that he would rather they did not come than risk it getting into the papers. It highlighted once again the dysfunction at the heart of so many royal relationships and that members of the royal family so rarely pick up the phone and speak to each other directly.
The final months
The Times featured several excerpts from Valentine Low’s Courtiers, one of which explained the time before the African tour through to the beginning of 2020:
As one senior source put it, when they gave an interview in the autumn to Tom Bradby of ITV News in South Africa “they had made it clear that they were finding it very difficult. They were anxious and excited to chart their own course, knowing that they had more flexibility as they were not in the line of succession.”
Moves were already afoot to create their own website with the help of the American PR company Sunshine Sachs. The site was originally intended to promote their charitable foundation, but later to explain — when the time came — how they planned to branch out on their own.
As they took an extended break with their son, Archie, now eight months, in Canada, the negotiations over their plans began to take shape. Harry originally contacted the Prince of Wales just before Christmas about spending more time in North America but was told he needed to come up with a thought-out plan, the London Evening Standard reported. When he sent a draft proposal to Prince Charles early in the new year he was told more time was needed to think through the complex implications, particularly over funding.
A source told The Times: “It reached an impasse where his father said, ‘We need to have these conversations in person. This is not something we can negotiate over email.’”
That much was agreed, but Harry also wanted to talk to his grandmother.
“He wanted to go and see the Queen,” a source said. “He has been communicating with her on the phone throughout. He wanted to see her, not to negotiate with her but to talk to her grandson to granny, to say, ‘This is how we have come to this.’” It was intended to be a gesture of respect, rather than an attempt to open negotiations with her.
He called her suggesting that he visit her at Sandringham when he returned home. “She says, ‘Yes, love to see you, come and see me,’” the source said.
Then came what has been described as a “classic” move from the Palace.
“A message was conveyed: ‘Oh, sorry, misunderstanding, she might have said she was available, but actually she is not available.’” Harry, it seemed, had fallen victim to family politics. The source said this was, in part, because the family were worried that he would use anything she said in their meeting as a negotiating tactic. Nothing, apparently, could have been further from the truth. But the result was that Harry was angry and upset at the rebuff.
By the time he and Meghan were back home, their press team was aware that The Sun was on to a story about their plans to spend more time in Canada. It prompted anxious negotiations between the Sussexes and the rest of the family about how to proceed. Should they sweat it out and say nothing, in the knowledge that such delicate negotiations are best conducted out of the public eye? Or should they release a statement and thereby try to set the agenda? The matter was taken out of their hands when the story appeared in Wednesday’s paper under the headline “We’re orf again”.
Never fans of the tabloid press, Harry and Meghan were incandescent. “They were so angry,” said the source.
The final instalment will come tomorrow.
What a sad story. It seems to get more desperate by the day and will not end well.
Anyone who has missed the previous entries in the series of former Health Secretary Matt Hancock, now a backbench MP with the Conservative whip withdrawn, can catch up on Parts 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5.
I left off on Friday, June 25, 2021, with Dominic Cummings’s Substack post on Hancock’s and Boris Johnson’s handling of the pandemic.
However, the big news that day was The Sun‘s front page — a ‘world exclusive’ — which had a large photo of Hancock handling a part of his assistant’s anatomy. A security camera captured the image a few weeks before, when social distancing was still in place:
It was bad enough, as I wrote, that he lost all credibility with the Queen the day before when she aired her views to Boris during their weekly meeting.
But The Sun‘s scoop surely meant that Hancock’s dictatorial time was up. And, lo, so it was:
UK coronavirus news: Matt Hancock’s final 48 hours as Health Secretary (June 25-27)
That post included these tweets, the first about his marital situation …
… and the second and third featuring polls saying that Britons wanted him gone, especially under those circumstances:
It was a wonderful start to the weekend.
Matt Hancock’s side of the story
In the final instalment of Hancock’s Pandemic Diaries that the Mail published, he tells his side of the story. Emphases mine below.
Friday, June 25:
The Sun published the story at 2am as a ‘world exclusive’. The picture was a grainy CCTV image of me and Gina embracing in my departmental office.
It was immediately obvious that the story would be huge.
I knew I had to get out of London, and my wonderful driver Mark came to pick me up very early and take me to stay discreetly in the countryside.
At about 8am, a welcome call from No 10: Dan Rosenfield [chief of staff] to say they’d got my back. He offered any support we might need, including sending a Conservative Party press officer to my house.
By 9am I’d had half a dozen sympathetic messages from ministerial colleagues: a terrible sign. They knew that I was in deep trouble.
Nadhim [Zahawi, Minister for vaccine deployment] sent me a piece of advice ‘from a brother’, which sounded very much like an appeal not to resign.
Meanwhile, I went back over all our movements and tried to think of any other rules we might be accused of breaking. Other than the one-metre-plus rule, I couldn’t think of any. ‘Should I do a fast apology for letting everyone down/breaching guidance?’ I asked.
Gina thought it was a good idea, so Damon [Poole, media adviser] began crafting a short statement. I tried to focus on the words, but my head was spinning. The final version of the statement, which went out at lunchtime, accepted that I breached social-distancing guidance and said I was still focused on working to get the country out of the pandemic. I hoped it would quiet the furore.
Yet the story continued to rage: on all the news websites, on the BBC, on Twitter and on just about every other conceivable news outlet.
By mid-afternoon, there were still suggestions that we’d broken the law. It was categorically untrue, and Damon thought we needed to brief harder or put out another line. ‘What’s wrong with ‘No laws were broken’?’ I suggested.
Round and round in circles we went, trying to find the right words. Damon’s mobile phone was practically melting, and I was more stressed than I have ever been in my entire life.
All afternoon, the ‘what, when, where, who, why, how much?’ questions continued. Journalists began suggesting I might have broken the Ministerial Code. I hadn’t, but I could see the way this was going.
My local constituency association in Suffolk was wonderfully supportive. Allan [Nixon, special adviser] worked the phones, trying to get MPs to say something helpful.
My spirits lifted a little when William Hague [former Tory leader] publicly declared that I shouldn’t resign. Not for long, though: by late afternoon it was clear tomorrow’s papers will be hideous.
Saturday, June 26:
Privately, I was still getting positive messages from colleagues. Publicly, few were willing to defend me. Politically, I was increasingly isolated. I felt desperate for my family, my children and Gina’s family and her children, and powerless to protect them. Worse was the knowledge that Gina and I had brought all this on them.
Gina’s feelings of shame and guilt were nearly overpowering her. The jokes and cartoons on social media were excruciating. We were being publicly humiliated, again and again.
While close friends and family were amazing, I also had messages from friends and colleagues who had had terrible lockdown experiences and were very upset. Their disappointment in me – and their sense of betrayal – was agonising.
It is all my fault, of course. I knew I had to take responsibility. I knew in my heart that I had to resign.
I went to Chequers to see the PM. I explained that I had been thinking about what had happened and how it had made people feel – and that my mind was made up. The damage to my family and to the Government was too great.
I told Boris I had to resign.
He was regretful but didn’t argue. We sat on the patio and talked about what this would mean for the management of the rest of the pandemic.
An exchange of letters was prepared, offering and accepting my resignation, and we each edited our letters. We had to decide how to make the announcement, what to say and how.
I must have shot a thousand videos over the course of the pandemic, levelling with the public and thanking the NHS for their dedication. This would be the last.
In the end, the great machinery of the State was nowhere. It was just me and the PM fumbling around with an iPhone. He stood on the grass, holding the phone while I said my piece. It took a few goes to get it right.
He nodded sympathetic encouragement so much throughout the first take that the camera waved up and down. In the end it wasn’t perfect, but I was beyond caring: I had to get it out.
Now messages of sympathy and support flooded in: from my team, the Prof [Chris Whitty, the Government’s Chief Medical Officer], JVT [Jonathan Van-Tam, the Deputy Chief Medical Officer], Pascal [Soriot, head of AstraZeneca] – and just about everyone else who worked so hard alongside us to save lives.
I’m incredibly grateful to all my team, especially my spads [special advisers] and private office, for going above and beyond in supporting me in what is such a difficult time for them, too.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I told them all. ‘I mean, the honest truth is I made a mistake due to love and it doesn’t matter that it was only guidance. I should not have broken advice that I myself signed off.’
This evening Jamie N-G [Njoku-Goodwin, former spad] whose endless advice – offered long after he stopped working for me – has been so valuable throughout the pandemic, messaged to say I’d done the right thing.
‘There is so much you have done that you should be incredibly proud of. There are people alive today who wouldn’t be if you hadn’t made the decisions you did,’ he said.
‘I love her. That’s what screwed my judgment,’ I replied wretchedly. ‘Love does that to us all. I hope you can both be happy,’ he said.
‘Of that I have no doubt,’ I replied.
As for Boris – well, if anyone knows how to survive a catastrophic political and personal mistake, it’s him.
‘Time to dive beneath the ice cap,’ was his advice.
Here’s the awkward video from Sky News:
That concludes the Mail‘s excerpts from Pandemic Diaries. The paper posted the following (emphasis in the original):
Matt Hancock’s book sale royalties will be donated to NHS Charities and good causes relating to dyslexia.
Hancock is a dyslexic and had special tutoring to enable him to pursue his studies at Oxford University.
The book is available now. Someone on social media repositioned it at a bookshop in the Crime section:
However, as my post on his last 48 hours as Health Secretary pointed out, Hancock told us in April 2020 that social distancing was more than guidance, it was an ‘instruction’. I’d included this tweet as proof:
In the days that followed, Sajid Javid — Boris’s first Chancellor — became our new Health Secretary. Questions whirled about the camera, security breaches and ministerial code breaches. Oliver Tress is the name Hancock’s girlfriend’s husband. He owns the Oliver Bonas chain of shops:
UK news: Sajid Javid’s return to Cabinet as Health Secretary (June 27-28)
UK coronavirus news: will Matt Hancock be investigated? (June 28; Oliver Tress, restriction-free Wimbledon video)
MPs worried about Matt Hancock’s security camera (June 28)
By now, most Britons know that Hancock met his girlfriend when they were undergraduates at Oxford. They both worked at the student radio station. Recollections from their contemporaries differ as to whether Hancock was part of the in crowd or whether he was a geek on its periphery.
Sky News’s Beth Rigby put that period of history in perspective for us:
On June 26, 2021, The Telegraph explained how the woman got involved in Hancock’s parliamentary career:
Gina Coladangelo started work for Matt Hancock during his short-lived Conservative Party leadership campaign in 2019, it has emerged.
Sources said Ms Coladangelo provided unpaid advice on the Health Secretary’s bid to replace Theresa May.
The work coincided with Mr Hancock sponsoring a parliamentary pass at the same time for his longtime friend, who has worked as communications director of Oliver Bonas, the homeware store, since 2014.
Mr Hancock declared his candidacy during a broadcast interview on May 25 2019, saying “we need a leader for the future, not just now”.
He quit the race on June 14 2019 – a day after coming sixth in the first ballot of Conservative MPs.
Ms Coladangelo was registered as holding a pass sponsored by Mr Hancock under her married name, Gina Tress, from June 2019.
Sources suggested she then started providing unpaid advice to Mr Hancock during the Covid-19 pandemic, before she was hired as a non-executive director at the Department of Health in September.
Her non-executive directorship also raised eyebrows. Who appointed her and how?
Tatler‘s profile of Hancock, published on June 28, told us:
… Both Hancock and Coladangelo, who were contemporaries at Oxford, have three children …
But, what of this relatively youthful minister? In 2014, he was touted as a junior minister with the skills ‘to reach the top’. Certainly, academically, his results are a tour de force of excellence, a first at Exeter College, Oxford, in what many consider a politician’s ‘rite of passage’, Politics, Philosophy and Economics (PPE). He worked briefly for a Tory backbench MP before breaking loose as an economist at the Bank of England specialising in the sterling money markets and on housing, before being sent to do a masters at Cambridge. On return, he was plucked out by George Osborne (in 2005) to join the Conservative economics team, later becoming the future chancellor’s chief of staff, and a bonafide ‘high-flyer’.
It was in 2010 that he became an MP for West Suffolk, and today – or at least before the lockdown – he balanced his time between his weekday home in London and his abode in Little Thurlow, in his Newmarket constituency, at the weekends. He has admitted that the work-life balance can sometimes be a challenge, explaining in an interview with the Financial Times in 2014, ‘I pay a lot of attention to timetabling. Both my professional and social and family time gets booked up a long way in advance and then you have to be strict about it.’
Hancock married an osteopath, Martha Hoyer Millar, in 2006, and together they have three small children, a daughter and two sons as well as a dachshund called Hercules (which Hancock will occasionally document via his Instagram). With noble connections, Martha, a red head, is the granddaughter of Frederick Millar, 1st Baron Inchyra, a British diplomat who served as Ambassador to West Germany from 1955 to 1956. Baron Inchyra had four children, two sons and two daughters, their youngest, Dame Annabel Whitehead, was a Lady-in-Waiting to Princess Margaret and later to the Queen …
By his own admission, Hancock is fiercely competitive. He once, in 2012, trained as a jockey and won a race at the beating heart of British racing, Newmarket, in his constituency. Going the whole hog, he trained rigorously, shedding two stones and even seeking advice from champion jockey Frankie Dettori. He keeps it up; in December, 2019 he posted a video of himself galloping atop a racehorse on the Newmarket heath, summarising afterwards, ‘absolutely exhilarating, every single time’.
It’s been far from plain sailing for Hancock, he’s overcome his own difficulties. One being dyslexia. His political career apparently practically ended before it even started, when a simple spelling mistake relayed the dead opposite of what he was trying to communicate. As a young Tory campaigner in Guildford he wrote an election leaflet. Instead of saying that candidate Nick St Aubyn wanted to ‘unite’ the community during the 2001 election, a then 22-year-old Hancock wrote: ‘I want to untie the community’. The mistake was spotted after the leaflet had been printed and landed in 50,000 letterboxes. St Aubyn went on to lose the seat by 538 votes.
Hancock reportedly winces at the memory, but told the tale since he does not want other dyslexics growing up thinking they are ‘useless’ like he did. His wife, too, is dyslexic. He says he got on by focusing on numbers-based subjects, taking A Levels in maths, physics, computing and economics, but told the Telegraph, ‘I wish I had been diagnosed earlier’.
Sheer hypocrisy
On June 25, before he resigned, the media rightly began enumerating Hancock’s diktats and his own actions, proving the man’s hypocrisy.
… How has the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care managed to cling on this long in the first place? …
As the man in charge of England’s health system when the pandemic struck, he is accused of overseeing the disastrous discharge of Covid-positive hospital patients into care homes, mismanaging the supply of personal protective equipment, and the multi-billion pound failure that is NHS Test and Trace.
According to Mr Cummings, Mr Hancock “lied” to Mr Johnson and the public about much of this …
Mr Hancock strenuously denies much of this.
Nevertheless, it comes on top of allegations that he awarded a lucrative contract to supply the Government with tens of millions of Covid test vials to a former neighbour, who lacked experience producing medical supplies after he received a WhatsApp from him.
He also committed a “technical” breach of the ministerial code by failing to declare that a firm run by his sister, in which he has a 20 per cent stake, had been awarded an NHS contract …
The danger lies in the familiar territories of hypocrisy and the alleged “chumocracy” of the Johnson administration.
If Mr Hancock’s embrace of Ms Coladangelo contravened government guidelines, as he has now admitted it did, many will remember his reaction to last year’s Neil Ferguson scandal, where he suggested it could be a matter for the police, not to mention countless hugs with loved-ones missed over recent months.
Meanwhile, if evidence emerges suggesting that Ms Coladangelo was brought into the Government because of her personal relationship with Mr Hancock, rather than her expertise, the rap sheet all too quickly becomes too heavy to survive.
The Spectator‘s Steerpike, their gossip columnist, posted ‘Nine times Matt Hancock told us to obey the rules’, most of which follows (bold dates in the original):
From threatening to ban outdoor exercise and close the beaches to advising against sex outside ‘established’ relationships, Mr S presents his round-up of Hancock’s best/worst moments:
9 February 2021: Ten years in jail for Covid returnees
Hancock announced that people returning from holidays who conceal that they’ve been in a red list country would face a prison sentence of up to ten years …
1 February 2021 ‘Don’t even think about stretching Covid rules’
At another No. 10 press conference, Hancock gave an update on the South African variant in which he said that those living in postcodes affected by the mutation should ‘not even think about stretching the Covid rules.’
10 January 2021: Hancock claimed that flexing of rules ‘could be fatal’
The Health Secretary appeared on the Andrew Marr Show where he was asked about the police fining two women who went for a walk five miles from their homes. Hancock told Marr: ‘Every time you try to flex the rules that could be fatal’ and that staying at home is the ‘most important thing we can do collectively as a society.’
24 September 2020: Hancock warned people to ‘be sensible’ when having sex during lockdown
Asked about the government’s guidance that only ‘established’ couples should be having sex, Hancock told Sky News: ‘There have to be boundaries, to coin a phrase.’ He warned against casual sex, advising the public to stick to ‘well-established relationships’ and joking, ‘I know I am in an established relationship,’ with his wife …
5 July 2020: Hancock threatened to shut down non-compliant businesses
In an interview with Sky Hancock said: ‘We also have the authority to shut down a business if it doesn’t follow that [Covid] guidance.’ When asked by Sophy Ridge if he is ‘looking at shutting down businesses’ Hancock replied: ‘Yes and that’s happened, absolutely’. He added: ‘We’re not just asking nicely, we’re very clear to businesses that these are their responsibilities.’
25 June 2020: Hancock theatened to close the beaches
After sun lovers flocked to the seaside on Britain’s hottest day of the year, Hancock warned that he could close beaches …
5 April 2020: Hancock threatened to ban outdoor exercise
At the beginning of the first lockdown, Hancock criticised sunbathers and warned the government would ban outdoor exercise if people continue to ignore government advice. He said on Sky that those who flout the guidance were ‘putting others’ lives at risk and you are putting yourself in harm’s way’. He told Andrew Marr that same day: ‘I don’t want to have to take away exercise as a reason to leave home… if too many people are not following the rules.’ He added: ‘If you don’t want us to take the next step and ban exercise… then the message is very clear… you have to follow the rules.’
Sickening.
The Mail has a report with reactions from several journalists also calling out Hancock’s disgusting hypocrisy, well worth reading.
Questions, questions
Also on June 25, The Spectator‘s Isabel Hardman asked:
Why was it appropriate for Gina Coladangelo to have a parliamentary pass, to become an unpaid adviser at the department and then to receive the paid non-executive director post?
… the important matter here isn’t the affair: these things happen and they’re not normally anyone else’s business. But where it becomes other people’s business is when the affair is interlinked with government business and taxpayer’s money.
Then there’s the hypocrisy charge, not just from someone in a government that has restricted personal freedoms so much this past year, but from the very minister responsible for the lockdown legislation and guidance.
Questions about the camera and security were many.
At lunchtime that day, The Telegraph reported:
The Government Security Group, which is in charge of security at 800 buildings across Whitehall, has been asked to investigate, with Alex Chisholm, the Cabinet Office Permanent Secretary, expected to be in charge of an inquiry.
There have also been calls for MI5 to get involved in order to rule out any involvement from hostile foreign states.
Government insiders said it is “unheard of” for security cameras to be placed in the offices of Secretaries of State, raising questions about whether the footage of Mr Hancock was filmed on a pre-existing camera or could even have been filmed by a camera deliberately placed there to catch him out.
Day-to-day security at government buildings is typically contracted out to private firms, though the Department of Health and Social Care has yet to confirm if this was the case at their offices in London’s Victoria Street …
One source said: “There are an awful lot of questions that need answering. Lots of government buildings have cameras outside offices that film people going in and out, but I have never seen one inside a Secretary of State’s office. It’s unheard of.
“What was that camera doing there, was it even a CCTV camera, and did Matt Hancock know it was there?
“More importantly, who is it that has access to what is going on inside that office? We are talking about people being able to spy on a Secretary of State, so this is a serious breach of security, regardless of what you think of Matt Hancock’s behaviour” …
Among the questions the Government Security Group will have to answer is whether proper vetting was carried out of staff who have access to CCTV footage, and whether they have been required to sign the Official Secrets Act.
Breaches of the Official Secrets Act can carry a maximum punishment of 14 years imprisonment.
The paper had a follow-up article that evening:
The Telegraph understands Mr Hancock had no idea the camera existed when it captured him kissing adviser Gina Coladangelo …
It raises the possibility that the camera was deliberately placed by someone with access to his office with the intention of catching the pair cheating on their spouses and breaking Covid rules. It is the first time a Cabinet minister has been filmed in their own office without their knowledge.
In a further twist, the Department of Health and Social Care’s offices use CCTV cameras made by the Chinese company Hikvision, which is banned in the US because of national security concerns …
One theory being investigated is that the footage was filmed by someone on a mobile phone as it was being played on a CCTV screen, which could make it more difficult to prove who was responsible.
While the revelation could spell the end of Mr Hancock’s Cabinet career, the leak has also triggered a red alert in the Government over who could be spying on the country’s most senior ministers …
A source told The Sun that the pair had regularly been caught embracing and that their affair was an open secret among staff. The newspaper claimed the footage was released by a whistleblower disgusted that Mr Hancock was breaking Covid rules while telling people to obey them.
At the time, the country was in stage two of the lifting of lockdown, meaning hugging anyone from outside your own household was banned. On Friday, Mr Hancock admitted breaching social distancing guidance and said he was sorry for having “let people down” …
The £144 million building is owned by Singapore-based property firm Ho Bee Land, which bought it five years ago and has not so far responded to requests for comment.
Cameras on the outside were made by Hikvision, which is owned by the Chinese state and banned in the US because of national security concerns and alleged human rights violations. The firm is alleged to have provided cameras that monitor Uighur Muslims in concentration camps in Xinjiang …
One covert security expert said: “In all my years of working in this field I have never known a camera to be positioned inside an office like this. An office is a private space and that raises all sorts of issues.
“The camera is facing the door so it will give you a record of who is coming and going. But if you wanted to do that you would place the camera outside of the office in the corridor. Also, the angle of the camera is all wrong because if someone walks into the office with their head down this will not be able to see their features. To me it smacks more of a small covert camera that has been placed in a light fixture” …
The fact that the camera was part of the overall CCTV network ruled out any suggestion that Ms Coladangelo could have been behind the leak, and friends of Dominic Cummings, the former Downing Street special adviser who has waged a campaign against Mr Hancock since leaving his job last year, insisted he had nothing to do with the leak.
One government source suggested it was possible the camera had been placed in the office to increase security as a result of the Covid pandemic, while another person familiar with the layout of the office speculated that extra cameras could have been put there because it has a balcony, making it more vulnerable to break-ins …
Indignity for his wife
On Saturday, June 26, the papers had stories about what was happening in the Hancock’s marital home.
The Mail‘s first report was ‘Callous Matt Hancock dumped wife on Thursday after learning his affair would be finally exposed’:
Matt Hancock dumped his university sweetheart on Thursday night after learning video footage of him kissing an aide in his ministerial office would be exposed.
The ex-Health Secretary, who announced his resignation this evening, raced home to tell his wife of 15 years that he would be leaving her after he was contacted by The Sun newspaper over his affair with Gina Coladangelo …
Martha Hancock, a 44-year-old osteopath, had no clue about the affair until her husband told her their marriage was over, reports The Sunday Times …
The reports of the affair came just weeks after Hancock was seen enjoying lunch out with Martha – the granddaughter of Frederick Millar, 1st Baron Inchyra – in London.
The pair were seen waiting for a taxi after eating at Exmouth market in the capital.
They were last seen together in public at the England vs Scotland Euro 2020 match at Wembley a week ago …
Mrs Hancock is said to have met her future husband while they were students at Oxford University. Both are dyslexic and he once revealed that the condition helped them bond.
Descended from a baron and a viscount, Mrs Hancock had a privileged upbringing. Her father, Old Etonian Alastair Hoyer Millar, 84, was secretary of The Pilgrim Trust between 1980 and 1996. The organisation supplies grants to preserve historically significant buildings or artefacts.
Her mother, Virginia Hoyer Millar, 70, an antiques dealer, was yesterday pictured comforting her daughter in the street by putting her arms around her shoulders. They also linked arms as they strolled around North-West London.
The couple [the Hancocks] divide their time between London and their West Suffolk constituency home, where there was no sign of Mr Hancock following his resignation.
The ex-Health Secretary wrote in his letter: ‘The last thing I would want is for my private life to distract attention from the single-minded focus that is leading us out of this crisis.
‘I want to reiterate my apology for breaking the guidance, and apologise to my family and loved ones for putting them through this. I also need (to) be with my children at this time.’
Another report from the Mail followed that day, discussing Conservative MPs’ disgust with their colleagues and more information about the respective marriages involved, complete with photographs:
… Mrs Hancock looked sad and upset as she left the couple’s home but didn’t speak to reporters about her husband’s alleged infidelity. Her husband was nowhere to be seen, however, she was still wearing her wedding ring.
The shutters were closed at the £4.5million South London home Mrs Coladangelo shares with Oliver Tress and their three children yesterday. They are also believed to have a country home near the West Sussex coast. She has been working as an advisor for Mr Hancock since last year, with one source saying: ‘Before Matt does anything big, he’ll speak to Gina’ …
Mr Hancock was meant to be at Newmarket Racecourse to visit the vaccination centre but a spokesman revealed he cancelled at the last minute ‘early this morning’.
A Department of Health probe into how the footage from outside Mr Hancock’s office was leaked is expected, with the whistleblower described as a former civil servant who was angry about his ‘brazen’ affair, adding: ‘They have tried to keep it a secret but everyone knows what goes on inside a building like that’ …
Mrs Coladangelo was appointed as a non-executive director at the department in September, meaning she is a member of the board.
She can claim up to £15,000 in taxpayers’ money in the role, though there is no public record of her appointment …
The woman Matt Hancock has been allegedly having an affair with is married to the millionaire founder of fashion firm Oliver Bonas and has worked as its communications director for the past seven years.
Gina Coladangelo, 43, knows the Health Secretary from Oxford University, where they both worked on the student radio station and studied politics, philosophy and economics (PPE) – and where he also met his wife Martha, 44.
Mrs Coladangelo remains Facebook friends with Mr Hancock’s osteopath wife – with whom the Conservative politician has two sons and a daughter – after they both graduated from the university at around the same time.
And they all reside in London, with Mrs Coladangelo living with her multi-millionaire fashion tycoon husband Oliver Tress and their three children in Wandsworth, while the Hancocks live in Queen’s Park with their children …
Mr Hancock met Mrs Coladangelo when they worked on Oxford student radio together in the 1990s. Mr Hancock was a minority sports reporter on Oxygen FM and they would have socialised together at Exeter College, Oxford.
… Mrs Coladangelo went on to marry Mr Tress, 53, who is founder of fashion chain Oliver Bonas, named after his ex-girlfriend Anna who is cousin of Prince Harry’s former partner Cressida Bonas.
It is not known exactly when Mrs Coladangelo and Mr Tress wed, although they were listed on the electoral roll together with her maiden name as recently as 2008, and then her married name of Gina Tress by 2011.
Mr Tress founded Oliver Bonas in London in 1993 with handbags and jewellery he had brought from Hong Kong where his parents lived, and his wife began working there in June 2014 after 11 years at Luther Pendragon.
They live together in a five-bedroom detached property believed to be worth around £4million in Wandsworth, South West London, on a quiet tree-lined street with residents-only parking bays that is popular with families.
Many of the cars parked in the street – which is a 20-minute drive away from Central London – are top-of-the range BMW 4x4s and Volvos. Neighbours of Mrs Coladangelo remained tight lipped and refused to comment.
But one visiting workman who left a neighbouring home was unimpressed by Mr Hancock. He said: ‘The guy had been caught bang to rights on film. He will have to do some smart talking to get out of that one with the wife.’
The Spectator‘s editor, Fraser Nelson, called readers’ attention to a Sunday Times report saying that Hancock took his girlfriend to a G7 summit:
The Sunday Times has something more significant: that Hancock took Mrs Coladangelo to the G7 health ministers’ summit, raising questions about whether they stayed together (the event took place a month after their being filmed canoodling in his office). The brilliantly-informed Tim Shipman has a devastating quote from a Cabinet source.
She went with him to the G7 health ministers summit. Did he disclose this to the PM? If it was shown he was shagging on the taxpayer he had to go. He’s been puritan-in-chief in the government and now it turns out he’s a massive, lying hypocrite.
… In this week’s magazine, Kate Andrews has dossier of how ministers have been living la vida loca, travelling globally at a time when they made it illegal for others to do so. All within the loophole-addled rules, yes, but generally conducting themselves in a way that others have been unable to do.
The girlfriend’s brother
More news emerged on June 26, this time concerning Hancock’s girlfriend’s brother.
Sky News reported:
A relative of the Whitehall director alleged to have had an extramarital affair with Matt Hancock, the health secretary, is an executive at a private healthcare company which has won a string of NHS contracts.
Sky News can reveal that Roberto Coladangelo – who is Gina Coladangelo’s brother – works at Partnering Health Limited (PHL Group), a specialist in the provision of urgent and primary care services to NHS patients …
People who know Mr Coladangelo said that he and Mr Hancock’s aide were siblings, and social media profiles and electoral roll data appear to confirm a relationship between them.
None of those contacted by Sky News on Friday afternoon would confirm or deny the relationship between the Coladangelos.
Weekend papers
The weekend papers were magic for those of us rejoicing over Hancock’s resignation:
Also see The Observer and The Sunday Telegraph.
Of the resignation news, the redoubtable Peter Hitchens tweeted that it was sad that the government didn’t believe in their guidelines but the public did — ‘our tragedy’:
He added that, given all the damage Hancock caused Britain, it was ironic an illicit grope brought him down:
Maybe that’s why Hancock wants to return to private life after the next general election. Will the formal coronavirus inquiry advance that far in two years’ time? If not, he could be safe in the knowledge he won’t be asked to testify.
No. 10: photos ‘in the public interest’
On July 16, The Telegraph had a follow-up on The Sun‘s photos: ‘Leaked Matt Hancock CCTV footage was “in public interest”, says Boris Johnson’s office’:
The leaked CCTV footage which exposed Matt Hancock’s affair was in the public interest, the Prime Minister’s spokesman has said, as an investigation into an alleged data breach continues.
Two people suspected of recording the film without consent had their homes raided on Thursday by officials from the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).
Police and Crime Commissioners have also called for the police to launch an urgent investigation amid concern over the security of government buildings.
But the Prime Minister’s official spokesman said Boris Johnson believed in the importance of a free press being able to investigate matters that were in the public interest …
Excellent!!!
There ends the resignation saga.
A final instalment on Hancock’s time as a backbencher will come next week.
My series on Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s downfall continues.
The first three instalments can be found here, here and here.
Wednesday, July 6, 2022 must have been a sad day for him. By the end of it, 43 Conservative MPs had left Cabinet or ministerial posts.
The haemorrhage continued into Thursday, by which point the number was 51, all of which were resignations bar Michael Gove’s sacking, the subject of yesterday’s post:
BBC Newsnight rejoices
On Wednesday night, BBC’s Newsnight ended with a list of 43 MPs’ names, instead of the usual programme credits.
The Daily Mail posted the video along with this report (emphases mine):
A rolling list of names was presented on a black background in the style of an Oscars ‘in memoriam’ tribute, set to a cover of the Verve’s 1997 song by London Grammar.
A faded picture of Mr Johnson was shown behind the names as they were shown, before they finished with a gap, and then the line: ‘Boris Johnson – Prime Minister?’
But the editorial decision was criticised by some viewers on Twitter, who described it as ‘simply ludicrous’, ‘pretty wild’ and ‘giving up any shred of serious journalism’.
Others labelled it a ‘total LOL-fest’ and ‘iconic behaviour from Newsnight’, while a third tweeted that the rolling list was ‘like it’s the obits at the Oscars’.
The Newsnight production team, presenter Kirsty Wark and guests must have had the time of their life that evening. They all wanted Boris gone:
Ahead of the list being shown, Wark concluded Newsnight by saying: ‘Well that is all from us tonight. On the evening that the resignations from the Johnson government threatened to become a flood, we leave you with the names of the first 43 of them.
‘As Nick (Watt) just said, there are already more since we came on air. See you tomorrow to find out who they are, if there are more to come. Goodnight.’
Newsnight and the rest of the BBC have been after Boris ever since his election as Party leader in 2019. The BBC were apoplectic on election night that year, barely able to say that he had won an 80-seat majority, the highest Conservative gain since 1987 under Margaret Thatcher.
Oh, our ‘values’!
Brandon Lewis, the then-Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, resigned early Thursday morning.
His letter, like those of many others, played on morality and the violation of Conservative values:
Sorry, it all seems hypocritical to me.
Boris stood down as Conservative Party leader at lunchtime on Thursday.
However, he remains Prime Minister until the Conservative Party membership elects their new leader.
Therefore, he scrambled to fill vacant posts so that there would still be a functioning Government until September 5.
Michelle Donelan’s egregious resignation
In this regard, the most egregious resignation had to have been Michelle Donelan‘s. Boris asked her to be the new Education Secretary. She resigned 35 hours later, the shortest-serving Cabinet member in British history.
On Thursday night The Telegraph reported:
Ms Donelan was promoted to Education Secretary late on Tuesday evening after the shock resignation of Sajid Javid which began the revolt against the PM.
But just 35 hours later, having failed to persuade Mr Johnson he should step aside for a new leader, she felt left with no choice but to quit herself in the national interest.
Oh, my!
A cynic might say that she took the role for extra taxpayers’ money:
She had previously served as universities minister for two years and would have been entitled to a redundancy payment of £7,920 upon leaving that role.
But her temporary elevation to the Cabinet significantly boosted her pay, meaning she is now in line for a much larger sum of £16,876.
The MP for Chippenham, in Wiltshire, told The Telegraph she doesn’t want the money and has asked officials if there is any way they can stop the payment.
She added if that is not possible she will give it all to a local charity in her constituency, though she has not yet decided which one.
Ms Donelan was the shortest-serving Cabinet minister in British history, breaking a 239-year-old record of four days set during the government of Pitt the Younger.
She said quitting her dream job was “extremely difficult” and she was aware of the “moral imperative to prioritise young people as they are heading towards their exams”.
Hmm.
Guido Fawkes tweeted about her resignation:
He wrote, in part (emphases his):
Responding to Guido’s tweet about her impending pocket-lining, ex-Education Secretary Michelle Donelan has just said she will donate it in full to charity.
Fair play and just as well – £16,800 is around the average annual salary of a teaching assistant…
Good grief.
Remuneration off the charts
Returning to The Telegraph article, our principled Conservatives who resigned were raking in redundancy payments:
She [Donelan] is one of 28 former ministers who quit or were sacked in the coup against Boris Johnson and are set to earn a combined £240,000 in redundancy money.
I agree with the Opposition MPs here, although they would have taken the money, too, were the shoe on the other foot:
Opposition MPs are urging those who will benefit to forgo the payments at a time when millions of families across the UK are facing a cost of living squeeze.
The remuneration is legitimate:
Members of the Government who leave their posts are automatically legally entitled to a golden goodbye worth a quarter of their ministerial salary.
This is how much was due to each MP who left:
Five Cabinet ministers walked out during the coup against Mr Johnson while a sixth, Michael Gove, was sacked. They will get £16,876 each.
Seven middle-ranking ministers who also quit are in line for £7,920 apiece while 15 from the most junior ranks are entitled to £5,594.
Nice work if you can get it. It reeks of hypocrisy to me.
Bear in mind that an independent board already gave MPs another salary rise. MPs also get their expenses paid. Their meals in Parliament are also subsidised. Who pays for this? The taxpayer.
They can also take advantage of hospitality from outside hosts for sporting and cultural events, which they must declare.
As we say in the UK, they’re ‘quids in’!
So, no more talk about morality, integrity and values, please!
Boris’s new Cabinet
The Telegraph told us about Boris’s new Cabinet and ministerial replacements:
Mr Johnson on Thursday appointed a flurry of new Cabinet and junior ministers despite having already announced he was stepping down as PM.
He brought several Tory moderates, including a former opponent over Brexit, into his top team to try and ease fears about him carrying on as a caretaker.
James Cleverly, a loyalist and foreign office minister, was drafted in to become the country’s third Education Secretary in just three days.
Kit Malthouse, policing minister, another staunch supporter, was also promoted to take up the vacant role as the Prime Minister’s de facto chief of staff.
The most surprising appointment came in the elevation of Greg Clark, a former arch-critic, to replace the sacked Mr Gove as the Levelling Up Secretary.
He was stripped of the Tory whip by Mr Johnson in September 2019 after voting with other rebels to give Parliament the power to block a No Deal Brexit.
Robert Buckland, who was sacked as Justice Secretary by the PM during his reshuffle last September, returns to the top table as Welsh Secretary.
The PM also promoted two junior ministers. Shailesh Vara became Northern Ireland Secretary, while Andrew Stephenson was given a Cabinet seat.
Andrew Stephenson was appointed co-chairman of the Conservative Party, replacing Oliver Dowden, one of the MPs who resigned:
Stephenson has been introducing each of the Party hustings taking place around the nation.
There were more appointments:
No 10 announced a dozen new appointments on Thursday night which included giving Will Quince, an education minister, his old job back less than 36 hours after he quit.
Former soldier Johnny Mercer also got his former role back as Veterans Minister, with the added promotion that he will now attend Cabinet.
I’m really happy about Johnny Mercer‘s reappointment. He is an ex-serviceman. No MP has worked more tirelessly for veterans than he. In 2021, he felt that the Government was not taking his concerns about veterans seriously enough. I saw him give a passionate speech in Parliament on the subject at the time. He told the Chief Whip that he was going to resign as Veterans Minister. When Boris got wind of the news, he sacked Mercer on April 20 that year.
Re Will Quince, is he getting redundancy cash, too, having resigned then being reappointed?
Boris pledged to be a good caretaker PM:
At a meeting of his new Cabinet on Thursday, the PM insisted he would respect his caretaker status and not try to introduce any radical new policies.
Guido posted a full list of Boris’s new team on Friday, July 8. It’s a long one. Well done, Boris.
I wasn’t the only one to harp on about redundancy payments:
Even if they are temporary, I was happy to see some of the appointments:
- Richard Fuller MP to be Economic Secretary to the Treasury;
- Brendan Clarke-Smith MP to be a Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department for Education;
- Steve Double MP to be a Parliamentary Under Secretary of State Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs;
- Peter Bone MP to be Deputy Leader of the House of Commons.
Friday’s front pages
A dismal week ended on July 8 with Friday morning’s front pages, which focussed on Boris’s resignation the day before.
Most were negative, because these newspapers wanted Boris — the public face of Brexit — out ever since he got into Downing Street:
Even The Telegraph was ambivalent (Boris is pictured with his son Wilf):
Only two papers were supportive of the Prime Minister.
The Daily Mail was cross with Conservative MPs:
The Daily Express thanked Boris for getting us out of the EU:
Speaking of the EU, here’s Guy Verhofstadt’s reaction:
Would we have expected anything less?
I’ll end with a heartfelt thread from Red Wall MP Mark Jenkinson from Workington:
Jenkinson was also intent on ensuring that Conservative MPs would allow Party members to get their rightful vote on the next leader. Theresa May was the last candidate standing in 2016, so she automatically became PM:
Fortunately, Party members received their ballot papers earlier this month and two-hour hustings have taken place all across the nation, including Northern Ireland, which has a tiny Conservative group of around 300 members.
Meanwhile, Brexit supporters, especially those in Red Wall seats, wanted to know what would happen next. Ensuring that the next leader completes the Brexit process and keeps us out of the EU was a hot topic on the GB News shows that weekend.
More about that next week as the series continues.
Those who missed the first instalment of Boris Johnson’s downfall can read it here.
The Queen’s Platinum Jubilee weekend at the beginning of June cannot have been an easy one for the Prime Minister, who turned up with his wife Carrie at the public events.
Pressure was mounting for a vote of confidence by Conservative backbenchers.
On the morning of Sunday, June 5, the last day of the Jubilee weekend, Transport Secretary Grant Shapps told the BBC that there would be no such vote, but even if one took place, Boris would win it (video):
By the time the Queen had celebrated her historic jubilee that weekend, Sir Graham Brady, chair of the Conservative 1922 Committee, had received the requisite number of letters from the Party’s backbench MPs to trigger such a vote.
The vote took place on Monday, June 6. Shapps was correct in saying that Boris would win it. Shapps went on to run for the Party leadership himself in July.
Unfortunately, after the confidence vote, more events occurred making Boris’s position as Party leader untenable.
Earlier, in May, the Conservatives had taken a drubbing in the local elections.
Then came the two by-elections on Thursday, June 23.
One was for Neil Parish’s seat of Tiverton and Honiton in Devon. The farmer had stood down on April 30 after two fellow Conservative MPs saw him viewing tractor porn on his phone in the Palace of Westminster. Liberal Democrat Richard Foord won handily.
The second was further north, in Wakefield, where another disgraced Conservative-then-Independent MP, Imran Ahmad Khan, had to stand down for being convicted on April 11 of assault on a 15-year-old boy in 2008. On May 23, Khan was sentenced to 18 months in prison. The West Yorkshire seat reverted to Labour, with the election of Simon Lightwood.
Then came the Chris Pincher groping scandal. Pincher was Deputy Chief Whip but resigned on Thursday, June 30, after a lubricious episode at the Carlton Club in St James. The Carlton is a private club for Conservatives. Pincher had allegedly groped two men at an event there.
Boris had to sign off on Pincher’s appointment as Deputy Chief Whip. However, even if Boris had objected, the Chief Whip could have appointed Pincher, anyway. As I explained on July 6, whoever the Chief Whip wants for a deputy, the Chief Whip gets.
However, the Party whip had not been withdrawn from Pincher, and MPs were incandescent.
On Friday, July 1, an article appeared in The Telegraph: ‘The “disturbing” call about Chris Pincher’s lurid behaviour that forced Boris Johnson to act’.
GB News interviewed Neil Parish, who was furious.
The Telegraph article says:
The low point of yet another chaotic 24 hours for Boris Johnson came when disgraced “tractor porn MP” Neil Parish popped up on the airwaves to give him a lecture on moral standards in government.
As the Prime Minister and his aides were holed up in Number 10 deciding how to respond to the growing Chris Pincher scandal, the “very cross” former backbencher was giving them both barrels on television.
“I can’t believe they haven’t done it,” he said incredulously, when asked why the whip had not been removed. Referring to his own punishment for watching pornography in the House of Commons, he added: “It’s double standards. Come on, let’s be fair.”
His righteous outrage encapsulated how untenable Downing Street’s insistence that Mr Pincher would be able to remain a Conservative MP, despite accusations he drunkenly groped two men, had become.
Someone must have been watching GB News that afternoon or the fury from MPs must have increased to the extent that the Chief Whip, Chris Heaton-Harris, withdrew the Party whip:
Just over two hours later, Chris Heaton-Harris, the Chief Whip, put out a statement reversing that decision, following a day of growing anger amongst backbench Tories at the Prime Minister’s failure to act.
However, there was a problem in that, the day before, Boris did not think things needed to go that far. He thought that Pincher’s resignation from the Deputy Chief Whip role sufficed (emphases mine):
Downing Street was bullish as the news broke at 8pm, with a Tory source insisting: “The PM thinks he’s done the decent thing by resigning. There is no need for an investigation and no need to suspend the whip.”
Even into Friday afternoon, Boris’s stance had not changed:
… at noon, No 10 still remained defiant – with the Prime Minister’s spokesman telling reporters he considered the matter closed, since Mr Pincher had resigned and that there was no investigation into his conduct.
Heaton-Harris and Boris received pushback for their inaction.
Finally, later on Friday Pincher became an Independent MP:
Early in the evening Downing Street was eventually forced to act and announced it had stripped Mr Pincher of the whip, given that a formal complaint had been made to Parliament’s harassment watchdog.
The question was how much did Boris know about Pincher — past and present — and when did he know it?
Regarding the Carlton Club:
The Prime Minister had also been “troubled” by a “disturbing” call from one of the MPs who witnessed the incident and relayed to him a detailed account of what had happened, according to a source close to him.
The article has the details of what happened with Pincher at the club.
One MP was so unnerved that he rang Heaton-Harris at 3 a.m.:
One Tory MP who was present at the scene told The Telegraph how they “threw out” a “very drunk” Mr Pincher after being told about one of the two sexual assaults and then called the chief whip at 3am to inform him.
Another waited until daylight to inform him:
A second MP who witnessed at least one of the groping incidents also informed Mr Heaton-Harris the following morning. “This is not something that should be brushed over,” the MP told The Telegraph.
That MP says Pincher’s reputation was known, and it is true that he did have to stand down from another post when Theresa May was Prime Minister:
“Given the nature of the behaviour and the seniority of the role he held, it was highly inappropriate behaviour. This is not the first time there have been conversations about this person either. Many of us were surprised when that appointment was made.”
It is the second time that Mr Pincher has been forced to resign from the whips’ office over allegations of sexual impropriety. In 2017, he quit a more junior position after being accused by a former Tory candidate of trying to chat him up.
Returning to Boris:
“Boris has set the level and now everyone else is trying to imitate him, it is a constant drip drip. It all adds up, doesn’t look good,” one former minister told The Telegraph.
“The worrying thing is this is beginning to shape up so much like sleaze in the 90s under Major, where it was a whole series of inappropriate and pretty seedy actions by ministers and Tory MPs that completely undermined him.”
Lord Hague, the former Conservative leader, said the Prime Minister had been too slow to act, with a “whole day of everybody speculating and talking”. He added: “These things need dealing with decisively.”
That day, The Telegraph had a related article, ‘Boris Johnson v John Major: How Tory sleaze scandals under the two leaders stack up’. The scores are pretty even. I remember reading it and thinking that things did not look good for Boris.
There were two other things that did not bode well for him that week: a proposed treehouse for his son and an upcoming investigation by the Privileges Committee over Partygate.
Let’s look at the treehouse first. Labour MPs were apoplectic that Boris wanted to have one built at Chequers for young Wilf.
Guido Fawkes has the story (emphases his):
Eyebrows were raised in Downing Street over the weekend after the publication of a story in The Sunday Times that Boris had looked into having a £150,000 treehouse built for son Wilf at Chequers. The story – undisputed since publication – goes he had once again entered into discussions about Lord Brownlow forking out for the cost, however plans were eventually scuppered by police security concerns given the house would be visible from the road. Despite the design including bulletproof glass, which raised the cost significantly…
Guido was amused to learn that Downing Street’s eyebrows weren’t raised by the Sunday Times’s story, instead by Labour MPs’ attacking the plans on the grounds of Boris being out of touch. Vauxhall’s Florence Eshalomi, Rhondda’s Chris Bryant, Wallasey’s Angela Eagle, and Hull’s Karl Turner were all among those laying into the PM.
Guido points out Labour’s hypocrisy, because it was Tony Blair who had a tennis court complex installed at the Prime Minister’s weekend retreat (purple emphases mine):
No. 10 sources wryly note, however, that it wasn’t that long ago when it was a Labour PM splashing huge wads of cash to renovate Chequers – without a whimper of controversy. In 1999, one Tony Blair added a luxury tennis court complex to the PM’s Buckinghamshire residence, something since enjoyed by successive MPs including David Cameron and Boris Johnson. Sources in the know tell Guido that the courts weren’t built using public cash, nor did they come out of the Chequers Trust, implying the extortionate costs either came out of Blair’s personal pocket, or a private donor. Given Guido unfortunately can’t make it to Blair’s big centrist jamboree today, perhaps an on-hand hack might like to raise the question of who paid for the courts…
Labour: it’s okay when they do it.
The Privileges Committee are investigating Boris for Partygate, specifically on whether he deliberately lied to the House of Commons in saying he was unaware any coronavirus rules were breached. That was before he received his fine.
Labour’s Harriet Harman is leading the investigation. Labour’s Chris Bryant recused himself from that responsibility because he has made no secret of his dislike for Boris.
However, as Guido pointed out on June 17, Harman is hardly impartial:
It’s now emerged his replacement, Harman, has not been neutral on the question up until this point either. She has tweeted her views relating to allegations around the PM’s truthfulness, with one saying “If PM and CX admit guilt, accepting that police right that they breached regs, then they are also admitting that they misled the House of Commons”. You wouldn’t favour your chances going to trial if the judge was on the record with such levels of preconceived bias…
Conservative MPs are also aware of her bias:
Yesterday in the Commons, Andrew Murrison asked Michael Ellis whether he agreed “that those placed in a position of judgment over others must not have a previously stated position on the matter in question”. The Cabinet Office minister replied:
It is, of course, an age-old principle of natural justice that no person should be a judge in their own court.
Where an individual has given a view on the guilt or innocence of any person, they ought not to then sit in judgment on that person. I know that point he is referring to, and I have no doubt that the right honourable lady will consider that.
It seems to be yet another own goal by Labour, mind-made-up Harman’s appointment totally undermines the impartiality of the privileges committee investigation…
The investigation formally began on June 29:
The problem with this investigation is that it has to prove intent on Boris’s part to mislead the House. How will Harman prove it?
If Boris is found guilty of deliberately misleading the House, it will have severe ramifications for parliamentary proceedings. Ministers might fear expanding on certain subjects in case they get a figure or another type of detail wrong.
We should find out the result in September.
What Labour are trying to do with this process is ensure that Boris loses his parliamentary seat for good, which is what will happen if he’s guilty. That way, he can never be an MP again.
Meanwhile, some Conservative MPs were disgruntled that Boris had won the confidence vote in June. Under the current 1922 Committee rules another one cannot be held until 12 months have elapsed. They wanted Sir Graham Brady to change the rules to allow another vote before then.
On Monday, July 4, Mail+ said that Boris was ‘still the best man to lead Britain’:
THE Prime Minister returns to his desk today after an impressive display of statesmanship on the world stage.
Following a Commonwealth conference in Rwanda aimed at building a common future, he returned to Europe to galvanise Nato and a wavering G7 into hardening their support for Ukraine.
Sadly, though, his achievements were overshadowed by yet another Tory sleaze row, leading to inevitable further attacks on his leadership. There are even reports that rebel backbenchers are plotting another attempt at regicide – just a month after the last one failed.
When will this self-mutilation end? Yes, the Chris Pincher affair is ghastly and should have been handled better. But there are far bigger issues at stake.
There’s a painful cost of living crunch, war in Europe and a migration crisis. Meanwhile, Tony Blair and his embittered Remainer chums are on a renewed mission to strangle Brexit.
Instead of dissipating energy on brainless infighting, the parliamentary Conservative Party needs to focus on the problems its constituents actually care about. They can only do that by getting behind their leader.
For all his recent troubles – some self-inflicted – this paper unequivocally believes Boris Johnson is the right man to lead the party and the country.
None of the potential replacements has his almost unique ability to connect with voters across the social and political spectrum. Crucially, he is the only one capable of winning the next election …
That Mail+ editorial has its finger on the pulse of the nation. I will come back to what voters think in a future post.
On Tuesday, July 5, Chris Pincher was in the news again after Baron McDonald of Salford — Simon McDonald — the Permanent Under-Secretary to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office between 2015 and 2020, wrote about the MP’s past and what he thought Boris knew to Kathryn Stone OBE, the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards for the House of Commons.
I wrote about this at length on July 6, concluding that there was bad blood between the life peer and Boris. Boris sacked him when the Foreign Office was merged with the Department for International Development. To soften the blow, Boris elevated him to the House of Lords. It should be noted that Baron McDonald is also a Remainer.
Wikipedia has a summary of Pincher’s parliamentary history of appointments under Theresa May and Boris Johnson:
Pincher served as an Assistant Whip and Comptroller of the Household in 2017, before he resigned after being implicated in the 2017 Westminster sexual misconduct allegations, having been accused of sexual misconduct by Tom Blenkinsop and Alex Story. Two months later, in January 2018, he was appointed by Theresa May as Government Deputy Chief Whip and Treasurer of the Household. After Boris Johnson became Prime Minister in July 2019, Pincher was appointed Minister of State for Europe and the Americas. In the February 2020 reshuffle, he was appointed Minister of State for Housing. In February 2022, he returned to his former role of Government Deputy Chief Whip and Treasurer of the Household.
As to what the peer alleges Boris knew about Pincher, here are two possibilities:
The matter was discussed on that morning’s Today show on BBC Radio Four.
Guido has the dialogue, with Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab responding for the Government. Raab said:
Aside from the Westminster rumour mill, any allegation that had resulted in formal disciplinary action… whilst there was inappropriate behaviour [from Pincher], it didn’t trip the wire into disciplinary action… the individual who made the complaint did not want formal disciplinary action taken.
McDonald was on next. He said:
I disagree with that, and I dispute the use of the word ‘resolved’… the complaint was upheld… Number 10 have had five full days to get the story correct, and that still has not happened… it’s sort of telling the truth and crossing your fingers at the same time and hoping people aren’t too forensic in their subsequent questioning.
Guido said:
In a matter of hours, the line has gone from “it’s not true” to “the PM didn’t know of any formal complaints”. Chaos.
The Paymaster General, Michael Ellis, addressed the matter in Parliament, intimating that Boris forgot a prior briefing on Pincher:
From that point, the spiral turned ever downward.
That day, Sajid Javid resigned as Health and Social Care Secretary.
Shortly afterwards, Rishi Sunak resigned as Chancellor.
That evening, an article by Lord Frost appeared in The Telegraph: ‘It is time for Boris Johnson to go’:
No one is more downhearted than me at the events of the last few days. Over the years, I have worked as closely as anyone with Boris Johnson. I know, therefore, that he is a remarkable man and a remarkable politician. Only he could have cut through the mess left by Theresa May and delivered on the verdict of the people in the Brexit referendum. He took the country with him through the pandemic and has shown huge leadership on policy towards Ukraine.
But this country now faces formidable challenges. Facing them requires not just the ability to talk about a vision but the determination and steeliness to establish a credible pathway to it. It requires a leader who knows where he wants to take the country and can set out how he intends to get there, in a way that is consistent with the traditional Conservative vision.
I had hoped Boris Johnson could be that person, but I have realised that despite his undoubted skills he simply can’t be. As I have often said, his Government has drifted far too much to the Left on economic matters, not only on tax and spend but by being too quick to regulate and too willing to get captured by fashionable trivia. It is tax-raising while claiming to be tax-cutting, regulatory while claiming to be deregulatory. It purports to be Conservative while too often going along with the fashionable nostrums of the London Left …
… I can’t honestly see what this Prime Minister’s economic philosophy is, beyond the content-free concept of “levelling up”, and accordingly I no longer believe we will ever see a consistent drive towards low taxation, low spending, attractiveness to investment, and deregulation on the scale needed.
But even more than that I have become worried by the style of government. The whole partygate affair could have been dealt with more straightforwardly and honestly by setting out right from the start what had gone wrong in No 10, taking responsibility, and explaining why it would not happen again. By the time those things had been said, they seemed to have been dragged unwillingly from the Prime Minister rather than genuinely meant. Accordingly they lacked credibility …
The Pincher affair then showed in a real-life case study that [reform of Downing Street] was not going to happen. Confronted with a problem which appeared to reflect badly on the Prime Minister’s judgment, we saw once again the instinct was to cover up, to conceal, to avoid confronting the reality of the situation. Once again that instinct, not the issue itself, has become the story and the problem. Worse, this time round, ministers have been sent out repeatedly to defend suspect positions that came apart under closer examination. This is no way to run a government …
Boris Johnson’s place in history is secure. He will be one of the past century’s most consequential prime ministers. If he leaves now, before chaos descends, that reputation is what will be remembered. If he hangs on, he risks taking the party and the Government down with him. That’s why it is time for him to go. If he does, he can still hand on to a new team, one that is determined to defend and seek the opportunities of Brexit, one that is able to win the next election convincingly. That is in the Conservative Party’s interest, in Leave voters’ interest, and in the national interest. It needs to happen.
On Wednesday, July 6, all hell broke loose.
The prime minister’s authority over his party is crumbling as three more ministers plus two parliamentary aides resigned this morning and a string of previously loyal MPs turned on his leadership.
Rebel MPs believe that a routine meeting of the executive of the 1922 Committee of Conservative backbenchers this afternoon could be the trigger point for changing the rules that at present mean Johnson cannot be ousted for another 11 months.
Sir Graham Brady, the 1922 Committee chairman, has told the 16 members of the executive to arrive promptly for the meeting, an instruction being taken by some of those on the executive as a sign that he wants to discuss options for ousting Johnson …
At midday he will take prime minister’s questions knowing that about half — perhaps more — of the Conservative MPs on the benches behind him want him gone …
Rebel Conservatives have been contacting Brady today to demand a rule change that would allow Johnson to be ousted as soon as possible. “It is being made very clear to Graham that this needs to happen sooner rather than later,” said one …
One former minister said that there was a very strong feeling amongst MPs that the issue needed to be brought to a conclusion. “Boris has made very clear that it will take a forklift truck to get him out of Downing Street. So it’s now up to us to assemble the forklift truck.”
The article goes on to list the resignations which came in by 11:30 a.m. that day. More followed in the afternoon.
To make matters worse, Boris got a grilling during his appearance at the Liaison Committee, comprised of the heads of the Commons select committees.
That evening during a telephone call, Boris sacked Michael Gove, who was the Levelling-up Secretary.
Gove had contacted Boris that morning to tell him he should resign before PMQs at noon.
Somehow, the news reached the media.
Gove’s allies claimed it was Downing Street that had briefed the media that Gove had told Johnson to resign. They said it was an attempt to make him look disloyal and distract attention from the wider revolt.
“It did not come from us,” one said. “They want to paint Michael as the villain trying to orchestrate a revolt against the PM. Nothing could be further from the truth.” They added that the sacking had then come out of the blue in a call from Downing Street. “He just told Michael that given their conversation in the morning he had no choice but to sack him,” the ally said.
I wonder. Gove is incredibly untrustworthy and, according to the article, he and Boris have had a difficult relationship since their days at Oxford.
Before Boris sacked Gove, a number of Cabinet ministers had urged him to stand down, including Priti Patel and Kit Malthouse, who had worked with Boris during his time as Mayor of London:
Patel’s intervention was striking because of her longstanding support of Johnson, having been home secretary throughout his time as prime minister.
In a one-to-one meeting in No 10 she is understood to have conveyed to him the overwhelming views of the parliamentary party. She said there was no way he could continue to govern without the support of his party.
A similar message was conveyed by Malthouse, her deputy, who was also one of Johnson’s deputies when he was mayor of London.
[Brandon] Lewis travelled back from Belfast to tell the prime minister that he believed he should resign. On his flight a passenger heckled him, telling him: “You are complicit in the betrayal of this country by Boris Johnson,” the BBC said.
[Grant] Shapps told the prime minister that he stood little chance of commanding a majority in a second confidence vote. [Kwasi] Kwarteng told Chris Heaton-Harris, the chief whip, that Johnson should resign for the good of the country.
I will have more on the resignations tomorrow.
Last weekend’s big news stories concerned freedom of speech.
The world was horrified to learn of the bloody and debilitating assault on Sir Salman Rushdie, who might lose his sight in one eye. He was off his respirator early this week, thankfully, but, unfortunately, still has a long recovery awaiting him.
Then, here in Britain, on Saturday, August 13, we awoke to the news that raunchy comedian Jerry Sadowitz, 60, had his Edinburgh Fringe gig cancelled at the city’s Pleasance Theatre.
Sadowitz gave only one performance before the Pleasance pulled the plug.
I’ve lived here as long as Sadowitz has been a comedian. For all that time, I have never met a man who liked his brand of comedy.
One could describe him as an equal-opportunity offender. He has appeared on television from time to time. I first saw him in the early 1990s on a comedy show. I couldn’t see what was funny. His jokes were gratuitously offensive and filthy.
Nearly everyone in the UK knows about Sadowitz’s humour, if one can call it that.
His show is not appropriate for a first date and certainly not for a blind date.
Being generous, I would say that, in terms of comedy, Jerry Sadowitz is the 21st century British version of Lenny Bruce.
Like Bruce, Sadowitz was born in the United States.
He moved to Scotland with his Glaswegian mother at the age of seven.
Let’s look at the facts surrounding his cancellation, keeping in mind that the month-long Edinburgh Fringe is supposed to be the bastion of comedic free speech. Its whole purpose is to shock and provoke.
Another thing worth keeping in mind is that Sadowitz actually said what sort of material his show at the Pleasance would include.
The show was called ‘Not for Anyone’.
That should have set people’s expectations, but it did not.
On Saturday, I read Guido Fawkes:
Guido posted Sadowitz’s tweet about how well he thought Friday night’s show went:
Guido tied the news in with that of Salman Rushdie (emphases in the original):
Here’s some news from the Edinburgh Fringe that Salman Rushdie might find amusing. In a statement announcing that they were cancelling further appearances by the comedian and magician Jerry Sadowitz, the venue said:
The Pleasance Theatre Trust have cancelled Jerry Sadowitz’s second and final show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe with immediate effect. In today’s society, opinions such as those displayed on stage by Sadowitz are not acceptable and The Pleasance are not prepared to be associated with such material.
Anthony Alderson, Director of the Pleasance said:
The Pleasance is a venue that champions freedom of speech and we do not censor comedians’ material. While we acknowledge that Jerry Sadowitz has often been controversial, the material presented at his first show is not acceptable and does not align with our values. This type of material has no place on the festival and the Pleasance will not be presenting his second and final show.
You couldn’t make it up….
No, you couldn’t.
Apparently, among other things, Sadowitz exposed himself to a woman in the front row.
The Scottish Daily Express reported (emphases mine):
Controversial Scots comedian Jerry Sadowitz has been cancelled by the Edinburgh Fringe after complaints from shocked audience members and venue staff.
The 60-year-old had two shows booked at the Pleasance called ‘Jerry Sadowitz: Not for Anyone’ which came with a warning of “strong language and themes some may find distressing” …
However, the decision sparked fury from fellow comics such as Leo Kearse, who said: “If the Islamic fundamentalists don’t get you, the wokeists will.”
He added that Sadowitz, who was born in the US and moved to Glasgow with his Scottish/Jewish mother at the age of seven, was the “only comedian worth seeing” at the Fringe this year.
Good grief. Yet, judging from this year’s Edinburgh Fringe and Festival reviews in The Times, he’s probably right.
Anyway:
The Pleasance said anyone who had booked a ticket for Saturday’s gig would receive refunds for their tickets and that they “won’t be working” with the entertainer again.
Meanwhile, Sadowitz was soon busy on Twitter promoting his run of 14 gigs at venues south of the Border later in the year.
How could the Pleasance not have known about Sadowitz’s material when he’d performed there before?
On Sunday, the paper had an update:
The Pleasance has hit back at critics following the Jerry Sadowitz cancellation claiming the comedian made people “uncomfortable and unsafe” to remain in the theatre.
The Edinburgh Fringe venue slammed those who ripped into the “woke” decision as an attack on freedom of speech. The theatre claimed that Sadowitz crossed the line and that controversial comedians “need to be challenged” in a “changing world” …
Fans say his unique brand of black comedy has to be viewed in context and questioned why the venue booked him in the first place, as well as asking why people bought tickets to the show if they were so easily offended.
I completely agree.
Whereas Sadowitz tweeted that he didn’t see anyone walk out, the Pleasance claimed that a number of people left during his act:
“A large number of people walked out of Jerry Sadowitz’s show as they felt uncomfortable and unsafe to remain in the venue. We have received an unprecedented number of complaints that could not be ignored and we had a duty to respond. The subsequent abuse directed to our teams is also equally unacceptable …
“In a changing world, stories and language that were once accepted on stage, whether performed in character or not, need to be challenged. There is a line that we will not cross at the Pleasance, and it was our view that this line was crossed on this occasion.
“We don’t vet the full content of acts in advance and while Jerry Sadowitz is a controversial comedian, we could not have known the specifics of his performance. The Pleasance has staged his work numerous times over the years, but as soon as we received complaints from those in the building which caused us great concern, we knew we could not allow the final performance to go ahead.
“The arts and comedy in particular have always pushed the boundaries of social norms but this boundary is always moving. Our industry has to move with it. However, this does not mean that we can allow such content to be on our stages.”
I was heartened to read that a Scottish Conservative and a feminist were critical of The Pleasance:
Former Scots Tory strategy chief Eddie Barnes was among the critics of the decision. He tweeted: “The Pleasance’s statement is totally contradictory. But it’s that mealy-mouthed, morally vacuous phrase ‘not acceptable’ that really grates. To whom? And on what grounds? Who decided?“
Feminist campaigner Lucy Hunter Blackburn added: “I first came to the Fringe in 1986. The cancelling of Jerry Sadowitz (who I’ve never seen – not my bag, I strongly assume I’d not enjoy his material) feels like an important moment – something to stop and look at hard.”
… While discussing the furore on GB News on Saturday night, Scots comedian Leo Kearse said: “The Edinburgh Fringe is over, the SNP have put a nail in it by restricting the amount of accommodation so there’s not enough space for audiences and acts. Nobody wants to go and see woke comedy. It’s like women’s football, it gets written about by the Guardian but it’s rubbish.”
On Sunday evening, GB News’s Andrew Doyle, a former teacher who went into stand up and created Titania McGrath, emphasised that what the audience sees is Sadowitz’s ‘persona’, not the man himself. He added that while Sadowitz is lobbing his offensive material, he simultaneously performs magic tricks. (Sadowitz is accomplished at card tricks in particular. That’s how he got his start.)
Doyle, who has seen Sadowitz’s act, explains that the material is so out there that it makes people laugh:
He’s an equal opportunities offender. Think of the worst thing in your head and then say it.
Leo Kearse and Josh Howie, another British comedian, joined Doyle in slamming the manager of The Pleasance, the Fringe’s premier venue.
According to them, Sadowitz’s material this year was nothing new. Doyle also confirmed that Sadowitz circulated a promo video in which he said what would be in the show.
Kearse said that the people complaining are probably the types who would be okay with Drag Queen Story Hour for children:
Why are we treating children like adults and adults like children?
Howie and Doyle were annoyed to see that some comedians at the Fringe supported The Pleasance. Howie said:
They’re putting themselves out of a job.
Doyle added:
They’re making a rod for their own backs.
Howie pointed out that Sadowitz is ‘revered’ on the comedy circuit and that he has inspired many newer comedians’ material, which makes his cancellation a ‘flash point’. Every new boundary push in comedy today has been thanks to him.
Doyle closed by saying that he had heard most of the complaints had come from members of staff at The Pleasance. Howie said that most venue employees are ‘mostly students’, ergo, likely to be offended and to ‘feel unsafe’.
Doyle asked:
Why do people keep submitting to these brats?
Theirs is a great exchange about freedom of speech in comedy:
On Monday, August 15, BBC Scotland interviewed Russian emigré and free speech advocate Konstantin Kisin. Kisin, who hosts his own podcast, says that such censorship helps no one and that, ultimately, the Edinburgh Festival might become less appealing and lose its audience. The male BBC co-host implied that audience members went only so they could laugh at racism because they rarely get the chance to do so.
Kisin responded, beginning with:
If I were a mind reader like you …
and said:
I have more faith in human beings than you do …
The co-host doubled down:
I was there in the audience. You weren’t …
Kisin asked him how he would assess what was going on in people’s minds as they watched Sadowitz:
You can tell what someone thinks from their body language? … No, no, you did say that you knew from their body language. You said exactly that.
At which point, the co-host abruptly terminated the interview.
Here it is. I applaud GB News’s Colin Brazier for his scathing remark about our being forced to pay for the BBC and their bias:
The same comedians had another go on Monday’s Headliners show on GB News. By then, Sadowitz felt forced to explain his act, which disappointed Josh Howie. Sadowitz is also seeking an apology from The Pleasance. Nick Dixon, another comedian, said that today’s big names in comedy (many of whom probably got where they are today thanks to Sadowitz) need to stand up for him. The owner of The Assembly Rooms, another top Fringe venue, has rightly criticised The Pleasance for cancelling the act:
Earlier that evening, Dan Wootton asked comedy veteran Jim Davidson, whose style is the exact opposite of Sadowitz’s, for his opinion. Davidson got dragged into this because Sadowitz wrote ‘I am not J** D*******, folks’ and ‘a lot of thought goes into my shows’. Davidson was generous in defending a comedian who does not wish to be compared to him. Davidson criticised The Pleasance, saying they knew ‘exactly what act’ Sadowitz was going to do.
Davidson thinks someone within the local council complained, which has happened before in England. He also pointed out that The Pleasance said that even performing material ‘in character’ should not be allowed:
Isn’t every comedian in character?
Here’s the video:
There is a huge gulf between the author of The Satanic Verses and obscene, offensive comedy, however, it is important to defend both.
James Marriott wrote about this conundrum for The Times on Wednesday, August 17: ‘The grubby truth about freedom of speech’.
He gave an unintended plug for GB News. Remember that Murdoch owns The Times and TalkTV:
An honest defence of free speech acknowledges that it inflicts pain on vulnerable people, disperses power unequally and has no scientifically identifiable principles — but that it is precious nonetheless. It is a grubby, unfortunate truth.
Has there ever been a less glamorous time to support free speech? Because social media companies refuse to accept editorial responsibilities, the internet is overrun with the gory worst of what humans have to say.
The most vocal modern defenders of free speech are not artists or libertines but pimply “Enlightenment bros” and the talking heads of GB News. Of course, one’s principles should never be formed in accordance with what is and isn’t trendy. So we are left as the awkward, perhaps half-embarrassed, defenders of this unhappy, dysfunctional system which is nevertheless by far the best one we’ve yet devised.
That probably explains why GB News’s ratings are way ahead of TalkTV’s.
I’ll leave the last word to The Telegraph‘s theatre critic Dominic Cavendish:
Though I’ve seen a number of his shows over the years, I didn’t catch this one. His act – initiated in the 1980s, and bolstered since the 1990s by dexterous card tricks – is easy to summarise: misanthropic, unrelenting bile, awash with expletives and at war with political correctness. No one escapes his performative contempt, which springs from him, but qualifies too as an act.
His patter is knowingly extreme, and can be extremely funny, although the exhalation of laughter wars with the sharpest intakes of breath. His offence-giving once brought him celebrity but that has been on the wane – TV has barely touched him since the early 2000s. Sick-taste comedians have come up in his wake, most successfully Jimmy Carr and Frankie Boyle, yet he has admirers across the spectrum; even Stewart Lee, the darling of the progressive Left.
As Lee wrote in the New Statesman in 2013, “because Sadowitz is one of the most complete and perfect stand-ups in history, his exact political position is complicated. By accident or design, he appears to be socially, sexually, culturally, physically and economically at the bottom of the pile. This gives him licence to attack everything and everyone, like a drowning rat swimming desperately up the U-bend. And this tells us a lot about the essence of stand-up.”
… It’s impossible to justify every line of Sadowitz’s sets but his worldview is to be suspicious of pleasantness and to detect phoneyness in progressivism. He confronts us with his viciousness and by extension, our own. Times have changed, have they? His pertinent thrust is that people haven’t.
… The Pleasance can hardly say they didn’t know who they were booking, this time around.
That they de-platformed Sadowitz just after Salman Rushdie was attacked felt doubly uncomfortable. There’s a world of difference, of course, in being told that your show is cancelled, and being stabbed in the face. But how could the Pleasance feel on the right side of history? Though worlds apart in terms of finesse, and import – Rushdie is a highbrow culture hero, Sadowitz an increasing anachronism – are the two men not both flying the flag for freedom of expression?
Today, sure, cancel Sadowitz. But tomorrow? What about other less provocative but maybe also problematic acts? Take another fringe veteran, Arthur Smith, who gratuitously if comically has a naked woman walk across stage during his Pleasance show. Should he go next? The 2022 Fringe so far has been a sun-lit occasion – but dark clouds have gathered.
I don’t like Jerry Sadowitz’s comedy but I will defend his right to perform on stage.
Like him or loathe him, where freedom of speech is concerned, he’s every bit as important as Salman Rushdie.
‘No one is remotely indispensable’.
So were the words of Boris Johnson as he stood in front of Downing Street in the early afternoon of Thursday, July 7, 2022, to announce that he was standing down as Conservative leader. He said that he planned to stay on as Prime Minister until a new leader is chosen.
Boris’s resignation speech
The Prime Minister’s speech is just over six minutes long:
Knowing how quickly the leadership contests moved in 2016 (David Cameron to Theresa May) and in 2019 (May to Johnson), we are likely to see a new party leader in place before Parliament’s summer recess. Regardless of what news outlets say, it no longer takes two or three months. The timing — i.e. summer resignations in all three cases — will accelerate because of recess.
Guido has the transcript of Boris’s speech, excerpts of which follow (I’ve put in punctuation, paragraphs and emphases):
It is now clearly the will of the parliamentary Conservative party that there should be a new leader of that party and, therefore, a new Prime Minister and I have agreed with Sir Graham Brady, the chairman of our backbench MPs [the 1922 Committee], that the process of choosing that new leader should begin now and the timetable will be announced next week.
And I have today appointed a cabinet to serve – as I will – until a new leader is in place.
So I want to say to the millions of people who voted for us in 2019 – many of them voting Conservative for the first time — thank you for that incredible mandate, the biggest Conservative majority since 1987, the biggest share of the vote since 1979.
And the reason I have fought so hard for the last few days to continue to deliver that mandate in person was not just because I wanted to do so but because I felt it was my job, my duty, my obligation to you to continue to do what we promised in 2019, and of course I am immensely proud of the achievements of this government …
He went on to list Brexit, the coronavirus vaccine rollout, coming out of lockdown the earliest of any other Western nation and showing leadership with regard to Ukraine.
He clearly regretted that he had to stand down:
If I have one insight into human beings it is that genius and talent and enthusiasm and imagination are evenly distributed throughout the population but opportunity is not, and that is why we need to keep levelling up, keep unleashing the potential of every part of the United Kingdom. And if we can do that in this country, we will be the most prosperous in Europe.
And in the last few days I have tried to persuade my colleagues that it would be eccentric to change governments when we are delivering so much and when we have such a vast mandate and when we are actually only a handful of points behind in the polls, even in mid term after quite a few months of pretty unrelenting sledging, and when the economic scene is so difficult domestically and internationally. And I regret not to have been successful in those arguments and, of course, it is painful not to be able to see through so many ideas and projects myself.
But as we’ve seen at Westminster, the herd is powerful and when the herd moves, it moves and,
my friends, in politics no one is remotely indispensable.
And our brilliant and Darwinian system will produce another leader equally committed to taking this country forward through tough times, not just helping families to get through it but changing and improving our systems, cutting burdens on businesses and families and – yes – cutting taxes, because that is the way to generate the growth and the income we need to pay for great public services.
And to that new leader I say, whoever he or she may be, I will give you as much support as I can and, to you the British people, I know that there will be many who are relieved but perhaps quite a few who will be disappointed. And I want you to know how sad I am to give up the best job in the world, but them’s the breaks.
I want to thank Carrie and our children, to all the members of my family who have had to put up with so much for so long. I want to thank the peerless British civil service for all the help and support that you have given, our police, our emergency services and, of course, our NHS who at a critical moment helped to extend my own period in office, as well as our armed services and our agencies that are so admired around the world and our indefatigable Conservative Party members and supporters whose selfless campaigning makes our democracy possible.
I want to thank the wonderful staff here at Number Ten and, of course, at Chequers and our fantastic protforce detectives – the one group, by the way, who never leak.
And, above all, I want to thank you the British public for the immense privilege you have given me.
And I want you to know that from now until the new Prime Minister is in place, your interests will be served and the government of the country will be carried on.
Being Prime Minister is an education in itself. I have travelled to every part of the United Kingdom and, in addition to the beauty of our natural world, I have found so many people possessed of such boundless British originality and so willing to tackle old problems in new ways that I know that even if things can sometimes seem dark now, our future together is golden.
Thank you all very much.
Boris delivered his speech in a normal, matter-of-fact way, which was good, especially given the circumstances.
Now that he has resigned from the Conservative leadership, some ministers are willing to come back into Government for the interim period.
As such, Boris held a Cabinet meeting at 3 p.m. today:
Those who read my post from yesterday will recall that I had not expected to cover this development until next week at the earliest.
However, yesterday afternoon into this morning was pure political carnage.
Wednesday, July 6
Junior ministerial resignations continued to pour in throughout the day, into the night.
Mid-afternoon, Boris held a second online meeting with Conservative MPs:
Guido has the story (emphases in red his):
In a sign of a continuing effort to hold on to his job, the PM has held a second meeting of Tory MPs in his parliamentary office, just 19 hours after his last meeting. Last night’s turnout was said to be around 80 – today’s turnout is said to have fallen to around 30. A loyalist MP spins that the PM was in a “buoyant mood and keen to get on with the job”. Presumably he was just happy his PMQs slagging was over and done with…
Boris apparently pointed to polls narrowing to “about five points” and left his reduced coterie of supporters under no doubt that “he’s going nowhere… no chance of stepping aside”. We’ll see what the 1922 Committee has to say about that this evening…
Guido’s mole concluded that “Basically the current challenge is all about personality and not policy. It’s a coup attempt before recess” The timetable observation is, at least, objectively correct…
At 3 p.m., Boris appeared for 90 minutes before the Liaison Committee, which is comprised of all the MPs who head Select Committees.
They grilled him on his performance and whether he would resign.
I’ve never seen anything like it. You can watch the proceedings using the link below:
These were the topics of discussion and the names of the MPs questioning him. Sir Bernard Jenkin chaired the session. Conservative MPs Tobias Ellwood and Jeremy Hunt might have their eyes on the leadership. Boris defeated Hunt in the 2019 contest:
All were brusque, including Bernard Jenkin, sadly.
That said, in May, Jenkin did write to the Leader of the House, Mark Spencer, to express his disappointment that some Government ministers were not appearing as scheduled before Select Committees:
The Liaison Committee were vipers. They were on the attack relentlessly.
Boris stood his ground. He reminded one MP that, in 2019, he had more than doubled the number of sitting Conservative MPs:
He also stated that he did not want another unnecessary general election when he had a clear mandate from the electorate to carry out. You can see how nasty Bernard Jenkin got in this short exchange:
Huw Merriman went so far as to send Sir Graham Brady, Chair of the 1922 Committee, a letter of no confidence during the session:
Meanwhile, Guido Fawkes and his team were busy updating Wednesday’s list of resignations.
The 1922 Committee was — perhaps still is — considering a rule change allowing for more than a 12-month gap between votes of confidence in a Prime Minister. Pathetic.
Guido has the story (purple emphases mine):
There are some reports that the 1922 Committee may move in the next 24 hours-or-so to dispose of the PM. Bloomberg is reporting that “The Tory backbench 1922 Committee will meet at 5 p.m. Wednesday and will discuss changing the rules to allow another party-leadership ballot. If there is a majority opinion in favor, a ballot could be held as soon as next week.” James Forsyth of the Spectator reports rule change or not, a senior committee member tells him “they now favour a delegation going to Johnson to tell him that it is over and that they will change the rules to allow another vote if he doesn’t quit”.
Guido’s post has a list the 1922’s executive members and whether or not they favour this rule change.
Later on, the 1922 decided not to change the rules — for now — because they will be holding their executive election on Monday, July 11:
Guido reported:
Surprisingly the 1922 executive has decided against changing the rules to allow a second vote of no confidence in the PM. Instead executive elections will go ahead on Monday, 2pm to 4pm.
Critics of the prime minister are organising a slate of candidates who are expected to win a majority of places, given most backbenchers voted to oust Johnson in last month’s vote. They are then expected to endorse a rule change.
During the afternoon, it was rumoured that the Chief Whip, Chris Heaton-Harris, was going to tell Boris that time was up.
Boris was hemhorrhaging support. The resignations were coming thick and fast from junior ministers. This is how it is done. The same thing happened when Labour wanted rid of Jeremy Corbyn as leader:
I used to like most of the Conservative MPs. Given what happened yesterday, I am not so sure anymore.
Those who have gone down in my estimation include former Equalities Minister Kemi Badenoch; Lee Rowley; Liam Fox; Red Wall MPs Dehenna Davison, Jacob Young and Jo Gideon; Ed Argar and former Welsh Secretary Simon Hart.
And that’s not counting the rest of them that Guido has named, including those from Tuesday.
The only one I’m willing to give a pass to is Lee Anderson.
The hubris and hypocrisy got worse.
Attorney General Suella Braverman appeared on Robert Peston’s show on ITV that night to announce her withdrawal of support for Boris. I really had expected better of her, especially as Peston has been anti-Boris for years. To add insult to injury, she went on to announce on his show that she would be running for leader:
Cabinet members visit Boris
Just before 5 p.m. a small Cabinet delegation visited Boris in Downing Street.
Guido wrote:
A Cabinet delegation of Nadhim Zahawi, Grant Shapps, Brandon Lewis, Simon Hart and Michelle Donelan are currently waiting in Downing Street to tell Boris the jig is up, and it’s time for him to step down. Kwasi Kwarteng has also reportedly lost confidence. Beginning of the end…
Note Michelle Donelan’s name in that list. Boris had just made her Education Secretary after Nadhim Zahawi moved into the Chancellor’s role.
What did Michelle Donelan do? She resigned after 36 hours in the role:
Yes, of course, she got a pay out — one of £16,876.25:
The others got pay outs, too. I read that the total for ministers who resigned is over £120,000.
That’s not a Conservative plan, by the way.
That’s how the system works.
The caboose
Just before midnight, the final resignation of the day rolled in, that of Gareth Davies, making him the 35th that day. There were ten more from Monday as well as Michael Gove, summarily sacked. It’s hard to disagree with the person comparing this to Trump:
Michael Gove
It was time for this duplicitous man to go. I never trusted him and never will.
When he turned from supporting Boris in the 2016 leadership campaign to start his own before supporting Theresa May, he stabbed him in both the front and the back.
One thing we have learned during Boris’s premiership is that he — Boris — is one to forgive.
He made Gove part of his Cabinet in various high profile roles.
On Wednesday, Gove decided to tell Boris to resign:
Gove, most recently the Levelling Up minister, was conspicuous by his absence in the House of Commons. He missed Prime Minister’s Questions:
News emerged at 9:30 that Boris sacked Gove — via a telephone call:
I will be very disappointed if Gove returns to a Government role. He is a Scot who, in my opinion, is too young at the age of 54 to appreciate the Union fully, and he does not have the Englishman’s best interests at heart.
I’ve never heard him say anything about England other than to do away with English Votes for English Laws (EVEL) in 2021. As the then-Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, he deemed it unnecessary in Parliament. It was a quick, quiet moment in the Commons. I do wonder why it went unchallenged by English MPs.
Yet, the English are the ones who have been overlooked the most over the past 25 years, beginning with Tony Blair, a quasi-Scot who pumped our Government and media full of many more Scots, e.g. Gordon Brown, to name but one. My apologies to Scottish readers, whom I admire greatly, but it is true.
Christian Calgie from Guido’s team explains that Boris might have sacked Gove because, unlike the Cabinet secretaries who had descended upon him earlier, Gove allegedly told Boris to resign:
By the end of Wednesday, it became clear that Boris was not about to leave:
Guido reported:
Guido has had it confirmed by a PM ultra loyalist that Boris Johnson is not resigning tonight, and is understood to be planning a reshuffle. The news will spark further senior cabinet resignations…
According to reports, Boris sat down individual members of the Cabinet – including those involved in the coup – and cited his 2019 mandate, as well as the belief the government needs to spend the summer focusing on the economy and not a leadership election …
I watched four hours of analysis on GB News on Wednesday, beginning with Nigel Farage …
… and concluding with Dan Wootton, who had a great interview with Boris’s father Stanley Johnson (see the 1 hour 15 mark, or, if the GB News clock shows, 10:21). Stanley is a big supporter of his son, which was heartening to see:
Thursday, July 7
Conservative ministers continued to resign en masse on Thursday morning, July 7.
Guido has a timeline of resignations and other events of the day.
Just before 9 a.m., Chancellor Nadhim Zahawi sent Boris a formal letter requesting his resignation.
Just after 9 a.m., Defence Secretary Ben Wallace — also thought to be a candidate for Conservative leader — tweeted MPs to say that they should make use of the 1922 Committee to get rid of Boris:
At 9:07 a.m., news emerged that Boris agreed to resign as Conservative Party leader. I agree that the next demand from the braying hypocrite hyenas in the media will be a call for a general election. Disgusting:
Guido reported:
Chris Mason has been told the PM has agreed with Graham Brady that he will resign, allowing a Tory leadership race to take place ahead of the Tory Party conference in October. A letter has been written. He’ll quit as Tory leader today. Guido’s frankly not sure how Boris can stay on for the summer with so many ministerial holes in his government…
Perhaps we can get by with fewer ministers, as someone said in Parliament this morning.
I hope that Boris’s Cabinet meeting at 3 p.m. went well.
Not everyone has been happy with the coup so far. Former Conservative Prime Minister John Major is fuming. It’s interesting he never reacted like that about David Cameron or Theresa May:
In brighter news, Boris’s loyal friend from Ukraine rang him with his condolences and thanks:
1457: PM has spoken to Zelensky on the phone. Finished the call by praising him: “You’re a hero, everybody loves you.”
Yes, well, I wished our MPs loved Boris as much as President Zelenskyy does.
Ladies and gentlemen, this was a coup.
It was for a ridiculous reason, too:
Don’t forget: this was ALL ABOUT BREXIT.
More to follow next week.
To follow this series, it is helpful to read parts 1 and 2.
We left off on Sunday, May 8, 2022. That day, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer had cancelled an appearance at an Institute for Government event on Monday in advance of the Queen’s Speech on Tuesday.
Labour’s campaign beer and curry event took place on April 30, 2021. The Sun made it public soon afterwards, but it did not get traction from other papers, namely The Telegraph and the Mail, until January 2022. Durham Constabulary only decided to really investigate it on Friday, May 6, 2022. Starmer took legal advice and cancelled his public appearance on Monday, May 9.
Journalists and pundits noted the length of time between the event, its wider coverage, the internal memo about the event leaked to the Mail on Sunday and Starmer’s reaction to the press coverage it received. No one forgot Starmer’s spending from December 2021 to May 2022 calling for Boris Johnson’s resignation over Downing Street events:
With the shoe being on the other foot, Labour supporters wanted Starmer’s event, held in Labour MP Mary Foy’s Durham office, to disappear from the public consciousness. Didn’t we know there was a war on in Ukraine? Didn’t anyone care about the cost of living crisis? Suddenly, breaking coronavirus restriction rules was something no one should care about unless it had to do with Boris and Downing Street.
Mail on Sunday journalist Dan Hodges noted the hypocrisy:
A YouGov poll published on Monday showed that the public thought Starmer should stand down if he gets a fine:
Guido Fawkes has YouGov’s breakdown of the public’s opinion on both Starmer and Boris. Not surprisingly, more people think that Boris should resign. That said, Conservative voters are more forgiving of Starmer than are Labour voters. That’s because most Conservatives believe in repentance.
Guido says a majority of the public think that Starmer broke the rules:
The general public is firmly of the view that Starmer should resign, at 46% agreeing versus 32% opposing. They also comfortably believe Starmer either did definitely or probably break the rules (54%) to probably didn’t or definitely didn’t (21%).
Guido conducted his own poll on Monday, May 9. Just under 50 per cent thought that the Labour leader — and Leader of the Opposition (LOTO) — should resign using the same standards that he applied to Boris:
Earlier on Monday, Starmer decided to issue a short statement to the media at 4 p.m. that day. By the time Guido closed his poll, there was a half hour left before that small, select event took place.
Guido’s post on the poll says (emphases in the original):
With Sir Keir expected to make a statement on Beergate at 4pm today, Guido asked co-conspirators how they’d advise Starmer if they were by his side in the LOTO office over the weekend. Resign right away? Wait for the police investigation? Tough it out…?
Thousands voted, and it turns out readers are divided. Half (49.6%) think Starmer should resign at the podium today – given he called for Boris’s resignation the moment the police launched their inquiry – 28.9% think he should resign only if fined, with a further 21.5% saying he should tough it out regardless of the police outcome. Guido’s own view is that the latter choice is politically impossible given his approach to Partygate. Demanding Boris and Rishi resign over a birthday cake set the bar incredibly high for his own behaviour – a bar he hasn’t met. If he’s not going to resign today, then his only real option is to promise he’ll go if Durham Police whack him with a fine…
Starmer invited only three journalists to hear his statement.
He said he would resign if fined.
Guido analysed that statement and said there was more to it than one might think:
Seeing as Charles — now Lord — Falconer is advising Starmer, Blairite tactics could come into play:
Sir Keir has just confirmed he will resign in the event of being given a fine, an unprecedented announcement from a Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition … Guido can see another obvious tactic at play from the pound shop Blair wannabee…
In 2007, when under investigation for the Cash For Honours scandal, Tony Blair’s team warned the Metropolitan Police that the PM would have to resign if interviewed under caution, forcing them to back off under such immense political pressure:
Sources close to the inquiry said that there were difficult discussions before a political intermediary made senior detectives aware of the serious implications of treating the Prime Minister as a suspect.
“Make no mistake, Scotland Yard was informed that Mr Blair would resign as Prime Minister if he was interviewed under caution,” said a source. “They were placed in a very difficult position indeed.”
On Saturday, when Guido exclusively revealed Lord Falconer has been tasked with putting together out Sir Keir’s legal defence, he didn’t expect Blair’s Justice Secretary to copy the tactic used by his old party boss so like-for-like. Unfortunately for Starmer one of his team accidentally explained the quiet bit out loud to ITV’s Daniel Hewitt, briefing “it puts some pressure on Durham Police who are being leant on in one direction”. Former DPP [Director of Public Prosecutions] Sir Keir knows a thing or two about letting police forces fudge an investigation and letting the culprit get away…
Hmm:
It will be interesting to see how a campaign team can justify alcohol at a notional working event, especially as a few overdid it:
Guido was referring to a Politico article by Alex Wickham, who wrote that he received no denials of the following account containing mentions of drunkenness:
On Tuesday, May 10 — Day 13 of Beergate — the Mail led with Starmer’s alleged piling of pressure on Durham police:
That day, fallout followed Starmer’s cosy Monday afternoon session with only three journalists.
The Sun‘s political editor Harry Cole was left out in the cold. ‘Lobby’ refers to the media:
Guido said this was but another episode in a long-running period in which Labour have not been transparent with the media:
Guido has been tracking this issue for some time:
Guido’s campaign to get Labour to publish their shadow cabinet meetings with media proprietors and editors, as pledged following Leveson, seems to be going nowhere, despite repeated promises from Labour HQ to pull their finger out. Yesterday Labour’s relationship with press transparency got colder, when Sir Keir invited just three tame broadcasters into the room, blocking any hacks who may have asked difficult questions from attending. GB News’ Tom Harwood was told this was due to “limited space”. Guido is old enough to remember when the Lobby was collectively outraged when only selected broadcasters were invited by Lee Cain [Boris’s former Downing Street Director of Communications] for a briefing…
Now Guido’s spotted another press frontier on which Labour’s dropping the ball: publishing press releases. Labour’s website hasn’t published a press release in over 40 days, the most protracted period of policy publishing paralysis since Starmer took over …
Perhaps not a good look when even the Labour-supporting press is starting to suggest Sir Keir needs some policies to win, not just claims of personal sainthood…
That day, YouGov published a new poll taken on May 5 and 6 that shows the Conservatives were one point below Labour. Other polls still show Labour in the lead, but here is YouGov’s take:
Guido wrote:
Margin of error territory as the public no longer perceives Sir Keir as “Mr Rules”. One poll so far so will be intrigued to see if this is a trend…
Prince Charles delivered the Queen’s Speech that morning for the State Opening of Parliament.
In the afternoon, both the Commons and the Lords began separate debates on the 38 proposed bills in the Queen’s Speech.
In the Commons, at least, the week-long debate, called the Humble Address, begins jovially, and it is an honour to be the MP selected to open it.
The lucky MP was Graham Stuart (Conservative), who represents Beverley and Holderness.
He cracked a joke about Keir Starmer as he reviewed Labour’s dominance in the North of England prior to the Conservatives’ breaking through the Red Wall in 2019 (emphases in purple mine):
Robert [Sir Robert Goodwill], of course, won selection in Scarborough. He then went on to overturn Lawrie Quinn’s 3,500 majority, and was, I think, along with my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies), the only Conservative candidate in the whole of the north of England to take a seat from the Labour party at that election. The Leader of the Opposition must wish it was so today. Instead the only thing opening up for him in the north is a police investigation. [Laughter.]
Guido has the video. Look at Starmer’s painfully forced smile:
Stuart had another go when discussing the corruption in his constituency in the 18th and 19th centuries:
Obviously the law did change. Free beer and cash inducements were the electoral controversies then, rather than, say, beer and curry today. Never in the history of human conflict has so much karma come from a korma.
Some time later, it was Boris’s turn to speak, introducing the important bills. Labour MPs intervened until he put a stop to them.
Of the energy bill, he said:
The energy Bill will create hundreds of thousands of new green jobs, taking forward this Government’s energy security strategy—it is about time this country had one—with £22 billion—[Interruption.] Labour did not want a single nuclear power station. Come on, be honest. Look at them, the great quivering jellies of indecision that they are. Our £22 billion UK Infrastructure Bank is supporting the transition to net zero and vast new green industries, in which our United Kingdom will again lead the world.
Boris quickly moved on to the economy and the Channel crossings of illegal migrants, during which he added a quip:
We are using our new freedoms to control our borders, with a new plan for immigration so that we can fix our broken asylum system, tackle the illegal immigration that undermines the legal immigration that we support and crack down on the vile people smugglers. I know that the Leader of the Opposition—perhaps I should, in deference to his phrase, refer to him as the Leader of the Opposition of the moment—likes to claim he opposes these plans …
Guido has the video, which is much more entertaining than reading the transcript. Boris was at his best:
That evening, The Guardian reported that Labour MPs were already talking about a change in leadership. Speaking personally, so far, Wes Streeting is the strongest candidate they have:
The majority of shadow ministers said they were grimly resigned to Starmer’s pledge – but said there were likely to be internal consequences. “I think once you start talking up the prospect of your own resignation you are on dangerous ground,” one said.
Another veteran MP, a Starmer loyalist, said they suspected ulterior motives from some shadow cabinet members. “If you fancy Keir’s job, this is win-win,” they said.
Rule changes pushed through at last year’s Labour conference mean a fifth of MPs must nominate any candidate for the party leadership in order for them to be put to a members’ postal vote – a higher threshold than under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership and a move that was seen by those on the left as intending to disadvantage their candidates.
One MP said a snap leadership contest would put ascendant shadow cabinet ministers such as Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, in an advantageous position. “[Starmer’s] disappearance now would obviously benefit the Blairite right – [the mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy] Burnham couldn’t stand, Sadiq Khan [the London mayor] couldn’t stand, Angela would be out of the picture for the same reason as Keir because if he goes on this she has said she will go too.”
If both Starmer and Rayner are forced to resign, there is no obvious interim leader. The most senior members of Starmer’s shadow cabinet – Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor; Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary; David Lammy, the shadow foreign secretary; Streeting; and Lisa Nandy, the shadow levelling up secretary – are all potential candidates in a contest. The party’s national executive committee would have to vote to designate an alternative member of the shadow cabinet.
A source close to Starmer said he was relaxed about the ambitions of his shadow cabinet. “I don’t think anyone is actively trying to undermine him. It says a lot about our party that there are so many potential candidates – look at the contrast again with the Tories. If people are ambitious, let them be.”
An ally of Streeting said: “Wes was on the media batting for Keir three times over the weekend and into Monday. He’s one of Keir’s most loyal and vocal supporters. After a great set of a local election results there is everything to play for at the next general election thanks to Keir’s leadership. This is no time for introspection.”
Senior figures in the Labour leader’s team are understood to have felt reluctant to advise Starmer he should raise the prospect of his own resignation.
On Wednesday, May 11, The Sun criticised Keir Starmer’s response to the Queen’s Speech. When responding to Boris on Tuesday, Starmer had no Labour policies to present. He merely criticised the Government at length and ended with this:
It does not have to be this way; it will not always be this way. A Labour Government would tackle the cost of living crisis head on, get Britain growing again after 12 years of failure, and improve public services so that they deliver for the people paying for them. A Labour Government would rise to the moment where this Government have badly failed.
The Sun‘s editorial, ‘Holey agenda’, said (bold in the original):
IS Keir Starmer chasing the wrong job?
He has no ideas anyone can detect, as his vacuous response to the Queen’s Speech proves. He clearly thinks it’s enough to be ‘decent’ and ‘honourable’.
Tribal Labour voters may lap up his preening sanctimony. Millions of others prefer leaders with vision and drive.
You’re auditioning for PM, Mr Starmer. Not Archbishop of Canterbury.
That day, digging around, Guido raised the matter of an early pandemic violation in Durham: that of Boris’s then-adviser Dominic Cummings at Barnard Castle in the Spring of 2020.
Durham Constabulary said at the time that there was nothing to investigate. They also stated that they did not issue retrospective fines.
As punishment, Boris made Cummings hold a lengthy televised press conference to explain himself. It lasted well over an hour and was most peculiar. At the end, after having asked many questions, one by one, reporters and broadcasters walked up individually to Cummings’s table to tell him what they thought of him.
Cummings’s press conference was his public penance.
Then again, parts of it were theatre for the public, most of whom didn’t know he is friends with many of those journalists, as is his wife. He addressed only one by his full name: Gary Gibbon from Channel 4 News.
Two years on with Starmer — and other Labour MPs in the frame — the Party’s ire was rising in Durham.
Mary Foy MP, who hosted the Durham gathering in 2021, had written a lengthy letter to Boris on May 28, 2020 about Cummings, who is pictured below in the background. The letter beneath it is recent. It is from the leader of Durham’s Labour Party to Red Wall Conservative MP Richard Holden, who had written to Durham Constabulary a few weeks ago to enquire as to whether they would investigate the 2021 Starmer event:
Mary Foy’s letter would have been better addressed to Durham Constabulary. It was up to them, not Boris, to take action against Cummings.
However, Foy took issue with Boris’s refusal to sack Cummings. In the event, he resigned a few months later for other reasons and was gone by the end of 2020.
Guido wrote about Foy’s letter, which can be viewed in its entirety on his post:
Now that Sir Keir is feeling the heat from his boozy lockdown curry night, Labour MPs are bending over backwards to explain why their leader’s Covid rule-breaking is somehow completely different to Boris’s, and why it’s right that Starmer remains in post provided he isn’t fined. One particular MP who might have some trouble with this is none other than the Honourable Member for Durham, Mary Foy…
Foy is probably best known for hosting the Beergate bhuna session in her constituency office, laughing and drinking merrily with her colleagues while the country was still in stage two of lockdown. She then went on to scream at Richard Holden for his asking Durham Police to reinvestigate the event. It turns out, however, that when Durham Police announced they wouldn’t fine Dominic Cummings over the infamous Barnard Castle trip, Foy had a few ideas about what should happen next. None of which involved Cummings keeping his job…
Here’s what Foy wrote in a public letter to Boris after the Cummings story:
The vast majority of constituents who have contacted me have expressed the view that Mr Cummings’ actions have been insensitive and unacceptable at best, and many feel that they warrant further investigation by the police.
While I understand today’s decision by Durham Police to take no further action, many of the constituents who have written to me would like Mr Cummings to resign or be sacked. Clearly, whether you stick by him or not is a matter for you, but the perception from my constituents, and I would hazard a guess that this is a common view across the North East, is that you are currently putting the interests of your chief adviser above that of the people of the region and the country as a whole.
Even though Cummings received no fixed penalty, and the police decided they’d take no further action, Foy still took the time to write a two-page letter informing the Prime Minister how upset her constituents are, and politely suggested Cummings lose his job. Presumably her office is inundated with similar letters now, all demanding Sir Keir does the honourable thing…
Labourites criticised Times Radio’s Lucy Fisher for mentioning Cummings and Starmer in the same tweet:
However, it would be wrong to think that Durham Constabulary never issued any fines — fixed penalty notices — for coronavirus violations.
On Thursday, May 12, The Times informed us of a fine Durham Constabulary issued to a bereaved woman in November 2020:
Some of Starmer’s supporters have assumed that detectives would not issue a fixed-penalty notice because they decided not to take retrospective action against Dominic Cummings, the prime minister’s former adviser.
However, the force’s approach appeared to harden later in the pandemic and it issued a £10,000 fine to a woman who organised a balloon release in memory of her father-in-law, who died of Covid.
Vicky Hutchinson held the gathering on November 11, 2020, in a field opposite a church in Horden, Co Durham, where Ian Stephenson’s funeral was due to take place a few days later. Her £10,000 fine was reduced to £500, based on her ability to pay, when she attended Peterlee magistrates’ court on April 23 last year, a week before the Starmer incident.
A court report by The Northern Echo revealed that Hutchinson, in her mid-thirties, had urged friends and family to wear masks and stay socially distanced at the balloon release. It said that police did not attend the gathering of about 30 people and there was no disorder.
However, it appears that there was a retrospective investigation after a complaint. Durham police analysed a livestream video of the event before issuing the fine, the report said.
The approach to Hutchinson’s case raises fresh questions about how the Durham force might handle the case of Starmer, who has denied wrongdoing …
Durham police did not respond to requests for comment.
Also on Thursday, Guido returned to Dominic Cummings, specifically what Keir Starmer said about the incident in 2020:
Guido has the quote:
Here’s what he said of Cummings back in 2020 – before the police had even launched their investigation:
This was a huge test of the Prime Minister, and he’s just failed that test. He hasn’t sacked Dominic Cummings, he hasn’t called for an investigation, and he’s treating the British public with contempt… that’s not a reasonable interpretation of the rules, and the Prime Minister knows it. One rule for the Prime Minister’s advisers, another rule for everyone else… If I were Prime Minister, I’d have sacked Cummings.
One rule for the Prime Minister’s advisers, another for Sir Keir…
And finally, London’s Metropolitan Police confirmed that they have now issued more than 100 fines for Downing Street events. Neither Boris nor his wife Carrie received one in this tranche:
Guido wrote:
A month on from their last update on Partygate, paused thanks to the local elections, the Met’s confirmed “more than 100″ fixed penalty notices have now been handed out. Downing Street say Boris has not received another fine…
Later that afternoon, GB News’s Colin Brazier and his guests discussed the Met’s issuing of fines to people who were at Downing Street gatherings.
It’s a bit rich for Brazier’s contributors to say that the Met want to channel their resources elsewhere. There are few police forces these days, including the Met, who want to investigate actual crime. This massive dispensing of fines also looks rather selective:
There is also the issue of double standards which irritate many members of the public:
Personally, I think the way the pandemic was handled was dystopian. I don’t know what to think about these fines. Part of me wants to see all of them refunded and any related criminal record for violations erased.
On the other hand, it seems only right that, if Labour have done wrong, they, too, should be fined.
So far, only the Conservatives have been. The Met have made them look positively criminal. Well, that’s par for the course in Labour-controlled London.
I’ll update this in due course.
End of series
Yesterday’s post reviewed events surrounding Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer and other MPs connected with 2021’s campaign meeting, forbidden under that year’s coronavirus rules:
Keir Starmer defended Labour’s indoor beer and korma event by saying that no other venue was serving food.
Well, they were. However, the problem was that service was outdoors only at that time.
The hotel where Starmer was staying, the Radisson Blu, provided room service, but that would have precluded any other persons gathering in an individual’s room.
On the evening of Election Day, Thursday 5, 2022, GB News’s Dan Wootton interviewed Red Wall MP Richard Holden, who had written to Durham Constabulary about properly investigating the event:
Holden said that the students who took the videos and photos offered to give Durham police a statement, but their kind offer was refused.
Holden suggested that evidence was being suppressed. He also questioned the fact that people involved had forgotten their diary details for that day.
As for dining, Holden said that, in order to comply with the rules, he had been part of a group eating a fish and chips supper outdoors in Hartlepool in windy conditions.
On Friday, May 6, Durham Constabulary finally issued a statement saying they would investigate the event held on April 30, 2021:
Labour MP Emily Thornberry dismissed the news and said all would be ‘fine’:
The BBC reported that Durham Constabulary waited until after the election to make an announcement (emphases in purple mine):
The force initially decided that no offence had occurred on 30 April last year, but said it had since received “significant new information”.
It added that it had delayed announcing the investigation until after Thursday’s local elections.
Sir Keir said he was confident he hadn’t broken any Covid rules.
He has faced criticism since he was filmed drinking a bottle of beer while in the constituency office of City of Durham MP Mary Foy.
Speaking to reporters on Friday, he said he had “stopped for something to eat” during meetings, and there was “no party”.
“The police obviously have go their job to do – we should let them get on with it,” he added.
Starmer took no questions on the matter:
Guido Fawkes resurrected a Starmer tweet from January 31:
Priceless:
The Telegraph‘s Madeline Grant made an eloquent observation …
… which received these replies:
Later that day, Guido posted about the concerns that Starmer’s advisers had with the upcoming investigation:
Guido’s post says that a journalist, Ava Evans, heard that Labour MPs would not be doing media rounds for a few days (emphases in the original):
Ava also reports that one Labour MP told her they would not be participating in any media interviews for the next few days, for fear of being asked to defend Sir Keir. His actions were “indefensible” she reports them as saying. Which explains why we are only seeing Emily Thornberry abasing herself in studios…
On Saturday morning, news emerged that Starmer was taking legal advice from Lord Falconer, Tony Blair’s close friend who served as Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice from 2003 to 2007:
Guido reported on the development, an exclusive:
An extremely worried Keir Starmer has tasked Charlie Falconer with putting together a Beergate legal defence team. Labour lawyers have told Starmer that there is a 60% chance that he will escape a fine, however the fining of Sunak over a cake has spooked Starmer that he too could be fined over a beer and curry. The irony of the legal and political situation is exquisitely painful for the barrister politician.
Guido later added an update:
UPDATE: In another irony, Falconer has publicly opined on the situation of politicians breaching laws they voted for in the Guardian:
… true accountability means facing justice in a criminal court. But not in this case – a fixed penalty notice does not bring any sense of justice done to those who paid what was very often a high price for obeying the rules.
Which appears to be a demand that Boris be tried in court for his birthday cake….
One of Guido’s readers wondered if Falconer’s involvement presented a conflict of interest, given his strong opinions on the matter:
That isn’t the only conflict of interest, either. There’s also Durham’s Police and Crime Commissioner, Joy Allen. Starmer campaigned for her and she won her election to that post:
The Mail on Sunday was able to obtain a leaked memo, Starmer’s itinerary for April 30, 2021:
This was the paper’s front page:
Glen Owen’s exclusive for the MoS says:
The bombshell document, marked ‘private and confidential’, also calls into serious doubt Sir Keir’s claim that he returned to work after the beers and takeaway curries.
After the entry recording the ‘dinner in Miners Hall’ – which includes a note to ‘arrange takeaway from Spice Lounge’, a local curry house – the document simply says: ‘End of visit.’
Spice Lounge did not supply food for the event. Another curry house, The Capital, did.
The paper received the memo from a whistleblower. The itinerary reveals that Angela Rayner MP was scheduled to be present:
The memo – which was passed to this newspaper by a whistleblower – also further undermines Labour’s claims that it made ‘an honest mistake’ when it denied that Deputy Leader Angela Rayner was at the event: it lists ‘AR’ alongside ‘KS’ as the two senior politicians anchoring the day’s proceedings.
Labour had denied that this was a planned event, but the memo’s existence proves that wrong:
… the note – a forward-planning logistics document which is referred to as an ‘op note’ – makes clear the beer and curries had been planned in advance.
The note says that after a day’s campaigning in Hartlepool, Sir Keir’s team were due to arrive at the Radisson Blu hotel in Durham at 6.31pm, leaving by 7pm to walk to the Miners Hall.
After recording clips for the media, the note says a 1hr 20mins slot was set aside for ‘dinner in Miners Hall with Mary Foy’, the local Durham MP. A side note reads: ‘YS to arrange takeaway from Spice Lounge’. YS is the acronym for a member of Sir Keir’s private office.
The Spice Lounge curry house was closed at the time, with callers being referred to the nearby Capital Indian restaurant. Last week, the Daily Mail spoke to one of the restaurant’s delivery drivers, who said he had dropped off a ‘big’ order of food for at least 15 people, including four bags of curries, rice and naan bread …
The Mail on Sunday has established that the Radisson Blu was serving food when Sir Keir and his party checked in at 6.31pm and continued to do so until 9pm …
The document also refers to four members of the ‘MPL’ – Met Police Liaison – who were included in the trip, suggesting they are likely to have information useful to the investigation.
Also included on the op note is the line ‘Covid Alert Level: National Lockdown’, and ‘important note: please maintain social distancing of 2m and wear face coverings whilst indoors at all time’.
The leaked document makes clear that Ms Rayner was to play a central role in the day’s events …
A Labour source said: ‘During a fast-moving campaign, the op note doesn’t always keep up with events so it would be wrong to assume that activities occurred at the times originally planned. For example, it’s been documented that the takeaway was late’.
This was Starmer’s previous denial that the gathering had been planned:
The Sunday Times also had an incriminating article. A source told the paper that some staffers were there only to party and that no work was done afterwards. Pictured below is Mary Foy MP:
It is expected that the investigation will take between four and six weeks:
Allegedly, pictures from the event circulated on Twitter. Those have since been deleted.
Interesting, to say the least:
The aforementioned Sunday Times article said that the Durham Constabulary have opened a major incident room. Angela Rayner’s presence appears to have triggered the investigation:
It was the discovery that Rayner had been at the event, despite Labour’s original claims, that prompted Durham police to open their investigation. A source close to the force said: “It raises the question about what else we might not have been told the entire truth about.”
Officers have set up a major incident room, and up to six detectives will spend the next four to six weeks looking at the potential lockdown breach. They are expected to use questionnaires — similar to the ones used by Scotland Yard to investigate Johnson and the Downing Street scandals — to interrogate those present at the event.
The force said, however, that it did not issue fines retrospectively. When Dominic Cummings was found to have made a 260-mile trip to Barnard Castle in 2020, the force said to take action against him would “amount to treating Mr Cummings differently from other members of the public”.
It is unclear whether Scotland Yard’s decision to issue retrospective fines over the Downing Street gatherings could force a change of stance.
Mary Foy said:
“Me and my team were working during a very busy period, including facilitating the leader’s visit,” she said. “I do not believe either I or my office broke any rules, and I will of course fully engage with any police investigation.”
Dominic Raab, the Justice Secretary and Deputy Prime Minister, said:
“It’s the rank double standards that drive people crazy,” Raab told Sky News. “He needs to fess up and answer all of the holes in the account that he gave for that beer-and-curry event in Durham.
“Keir Starmer looks like, I’m afraid, someone who is engaged in complete hypocrisy, complete double standards and I don’t think he is going to get past that until he gives a proper account of what happened in Durham.”
Here’s the video of Raab talking to Sky News:
Jacob Rees-Mogg MP, in charge of Brexit efficiency, told Channel 4’s Andrew Neil that one should be extremely careful with hoisted petards:
He does have a way with words.
Guido took a look at what Lord Falconer might say in Starmer’s defence:
That said, in February, The Mirror reported that Prime Minister Boris Johnson also hired lawyers over ‘Partygate’:
The Prime Minister has hired hot shot lawyers to deal with the Met’s questions on Partygate.
The Mail reported that Starmer had cancelled his appearance on Monday, May 9, at an Institute for Government event in advance of the Queen’s Speech on Tuesday.
Guido tweeted:
Guido’s post says:
The public event was scheduled to have included questions from the press and public. This morning, when door-stepped outside his North London home by journalists, a grim faced Starmer refused to say anything and was bundled into a waiting Range Rover. Keir clearly realises that “the police have already investigated this matter and found nothing” will no longer work as a line.
The Institute for Government is funded by the billionaire David Sainsbury, a former Labour minister under Tony Blair, who has backed centrist Labour politicians financially in the past. A statement on the website says only that the event is cancelled, with no explanation given.
The cancellation made the front page of Monday’s Daily Mail:
It was the start of another tense week for the Labour leader.
Meanwhile, Boris focused on the Queen’s Speech and historic agreements between the UK, Sweden and Finland in case of Russian aggression as a knock-on effect of the Ukraine conflict.
More to follow tomorrow.
Churchmouse Campanologist 