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Matt Hancock looms large in The Telegraph‘s Lockdown Files series which ended earlier this month.
For more background, see parts 1 and 2.
Matt Hancock latest
The series continues after an update on latest news about the UK’s former Health and Social Care Secretary.
On Saturday, March 25, 2023, The Guardian reported that Hancock had been one of a handful of Conservative MPs caught in a prank set up by the left-wing activist group Led By Donkeys, ‘Top Tory MPs ask for £10,000 a day to work for fake Korean company’ (emphases mine):
The former chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, and former health secretary, Matt Hancock, agreed to work for £10,000 a day to further the interests of a fake South Korean firm after apparently being duped by the campaign group Led by Donkeys.
Kwarteng attended a preliminary meeting at his parliamentary office and agreed in principle to be paid the daily rate after saying he did not require a “king’s ransom”. When Hancock was asked his daily rate, he responded: “It’s 10,000 sterling” …
The senior politicians have complied with all relevant rules and referred to their obligation to their constituents during preliminary meetings. The Led by Donkeys project, conducted with investigative reporter Antony Barnett, comes at a time when people face a cost of living crisis. The campaign group released a report on its investigation on Twitter on Saturday, with recorded undercover footage …
The purported firm that approached the politicians did not exist and had a rudimentary foreign website with fake testimonials. MPs have been warned by the Home Office to be on their guard against the “threat of foreign interference”, and the group’s investigation demonstrated the ease with which they seemed able to gain access to the MPs.
Led by Donkeys is understood to have approached 20 MPs from the Conservative party, Labour and Liberal Democrats after examining the outside earnings of MPs on the parliamentary register of interests. An email sent by the fake investment and consulting firm, Hanseong Consulting, said it wanted individuals for an international advisory board to “help our clients navigate the shifting political, regulatory and legislative frameworks” in the UK and Europe.
It said advisers would be required to attend six board meetings a year, with a “very attractive” remuneration package and “generous expenses” for international travel. Five MPs agreed to be interviewed on Zoom, with one who was clearly suspicious of the firm’s credentials terminating the call. The MPs were interviewed by a woman purporting to be a senior executive, with a backdrop of the skyline of Seoul, the South Korean capital, at her office window …
In early March, Hancock agreed to an online meeting for the advisory role. The Telegraph had that week published his leaked cache of more than 100,000 WhatsApp messages, but he seemed relaxed for the meeting with the fake foreign firm. He said it had been “quite a busy week” but that March was the “start of hope”.
“We were wondering, do you have a daily rate at the moment?” he was asked by the interviewer, posing as a senior business executive. “I do, yes,” Hancock replied. “It’s 10,000 sterling.”
… Hancock is an independent MP after he had the whip suspended for taking part in I’m a Celebrity, for which he was paid £320,000, with Rishi Sunak’s spokesperson saying at the time that “MPs should be working hard for their constituents”.
Hancock said in the meeting that he followed the “spirit and letter” of parliamentary rules, and would also require additional approval for the role because he had been a minister, but outside interests were permitted. He said he was mindful of the responsibility to serve his constituents …
Led by Donkeys was established in 2018 as a campaign in response to Brexit. Its high-profile projects and satirical stunts have since included a spoof episode of the BBC show Line of Duty with Boris Johnson being interrogated by the anti-corruption AC-12 unit and painting the colours of the Ukrainian flag outside the Russian embassy in London.
A spokesperson for Hancock said: “The accusation appears to be that Matt acted entirely properly and within the rules, which had just been unanimously adopted by parliament. It’s absurd to bring Mr Hancock into this story through the illegal publication of a private conversation. All the video shows is Matt acting completely properly.”
Furthermore, Matt will be looking for a new job as he will not be standing again as an MP come the next general election.
Although I am not a defender of Hancock, former BBC presenter Jon Sopel is hardly in a position to take pot shots at him, considering that he, too, fancies filthy lucre, as Guido Fawkes revealed on Monday, March 27:
Days earlier, on March 18, The Mail‘s Richard Eden reported that Hancock’s girlfriend and her estranged husband sold their South London house to Gordon Ramsay for several million pounds:
Should she ever tire of turning her boyfriend, Matt Hancock, into a TV star, Gina Coladangelo has a lucrative alternative career as a property tycoon.
I can disclose that she and her estranged husband, Oliver Tress, managed to sell their marital home to fiery TV chef Gordon Ramsay and his wife, Tana, for a staggering £7.5 million.
It’s an astonishing price for the area of South London. Not only is it almost double the £3.8million that Gina and Tress paid in 2015, but it’s £2.5 million more than the top price paid previously for any property in their street.
Zoopla had estimated its value as between £3.8 million and £4.6 million …
The sale, which Land Registry documents confirm went through in January, is all the more impressive as it comes when British property prices are predicted to plunge by ten per cent.
The five-bedroom Edwardian house is in one of London’s most desirable areas. Ramsay, 56, and his wife, 48, bought it in their joint names from Gina and Tress, the founder of upmarket homeware and clothing chain Oliver Bonas.
Gina, 45, left Tress, 55, with whom she has three children, for former health secretary Hancock, 44, who competed in I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out Of Here!.
Ramsay, who has an estimated fortune of £175 million, already owns a huge house, said to be worth £7 million, less than a mile away …
Last year, he, Tana and their five children were reported to have temporarily moved out after work began on a super-basement …
Tatler adds:
It is easy to see why Ramsay might need a new home. The chef announced at the start of the year that he and wife Tana are expecting their sixth child. On the Heart Breakfast show, the chef said that ‘there’s one more on the way’ to join their five children: Megan, 25, twins Jack and Holly, 23, Tilly, 21, and Oscar, three. Holly recently featured as one of the most eligible singles at Tatler’s Little Black Book party. According to Hello! magazine, the Ramsays are believed to have paid in cash for their new luxury pad; they also own a £6 million house in Cornwall and a mansion in Los Angeles. Gordon and Tana marked their 26th wedding anniversary very recently, having married in Chelsea in 1996.
On March 6, as The Lockdown Files were drawing to a close, The Telegraph reported, ‘Matt Hancock cancelled after indiscreet WhatsApps “upset” travel industry’:
A major international travel conference has axed Matt Hancock from its programme after The Telegraph revealed he had been highly critical of the travel sector during the pandemic.
The Institute of Travel and Tourism (ITT) confirmed that Mr Hancock will no longer be speaking at its annual conference in Doha, Qatar, saying that the messages uncovered by The Telegraph had caused upset to many in the travel industry.
Last week, as part of its Lockdown Files series, The Telegraph revealed that Mr Hancock and Simon Case, the country’s most senior civil servant, shared jokes about those being forced to stay in quarantine hotel rooms during the pandemic …
The former health secretary was also highly critical of the airline and airports industry, describing them as being “totally offside” and “unhelpful”, while Mr Case [top civil servant Simon Case] labelled them as “horribly self-serving” ...
In a statement to The Telegraph, Steven Freudman, chairman of the ITT, said that Mr Hancock had become a “major distraction”.
He added: “We have over 25 distinguished speakers and it would have been unfair on them for the focus to have been solely on Matt Hancock.”
The ITT annual conference is regarded as one of the sector’s key annual events, with thousands of travel professionals and high-profile speakers from across the globe attending.
The initial decision to invite Mr Hancock as a speaker at the conference was widely criticised by sector figures even before The Lockdown Files revelations were published.
Industry figures told The Independent that they wanted the ITT to reconsider its decision, accusing Mr Hancock’s policies of “destroying the sector” and resulting in thousands of travel jobs being lost …
Dr Freudman said: “The original invitation was issued in the hope that Matt Hancock would recognise the damage that he and his government caused the travel industry with its handling of the pandemic.
“We were also hoping that he might confirm that lessons had been learnt and that any future crises would be handled differently.
“However, his WhatsApp messages have upset many of us in the travel industry and his presence would clearly have been a major distraction.”
The Telegraph has contacted Mr Hancock for comment.
That day, Hancock’s lawyer appeared on GB News and was introduced as such. He responded vehemently that he did not want that detail mentioned. The presenter calmly read out the lawyer’s email to GB News stating that he permitted them to describe him as Hancock’s lawyer. The lawyer sheepishly responded that he forgot to type ‘not’. Comedy gold:
Isabel Oakeshott describes The Telegraph ‘bunker’
Hancock gave Oakeshott access to the 100,000 WhatsApp messages because she co-authored his book, Pandemic Diaries.
On Friday, March 24, she wrote an article for Tatler describing what working in seclusion with The Lockdown Files reporters was like at the beginning of 2023:
… The Daily Telegraph was the only newspaper that consistently challenged the lockdown agenda and had a track record of managing huge investigations in the public interest – famously exposing the MPs’ expenses claims in a scandal that rocked Westminster in 2009. They immediately agreed to put a full team of top journalists on the project: The Lockdown Files.
In a secure bunker, well away from the main newsroom, I worked alongside their reporters, filleting the messages: a team of eight or so, full time, for eight weeks. To avoid hackers, our computers were not connected to the internet. We worked from hard drives stored overnight in a safe. Anything printed was swiftly shredded. Nobody else came into the bunker, which, as the weeks went by, became increasingly unhygienic. Discarded takeaway containers, half-eaten packets of Colin the Caterpillar sweets, mouldy mugs and other detritus were strewn over every grubby surface. Hunched over our computers in a room with no windows, we were like lab rats in some dubious experiment, wracked by colds, coughs and – oh, the irony – Covid. By the week of publication, our core team had swelled to some 25 writers and digital news experts. The Daily Telegraph’s newsroom was emptying out – leaving those who remained wondering where all their colleagues had gone.
There was a curious voyeuristic pleasure in reading the banter between Government ministers and their aides – including some very flirty exchanges between two household names. Who was sending who the heart emojis and who was complimenting who on their sexy outfits? I’ll leave it to your imagination. Suffice to say, they wouldn’t be too happy if that news was in the public domain.
On Sunday, March 26, we got an answer about the heart emojis. Michael Gove sent them to Hancock:
Hancock responded, ‘You have been true throughout’.
Gove explained to Sophy Ridge on Sky News that he agreed, particularly on that day, with Hancock’s course of action. No surprise there. They’re cut from the same cloth.
Guido Fawkes has the interview:
Oakeshott’s article continues:
The WhatsApp from Matt Hancock came through at 1.20am: ‘You have made a big mistake,’ it said darkly – leaving me to imagine what punishment he had in mind. The following day, he released a furious statement, accusing me of ‘massive betrayal’. Fair enough – I had breached his trust and would face plenty of questions about that decision. But did anyone outside the media bubble seriously doubt it was for the public good? The torrent of grateful messages from ordinary people, often with harrowing personal stories about their own suffering during lockdown, was answer enough for me … Dining in a mountain restaurant in the French Alps, my partner, Richard Tice [leader of the Reform Party], was surprised – and touched – to be passed a note by the waiter from a fellow diner who had recognised him. On the crumpled piece of paper were the words ‘please thank Isabel’.
Lord Sumption on Hancock: ‘a fanatic’
On March 10, after The Lockdown Files came to an end, Lord Sumption, a former Supreme Court justice and guardian of civil liberties, wrote an editorial for The Telegraph: ‘Matt Hancock was never a policy maker — he was a fanatic’:
The 19th-century sage William Hazlitt once observed that those who love liberty love their fellow men, while those who love power love only themselves. Matt Hancock says that he has been betrayed by the leaking of his WhatsApp messages. But few people will have any sympathy for him. He glutted on power and too obviously loved himself.
Some things can be said in his favour. The Lockdown Files are not a complete record. No doubt there were also phone calls, Zoom meetings, civil service memos and the like, in which the thoughts of ministers and officials may have been more fully laid out …
Nevertheless, Hancock’s WhatsApp messages offer an ugly insight into the workings of government at a time when it aspired to micromanage every aspect of our lives. They reveal the chaos and incoherence at the heart of government, as decisions were made on the hoof. They expose the fallacy that ministers were better able to judge our vulnerabilities than we were ourselves. They throw a harsh light on those involved: their narcissism, their superficiality, their hypocrisies great and small. Above all, they show in embarrassing detail how completely power corrupts those who have it.
… Even the most ardent lockdown sceptics accept that in extreme cases drastic measures may be required. But Covid-19 was not an extreme case …
No government, anywhere, had previously sought to deal with epidemic disease by closing down much of society. No society has ever improved public health by making itself poorer …
The fateful moment came when the government chose to go for coercion. This ruled out any distinction between the vulnerable and the invulnerable, because it would have been too difficult to police. It also meant that ministers began to manipulate public opinion, exaggerating the risks in order to justify their decision and scare people into compliance. So we had the theatrical announcement of the latest death toll at daily press conferences from Downing Street. Shocking posters appeared on our streets (“Look him in the eyes”, etc). Matt Hancock announced that “if you go out, people will die”.
The scare campaign created a perfect storm, for it made it more difficult to lift the lockdown …
Hancock was the chief peddler of the idea that everyone was equally at risk from Covid-19. This proposition was patently untrue, but it was useful because it frightened people. “It’s not unhelpful having people think they could be next,” wrote his special adviser, who knew his master’s mind well. Other countries did not behave like this. In Sweden state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell was able to reassure his public that a lockdown was neither necessary nor helpful. Events have proved him right.
… Matt Hancock insisted on schoolchildren wearing masks in class in spite of scientific advice that it made little difference, because it was necessary to keep up with Nicola Sturgeon. When Rishi Sunak had the temerity to suggest that once the vaccine rollout started the lockdown should be relaxed, Hancock resisted. “This is not a SAGE call,” he said, “it’s a political call.”
Once ministers had started on this course, there was no turning back. It is hard to admit that you have inflicted untold damage on a whole society by mistake. Hancock resisted shortening the 14-day quarantine period in spite of scientific advice that five days was enough, because he did not want to admit that the original policy had been wrong. Relevant evidence was simply shut out. His response to the success of Sweden’s policies was not to learn from it but to dismiss it as the “f—ing Swedish argument”. Having no grounds for rejecting the Swedish argument, he had to ask his advisers to find him some. “Supply three or four bullet [points] of why Sweden is wrong,” he barked.
The adrenalin of power is corrosive. It was largely responsible for the sheer nastiness of the Government’s response to criticism. Hancock lashed out at the least signs of resistance or dissent. He wanted internal critics sacked or moved. He suggested the cancellation of a learning disability hub in the constituency of an MP who intended to vote against the tier system. Ministers “got heavy” with the police to make them tougher on the public …
I’ll get to the learning disability hub in a moment. Shameful, just shameful.
Lord Sumption’s editorial continues:
There is no sign that Hancock either thought or cared about the wider consequences of his measures. He seems to have believed that there was no limit to the amount of human misery and economic destruction that was worth enduring in order to keep the Covid numbers down. Rishi Sunak is on record as saying that any discussion of the wider problems was ruled out in advance, and this is fully borne out by the WhatsApp messages. Any hint from Sunak or business secretary Alok Sharma that the cure might be worse than the disease provoked an explosion of bile but no actual answers.
Hancock fought tooth and nail to close schools and keep them closed. Deprived of many months of education, cooped up indoors and terrified by government warnings that they would kill their grandparents by hugging them, children suffered a sharp rise in mental illness and self-harm although they were themselves at no risk from Covid-19. Cancer patients were left undiagnosed and untreated. Old people, deprived of stimulation, succumbed to dementia in large numbers. Small businesses were destroyed which had taken a lifetime to build up. A joyless puritanism infected government policy. No travel. No wedding parties or funeral wakes. No hugs. Anyone who spoke up for a measure of decency or moderation in this surreal world was promptly slapped down as a “w—er”.
Real policy-making is never black and white like this. It is always a matter of judgment, of weighing up pros and cons. In that sense, Matt Hancock was never a policy-maker. He was a fanatic.
Why did hitherto decent people behave like this? In Hancock’s case, at least part of the answer is vanity. The crisis was good for his profile. He saw himself as the man of action, the Churchill of public health, the saviour of his people, earning the plaudits of a grateful nation. As early as January 2020, he was sharing a message from a sycophantic “wise friend” assuring him that a “well-handled crisis of this scale could propel you into the next league”. He fussed over his tweets. He pushed his way in front of every press camera. He tried to divert the credit for the vaccines from Kate Bingham to himself. “I think I look great” is one of his more memorable messages.
Sumption says that Boris Johnson, his Cabinet and his advisers could not have restrained Hancock. Boris had no strategy, and the others were lacklustre:
Apart from Sunak and Gove, his Cabinet was probably the most mediocre band of British ministers for nearly a century. Collectively, they proved unable to look at the whole problem in the round. Their eyes were never on the ball. They were not even on the field. These are the lessons of this sorry business.
Blocking disability hub
Hancock did not tolerate Conservative MPs voting against his health policies during the pandemic.
On Tuesday, March 7, The Telegraph led with a story about James Daly MP from Bury North:
‘Matt Hancock’s plan to block funding for disabled children if MP opposed lockdown’ tells us:
Matt Hancock discussed a plan to block funding for a new centre for disabled children and adults as a way of pressuring a rebel Tory MP to back new lockdown restrictions, The Lockdown Files show.
WhatsApp messages between Mr Hancock, the then health secretary, and his political aide show they discussed taking a plan for a learning disability hub in Bury, Greater Manchester, “off the table” if James Daly, the Bury North MP, sided against the Government in a key vote.
It came ahead of the vote on Dec 1, 2020 on the introduction of a toughened new local tiers system of restrictions for England.
The Telegraph has also obtained a WhatsApp message with an attached list of 95 Conservative MPs planning to vote against the tier system and detailing their concerns about it.
The article has that list.
On November 20, 2020, Allan Nixon, one of Hancock’s Spads (special advisers) WhatsApped his boss:
… Thoughts on me suggesting to Chief’s spads that they give us a list of the 2019 intakes thinking of rebelling. Eg James wants his Learning Disability Hub in Bury – whips call him up and say Health team want to work with him to deliver this but that’ll be off the table if he rebels
These guys’ re-election hinges on us in a lot of instances, and we know what they want. We should seriously consider using it IMO
Hancock replied:
yes, 100%
James Daly only found out about this through The Lockdown Files:
Mr Daly – whose constituency is the most marginal in the UK mainland with a majority of just 105 – told The Telegraph he was “appalled” and “disgusted” that the disability hub, for which he had been campaigning, had been discussed as a way of coercing him into voting with the Government.
He said he had never been contacted by the Whips’ Office and no threat to block the scheme had been made.
The conversation between Nixon and Hancock continued on December 1, 2020:
On the morning of the vote, Mr Hancock messaged his adviser to say: “James Daly is with us”, but Mr Nixon responded with the caveat: “If extra hospitality support is forthcoming.”
Later that day, Mr Nixon also forwarded his boss a new list of MPs who were undecided on the vote. In the event, Mr Daly voted against the Government, according to the parliamentary record.
In total, 55 Conservative MPs opposed the tiers system, forcing Mr Johnson to rely on Labour abstaining to get the measures through. It was, at the time, the biggest rebellion of the Johnson administration.
After revealing that he had not been contacted by the Whips’ Office, Mr Daly said: “It sounds like the whips didn’t bother.”
The Bury North MP said he was surprised that the hub, which would allow specialists to coordinate activity under one roof, was even being threatened because “it never got dangled in the first place”.
He added: “They were never proposing to give it to me. I still don’t have it. Even though I have repeatedly campaigned for it, Hancock never showed the slightest bit of interest in supporting it. I had a number of conversations with Hancock at that time, but I can definitively say the hub was never mentioned.
“I think it is appalling. The fact that they would only give a much needed support for disabled people if I voted for this was absolutely disgusting.”
Mr Daly had discussed the need for the centre with Mr Hancock in January 2020. In a post on his website about “how we improve health outcomes for all Bury North residents”, he published a photograph of himself with the then health secretary. The hub, he said, would benefit “the most vulnerable in our community”.
That afternoon, The Telegraph published ‘Rishi Sunak rebukes Matt Hancock over plot to block disability funding’:
Downing Street has rebuked Matt Hancock after it emerged that he had discussed a plan to block funding for a new disabled centre to pressure a Tory MP to back lockdown restrictions …
Asked whether this was not the way Rishi Sunak would like his ministers to operate, the Prime Minister’s official spokesman said: “Of course. There are rules and guidelines which apply.
“I can’t speak for the actions of a former government. I think you heard from the Prime Minister, who said it’s important that the inquiry looks at all the issues in a complete way rather than relying on piecemeal bits of information.
“You will know that funding decisions are taken in line with strict guidelines to ensure value for money set out in the spending framework, and ministers’ departments are held accountable for their decisions.”
Allison Pearson: Hancock ‘should be arrested’
After The Telegraph published No. 10’s rebuke to Hancock, one of the paper’s columnists, Allison Pearson, weighed in with ‘Matt Hancock should be arrested for wilful misconduct in public office’:
… Dismayingly, if not entirely unpredictably, it was the very restrictions Matt Hancock and his lockdown zealots told us were necessary to save the health service which have very nearly finished it off. “The NHS has collapsed anyway as a direct result of the lockdowns and the vast backlog they caused,” says my source. Ironies don’t come much more bitter than that …
Just when you think he has sunk as low as is humanly possible, he ponders using children with special educational needs as leverage (“yes 100%,” enthused Hancock). By unhappy coincidence, I have just had an email from Rob, a father with an autistic son. This is what Rob wrote: “Lockdown sent him from a happy 14-year-old into a complete psychological breakdown. The fear of why everyone was wearing masks, the breaking of routine (so important for SEN children) and closing of schools. He was utterly terrified. The knock-on-effect for our family has been devastating. Thanks to anti-psych meds he’s slowly getting there, but from the second lockdown onwards it’s destroyed the fabric of our family to say nothing of our life savings being lost (self-employed). To read the WhatsApps in The Telegraph makes me so angry. Having the heartbreak of a disabled child made worse by self-aggrandising fools is almost too much to take. Administering psychiatric medicines to your child tends to focus the mind as to where the blame lies and it isn’t with Isabel Oakeshott.”
Well, there’s another Hancock Triumph. A 14-year-old boy who successfully had the pants frightened off him. (Hope you feel proud of yourself, Matt.) Are Members of Parliament seriously not going to debate what we suspected, but now know for sure, was done quite deliberately to Rob’s son and thousands of other vulnerable children, some of them no longer with us because they were scared into taking their own lives? …
As for Matt Hancock, he has lost the Whip and, unfortunately, can no longer be disciplined by the Conservative party. The slithy tove can – and must – be dragged before a Select Committee. Personally, I would like to see him in jail for the vast hurt he has caused.
Are there grounds for a prosecution of the former minister for misconduct in a public office? Did Matt Hancock “wilfully misconduct himself to such a degree as to amount to an abuse of the public’s trust in the office holder without reasonable excuse or justification”? …
Now, that’s what I call an Urgent Question.
Also of interest is ‘Dominic Cummings takes “nightmare” swipe at Rishi Sunak and Matt Hancock’.
I hope to wrap up the rest of my review of The Lockdown Files tomorrow.
After the gloomy opening of the Conservative Party Conference this year, dominated by U-turns, rebels and division, I promised good news.
Liz Truss’s closing speech
Prime Minister Liz Truss gave an excellent closing speech and, despite the train strike that day, the conference hall in Birmingham appeared to be filled.
Her speech is 36 minutes long, but it went by very quickly indeed:
I watched a bit of GB News on Wednesday afternoon. One of their reporters interviewed Party members leaving conference. Nearly all said that they were ‘pleasantly surprised’ and reassured by what the new Prime Minister had to say.
Writing for The Telegraph, veteran journalist Patrick O’Flynn concluded, ‘Liz Truss might just have rescued her premiership’ (emphases in purple mine):
Strip away the depressing context surrounding Ms Truss’s speech, of backbench rebellions and media pile-ons, and what we heard and saw was a well-crafted address that attempted to place her culturally on the side of “normal working people” – especially in the private sector. More notably, she has positioned herself firmly against an “anti-growth coalition” whose members she characterised as being driven from north London town houses to BBC studios to preach “more tax, more regulation, more meddling”.
“They don’t understand the British people. They don’t understand aspiration,” she said, adding: “The real heroes are the people who go out to work, take responsibility and aspire to a better life for themselves and their families and I am on their side.”
This was an attempt to glue back together an old alliance between a female prime minister and her natural supporters: that which existed between Margaret Thatcher and “our people”. So was a key message towards the end of the speech. Not the grandiose “the lady is not for turning” which had after all been made untenable by the U-turn on top rate tax, but the more sober phrase “we must stay the course”.
Guido Fawkes has the transcript, excerpted below.
Truss began by thanking Andy Street, the Conservative mayor of Birmingham, which is the United Kingdom’s second largest city. She praised Teesside’s mayor, Ben Houchen, as he transforms the North East of England.
She acknowledged that we are in difficult days:
Together, we have mourned the death of Queen Elizabeth II, the rock on which modern Britain was built.
We are now in a new era under King Charles III.
We are dealing with the global economic crisis caused by Covid and by Putin’s appalling war in Ukraine.
In these tough times, we need to step up.
I am determined to get Britain moving, to get us through the tempest and put us on a stronger footing as a nation.
I am driven in this mission by my firm belief in the British people.
She said she would not meddle in our personal affairs but resolve the concerns that unite us:
… I’m not going to tell you what to do, or what to think or how to live your life.
I’m not interested in how many two-for-one offers you buy at the supermarket, how you spend your spare time, or in virtue signalling.
I’m not interested in just talking about things, but actually in doing things.
What I’m interested in is your hopes and fears that you feel every day.
Can you get a good job locally?
Is it safe to walk down the high street late at night?
Can you get a doctor’s appointment?
I know how you feel because I have the same hopes and fears.
I want what you want.
I have fought to get where I am today.
I have fought to get jobs, to get pay rises and get on the housing ladder.
I have juggled my career with raising two wonderful daughters.
I know how it feels to have your potential dismissed by those who think they know better.
She then related an anecdote from her childhood, which may over-40s will recognise:
I remember as a young girl being presented on a plane with a “Junior Air Hostess” badge.
Meanwhile, my brothers were given “Junior Pilot” badges.
It wasn’t the only time in my life that I have been treated differently for being female or for not fitting in.
It made me angry and it made me determined.
Determined to change things so other people didn’t feel the same way.
This I did not know:
I stand here today as the first Prime Minister of our country to have gone to a comprehensive school.
She gently reminded her audience that the Government has already addressed the fuel price crisis. The cap is £2,500:
Let’s remember where we were when I entered Downing Street.
Average energy bills were predicted to soar above £6,000 a year.
We faced the highest tax burden that our country had had for 70 years.
And we were told that we could do nothing about it.
I did not accept that things had to be this way.
Around that point, two protesters waved a Greenpeace banner (Guido has the video):
They would have had to sign up to be Party members in order to get in, just as the protesters did who infiltrated the Party leadership hustings in July and August.
Conservative men quickly took the banner away. The women had a spare to unfurl. That too, was swifly removed.
Truss quipped:
Now later on in my speech my friends I am going to talk about the anti-growth coalition.
But I think they arrived in the hall a bit too early, they were meant to come later on.
We will get onto them in a few minutes.
She paused while security removed the women from the conference hall.
She concluded on the fuel price cap:
We made sure that the typical household energy bill shouldn’t be more than around £2,500 a year this winter and next.
We followed up with immediate action to support businesses over the winter.
We are determined to shield people from astronomically high bills.
So much so, that we are doing more in this country to protect people from the energy crisis than any other country in Europe.
Our response to the energy crisis was the biggest part of the mini-Budget.
Later, she borrowed one of Michelle Obama’s phrases from the 2008 presidential campaign:
We need to fund the furthest behind first.
And for too long, the political debate has been dominated by the argument about how we distribute a limited economic pie.
Instead, we need to grow the pie so that everyone gets a bigger slice.
That is why I am determined to take a new approach and break us out of this high-tax, low-growth cycle.
She also used John McCain’s ‘my friends’ in addressing the audience, more than the transcript references. That, too, came from the 2008 presidential campaign:
When the government plays too big a role, people feel smaller.
High taxes mean you feel it’s less worthwhile working that extra hour, going for a better job or setting up your own business.
That, my friends, is why we are cutting taxes.
We have already cut Stamp Duty, helping people on the housing ladder – especially first-time buyers.
We are reversing the increase in National Insurance from next month.
We are keeping corporation tax at 19%, the lowest in the G20.
We are helping 31 million working people by cutting the basic rate of income tax …
The fact is that the abolition of the 45p tax rate became a distraction from the major parts of our growth plan.
That is why we are no longer proceeding with it.
I get it and I have listened.
She reiterated pledges for post-Brexit and post-pandemic Britain.
She made a good point about Western complacency, something I have been saying for years:
One of the reasons we are facing this global crisis is because collectively the West did not do enough.
We became complacent.
We did not spend enough on defence.
We became too dependent on authoritarian regimes for cheap goods and energy.
And we did not stand up to Russia early enough.
We will make sure this never happens again.
She pledged continued support for Ukraine, which earned her a standing ovation.
Then it was time for her to talk about the anti-growth coalition — the metropolitan elite — which was lengthy. This was her opening:
I will not allow the anti-growth coalition to hold us back.
Labour, the Lib Dems and the SNP…
…The militant unions, the vested interests dressed up as think-tanks…
…The talking heads, the Brexit deniers and Extinction Rebellion and some of the people we had in the hall earlier.
The fact is they prefer protesting to doing.
They prefer talking on Twitter to taking tough decisions.
They taxi from North London townhouses to the BBC studio to dismiss anyone challenging the status quo.
From broadcast to podcast, they peddle the same old answers.
It’s always more taxes, more regulation and more meddling.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
Guido has the video:
She praised our unsung heroes:
My friends, does this anti-growth coalition have any idea who pays their wages?
It’s the people who make things in factories across our country.
It’s the people who get up at the crack of dawn to go to work.
It’s the commuters who get trains into towns and cities across our country.
I’m thinking of the white van drivers, the hairdressers, the plumbers, the accountants, the IT workers and millions of others up and down the UK.
The anti-growth coalition just doesn’t get it.
This is because they don’t face the same challenges as normal working people.
She concluded:
We cannot give in to those who say Britain can’t grow faster.
We cannot give in to those who say we can’t do better.
We must stay the course.
We are the only party with a clear plan to get Britain moving.
We are the only party with the determination to deliver.
Together, we can unleash the full potential of our great country.
That is how we will build a new Britain for a new era.
A strong cross-party coalition, helped powerfully by the media, is clearly trying to do away with Truss’s premiership.
These were her YouGov ratings before her speech:
Keep in mind that YouGov was founded by former Chancellor, Nadhim Zahawi, who was caretaker during the leadership contest over the summer.
Guido wrote:
If memory serves Guido correctly, [former Labour leader] Jeremy Corbyn managed a minus 60 net approval rating at his worst. Liz has a net approval rating of minus 59. Guido is told it is the lowest rating ever recorded of a Conservative Party leader. Her speech today needs to be the beginning of a turnaround.
Borrowing from the 1960s protest tune: all we are say-ing, is give Truss a chance …
Truss, with the help of Party whips, has finally been able to complete the rest of her parliamentary appointments.
Guido said:
The Government’s reshuffle is finally coming to a close, as appointments to a number of Parliamentary Private Secretary (PPS) positions gave been confirmed. Co-conspirators will recall the whips had been experiencing some difficulty in recruiting enough parliamentary bag-carriers, though they have now managed to fill each position. Even if the vast majority are eager 2019ers…
The Government also seems to have granted whips greater individual responsibility for departments, with specific roles also listed. If recent trends are anything to go by, the government could use all the help to party discipline it can muster.
Having mustard keen 2019 MPs in on the act can only be a good thing. Most of them are from Red Wall seats, so their minds will be focused on growth and other Truss objectives, many of which dovetail with their own.
Other high points — Foreign Secretary Cleverly and Home Secretary Braverman
Other well-received speeches came from Foreign Secretary James Cleverly and Home Secretary Suella Braverman, both of whom appeared on Tuesday, October 4.
Here is a short clip from James Cleverly’s speech:
Cleverly’s speech is at the 2:05:00 mark in this video. Braverman’s comes before, beginning at 1:35:00:
Suella Braverman said many of the same things that her predecessor Priti Patel did as Home Secretary. We can but wait and see what happens.
One of the big problems in processing migrants without papers, such as those who come across the Channel in dinghies, is that they are hard to trace to their true countries of origin.
Another issue is that many in the civil service who are assigned to the Home Office are pro-immigration. Patel tried her best to counter them, but they stood firm, citing EU laws under which we are still beholden. The Brexit process continues. There wasn’t enough time to renegotiate everything we should have, e.g. the Dublin Agreement. As we are no longer in the EU, we are no longer subject to that agreement whereby migrants have to apply for asylum in the first safe country they are in — in our case, France. We have to draw up a new agreement along the same lines, which will require EU co-operation.
On top of that, during Theresa May’s time as PM, a modern slavery law came into force in the UK. In short, anyone claiming to have been a modern slave is automatically allowed to stay here. No proof is required.
With that burden, we can also add human rights charities and their lawyers who effectively scuppered the first UK flight to Rwanda last summer. It never happened. Everyone’s case was challenged before take-off, leaving an empty aircraft.
Euronews reported on that part of Braverman’s speech:
In a Tuesday evening speech at the Conservative Party’s autumn conference in Birmingham, immigration minister Suella Braverman said that people who arrive by unauthorised means should not be allowed to claim asylum in the UK and she doubled down on contentious plans to send some asylum-seekers on a one-way trip to Rwanda.
However, Braverman acknowledged that a legal challenge to the policy means it’s unlikely anyone will be deported to the east African country this year.
“We need to find a way to make the Rwanda scheme work,” said Braverman.
“We cannot allow a foreign court to undermine the sovereignty of our borders,” she continued, to cheers and applause from the audience.
“A few months ago the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg did just that. By a closed process, with an unnamed judge, and without any representation by the UK. A European Court overruled our Supreme Court. And as a result our first flight to Rwanda was grounded. We need to take back control.”
She didn’t say how the government intends to ‘take back control’. The European Court of Human Rights is not part of the EU, and membership is not affected by Brexit …
Braverman said many migrants were “leaving a safe country like France and abusing our asylum system,” adding that she wanted to work more closely with French authorities “to get more out of our partnership.”
“We’ve got to stop the boats crossing the Channel,” she said, to more applause.
So far this year, 30,000 migrants have crossed the Channel:
The one advantage that Braverman has over Patel is that she is a lawyer, so she will be finely attuned to legal turns of phrase.
Those interested can read more of her views in this article from The Telegraph.
Quentin Letts, The Times‘s political sketchwriter, concluded:
the day belonged to Braverman. As bids for popularity go, it wasn’t particularly subtle or cerebral. Effective, though.
Proper membership cards make comeback
In an eco-friendly move under Boris Johnson, the Conservative Party began issuing paper certificates instead of plastic membership cards.
Thankfully, those days are over, for lifetime Party members at least:
Guido reports:
Tory party Chair Jake Berry has just confirmed the return of plastic membership cards for lifetime Tory members, replacing the much-maligned ‘membership certificates’ introduced by Amanda Milling back in 2020. At the time, Milling introduced the paper certificates to save the environment, or something like that. Even MPs were upset; Michael Fabricant complained the certificate wouldn’t fit in his trinket box of membership cards and hair clips. Jane Stevenson pointed out they could just be made of card instead. Now the debate has been put to rest – Berry’s bringing the real deal back, having just revealed the move at a fringe event this morning. Expect to see the cards’ triumphant return from January.
That ends the positive conference news.
Kwarteng’s U-turn U-turn U-turn
Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng did a third U-turn on bringing forward his more detailed fiscal event plans.
It appears that he will be going ahead with presenting them to Parliament on November 23 after all:
Or is it October 23?
Mel Stride, who supported Rishi Sunak in the leadership contest and heads the Treasury Select Committee, says that it will be October 23. So did the Financial Times, apparently. They, too, supported Sunak.
Hmm. I sense mischief making.
Guido reports:
Except Kwasi later insisted on GB News that it definitely wasn’t moving:
‘Shortly’ is the 23rd. People are reading the runes […] it’s going to be the 23rd.
“People reading the runes” in this case including the Chair of the Treasury Select Committee. Liz herself later said it’s coming in November, and Treasury Civil Servants were told in a team meeting this morning that anything to the contrary was just “press speculation“. Guido understands, however, that the people reading the runes are onto something: the Treasury is still considering adjusting the date after all…
Kwasi must stick to his guns and stop the U-turns.
Rebel, rebel …
The rebels were active throughout the conference.
Michael Gove
On Wednesday’s Dan Wootton Tonight show on GB News, panellists were split on whether Sunak-supporting Michael Gove should have the whip removed.
The Daily Express‘s Carole Malone said that Truss should have given Gove a Cabinet post so that he would have made less mischief. However, Wootton countered by saying that Gove always undermines the Prime Ministers he has worked for in Cabinet.
Someone who wasn’t on the show and thinks Gove should have the whip removed is Nigel Farage. I fully agree with him. We saw the trouble that rebel Conservatives made for Theresa May and Boris Johnson in 2019 over Brexit. David Gauke was one of them. Boris had the whip removed and we did not see him again after the 2019 general election; his Conservative association deselected him:
Grant Shapps
Grant Shapps, another Sunak supporter, has been working in tandem with Michael Gove to thwart Truss’s leadership.
He has made no secret of his threat to go to Sir Graham Brady, chairman of the 1922 Committee, with a letter of no confidence — not only from himself but other MPs:
On Tuesday, October 4, he told Times Radio:
I want Liz to succeed. So I’m hoping that she can turn us around, I think there is a window of opportunity for her to do it. I’m cheering her on, if you like, to succeed. Y’know, in the end I don’t think members of parliament, Conservatives, if they see the polls continue as they are, are going to sit on their hands. A way would be found to make that change. You know, it’s important, not for members of parliament, but for the country, still two years to go to another election, that we have good, stable, sensible, smart government in place doing things that are required for the people in this country. So of course that could happen. In the meantime, I hope Liz can turn this around.
‘A way would be found’ means urging Brady to change the rules whereby a PM could be ousted sooner than 12 months of assuming the Party leadership.
Shapps had the gall to suggest Truss had ten days to turn around her leadership!
Nadine Dorries
Nadine Dorries was the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport while Boris was PM.
When he stood down as party leader, she was gutted. She had at least one defender:
She stayed loyal beyond the end of his premiership, perhaps embarrassingly so:
She had a lot to say when he stood down as Party leader:
In the end, she didn’t run for Party leadership:
Dorries resigned from Cabinet on Tuesday, September 6. Boris was in his final hours as PM that day, when he and Truss flew separately to Balmoral to see the Queen.
Guido posted Dorries’s letter to Boris, commenting:
She added that while Liz had offered her the chance to continue, she’s stepping down anyway.
She is now unhappy that her Online Safety Bill might be kicked into the long grass. Millions of us certainly hope so. It is deeply embedded in censorship, principally the ‘legal but harmful’ clause.
On Monday, October 3, Dorries said that Truss should hold a general election. Utter madness, all because her censorship legislation is up for cancellation. Even madder is the fact that she was a Truss supporter.
The Spectator had the story:
To inspire one Nadine Dorries tweet may be regarded as a misfortune, to inspire two looks like carelessness. Less than 24 hours after the former Culture Secretary criticised Truss for appearing to blame her Chancellor for the 45p tax debacle, she’s back at it again. Frustrated by Truss’s decision to junk much of the Johnson agenda from 2019, the high priestess of online harms took to her favourite medium of Twitter to write:
Widespread dismay at the fact that 3 years of work has effectively been put on hold. No one asked for this. C4 sale, online safety, BBC licence fee review – all signed off by cabinet all ready to go, all stopped. If Liz wants a whole new mandate, she must take to the country.
The repeated criticisms are all the more interesting, given the importance of Dorries and other Johnson loyalists in ensuring that Truss made the final two earlier this summer. Dorries was something of an unruly attack dog, savaging Truss’s opponent Rishi Sunak at ever opportunity …
Guido posted Dorries’s tweet …
and wrote:
We appear to be at the “everybody losing their mind” stage of Conservative Party conference a day early.
The next day, she seemed to walk back what she said by citing Boris’s support of Truss. This is a clip of her interview with LBC radio’s Iain Dale:
Embarrassing.
Benefits rebels
Truss-backer Sir Iain Duncan Smith is now opposing her in wanting benefits increased in line with inflation:
Guido has the video:
Iain Duncan Smith has added his voice to the chorus of rebels piling on Liz to raise benefits with inflation. Speaking at a ConservativeHome fringe the former Work and Pensions Secretary argued giving to the poorest was a more efficient way of going for growth, as they would spend it quicker. He’s had a quick change in tune since backing Liz for leader…
That sounds very cynical, indeed.
Kemi Badenoch
Trade Secretary Kemi Badenoch, the popular Party leadership candidate for British voters, openly opposed Truss’s bid for even more migration.
It is hard to disagree with Badenoch. Even so, as a Cabinet minister, perhaps she should have held back from expressing them publicly.
She aired her views on Sunday evening:
At the IEA/TPA DrinkTanks reception last night, guest of honour Kemi Badenoch openly rebuked the PM’s plans to let in more immigrants to boost growth. The Trade Secretary ignored any sense of collective responsibility as she told the assembled free marketeers:
Simply taking in numbers to boost GDP while GDP per capita falls is not the right way to do that. We need to look again at resolving our productivity issues and that means using capital better, not just getting cheaper and cheaper labour.
Kemi’s brazen and deliberate speech last night all but confirmed The Times’ article on Sunday reporting major Cabinet divisions over the plan, with Kemi and Suella Braverman at odds with the PM’s preferred free market solution. Like Liz, Guido doesn’t have a problem with skilled, legal immigration, it is the illegal immigration which is concerning. It seems Tory Cabinet ministers aren’t even pretending to play happy families anymore…
45% tax rate rebels
Prominent Conservative Cabinet members disagree with Truss and Kwarteng over their Sunday night U-turn on abolishing the 45% upper tax rate.
Home Secretary Suella Braverman seemed to accuse Conservative MPs of forcing the change in plan, going so far as to claim it was ‘a coup’:
Guido has a photo of Braverman, along with Jacob Rees-Mogg and Simon Clarke, two other Cabinet members who want the upper rate abolished:
Simon Clarke agrees with Braverman’s assessment of ‘a coup’:
Guido has more:
Jacob Rees-Mogg was also quick to voice his disappointment at the scrapped cut at a fringe event this afternoon, although he claimed to recognise the politics of the move. This all comes in the context of public cabinet battles over benefits, and Penny Mordaunt’s attacks on government comms. Meanwhile backbench agitators continue briefing out plans to rebel, with some now even claiming they’re holding “crisis” talks about Liz’s leadership. Truss has been PM for 28 days. Not quite the honeymoon period she would’ve hoped for…
Wow. For Jacob Rees-Mogg to speak out about his disappointment is surprising. He is normally respectful of parliamentary boundaries and procedure.
There is a way to get rid of this tax rate. I will have more on that next week.
James Cleverly warns Cabinet rebels to ‘shut up’
In much the same way that Welsh Secretary Robert Buckland did, Foreign Secretary James Cleverly warned Cabinet rebels to ‘shut up’:
On Wednesday, October 5, Guido reported:
James Cleverly has diplomatically warned Cabinet colleagues to shut up after yesterday’s day of chaos, in which collective responsibility broke down on everything including the 45p u-turn, immigration numbers and uprating benefits in line with inflation. Speaking on the BBC this morning ahead of Liz’s big speech, the foreign secretary warned:
All Cabinet colleagues ultimately are going to have to abide by collective responsibility… I think it’s always better and easier to feed ideas, particularly when you’re in government and have access to the Chancellor and the PM, feed your ideas directly into the centre of the system…
On TimesRadio he also implied yesterday’s comments from Braverman, Mordaunt and Clarke – among others – were inappropriate. Guido hears Cleverly’s speechwriter had to edit a swear word out of the Foreign Secretary’s speech earlier this week; we can only imagine how many expletives Cleverly wanted to use in response to yesterday’s farce…
Conclusion
Here endeth the news about the Conservative Party Conference.
MPs must give Truss a chance. She has gone through the hardest beginning to her premiership of any PM in known history.
She deserves time to lead us. With everyone against her, she must be doing something right.
She is representing British voters’ interests. That is only right and fair.
This has not been the best Conservative Party Conference, and here’s why:
1/ Bombastic Boris is no longer Prime Minister;
2/ Liz Truss is still finding her feet as his successor;
3/ A train strike is taking place on the final day, so a lot of people left before Liz spoke on Wednesday.
On Wednesday morning, October 5, GB News’s Darren McCaffrey, a veteran of many party conferences, said that the mood in Birmingham was very low this year, as if, after 12 years, the Conservatives think that their time in Government could be up.
It doesn’t help that Labour’s Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves has been spreading lies about Kwasi Kwarteng’s fiscal event, either:
Meanwhile, the people in Boris Johnson’s constituency of Uxbridge in west London miss him dearly:
Anyone who missed the controversies of the Conservative Party Conference can catch up here and here.
On Tuesday night, former Conservative adviser Amanda Platell, who writes for the Daily Mail, said she is praying that Liz Truss can actually govern without opposition from her own MPs. Platell described Michael Gove as ‘a jackal’. Platell added that the Leader of the Commons, Penny Mordaunt, wasn’t a very good employee when she worked for her several years ago:
After Amanda Platell spoke in that clip, it was time for Stanley Johnson, Boris’s father, to give his impressions of this year’s conference.
He said that he must have been to a different one, because everyone he saw was upbeat and the conference hall was full for Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng’s speech. Stanley Johnson blames the negativity on an ongoing media narrative:
I didn’t see this gloom and doom meeting at all.
When Dan Wootton asked Stanley about Michael Gove, the former Prime Minister’s father replied:
I’m not going to talk about wildlife of any kind … I’m going to sing Michael Gove’s praises because he has been a really good Secretary of State for the Environment.
Wootton countered:
He stabbed your son in the back.
Stanley said:
I’m not going to talk about it … I’m speaking as an environmentalist.
In another part of the show, Stanley said that he is ‘100% certain’ that Boris will not be back as Conservative Party leader, i.e. Prime Minister.
Robert Buckland’s advice to rebels: ‘Shut up’
On Tuesday afternoon while listening to GB News, one of the presenters said that the Secretary of State for Wales, the mild mannered Robert Buckland, told Michael Gove to ‘shut up’.
Hoping it was true, I searched Wednesday’s headlines but saw only that Buckland had issued his advice indirectly, via Global Radio’s News Agents podcast, featuring ex-BBC broadcasters Emily Maitlis, Jon Sopel and Lewis Goodall.
Buckland was mild mannered throughout:
The i paper confirms that no direct confrontation took place:
Welsh Secretary Robert Buckland appealed to recently sacked ministers to “shut up” but indicated he wants to see benefits rise in line with inflation, telling Times Radio he believes in supporting “those who genuinely cannot share … In growth and prosperity”.
One can only hope that Gove and his Sunak-backing allies got the message.
On Tuesday night, The Telegraph urged MPs to rally behind their new Prime Minister: ‘Tories owe Liz Truss their full support’ (emphases in purple mine):
Ms Truss has an ambitious set of policies that she set out in the leadership campaign, yet there is now a danger that she will be thwarted at every turn by a fresh coalition of opponents in her own party.
MPs should remember that the Prime Minister won fairly and squarely under the rules after they removed a leader who had delivered an 80-seat majority just three years ago. She did not engineer a coup and, indeed, stayed loyal to Boris Johnson until the end.
Senior backbenchers and former ministers such as Michael Gove and Grant Shapps, who have been in the vanguard of recent criticism, should consider the damage they are doing to the party’s re-election prospects. The only beneficiaries are their political opponents.
Conservative values championing a small state, low taxes and deregulation are being replaced by social democratic nostrums that brook no spending cuts and take the same attitude to wealth creators as the Left. The pandemic lockdowns did not help matters by fostering a widespread sense that the state will always step in to help in difficult times, as it has done again with energy bills.
As we have argued consistently, the UK needs a growth strategy, and Ms Truss is at least providing one. The alternative is to manage the nation’s decline into a high-tax, low-productivity economy. She needs the full support of the parliamentary party in her endeavour, starting now.
Left-wing lies persist over economic measures
Last week, the Bank of England had to take action to counter what appeared to be an immediate effect of the Chancellor’s fiscal event of Friday, September 23.
However, Guido Fawkes cited a report from the Financial Times which said that the economic hiccup originated with the pensions industry.
Note the exposed deception in this Twitter thread:
Yes, I can well imagine that it was Mark Carney’s fault. He was Andrew Bailey’s predecessor at the Bank of England. Both are worthless, yet the media deifies Carney as some sort of miracle worker.
The left-wing narrative, spun by Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves and the media, persists that the taxpayer is being hung out to dry.
Guido wants to correct that narrative, noting that the BBC’s Nick Robinson has already apologised for getting it wrong:
Guido’s post from Tuesday, October 4, — which includes audio — says (emphases his):
Since the Bank of England announced market operations to purchase gilts last Wednesday, Westminster politicos have been struggling to get their heads round the intricacies of gilt markets. It therefore comes as no surprise to Guido that Nick Robinson was forced into a correction today, after incorrectly repeating the widely tweeted claim that the Bank of England has spent “£65 billion to prop up the markets” …
The claim is somewhat misleading. The Bank of England pledged to buy gilts to the tune of a maximum of £5 billion a day, over two weeks, to assure markets. This means the maximum possible spend was £65 billion, though the actual number will be far smaller. In reality the bank has purchased around £3.66 billion so far, with yesterday’s purchases coming in at just £22 million. The smaller purchase signals the Bank is comfortable with the current state of gilt markets as its credible commitment appears to have paid off. Guido appreciates that the BBC this time took the effort to get the facts right…
Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves, who should know better as an ex-Bank of England employee, repeated the same line: “The fact the Bank of England had to step in with a £65 billion bailout with taxpayers money is deeply shameful.” It is not a fact.
Firstly, the market operation will be nowhere near £65 billion. Secondly, it is not money from taxpayers … with the purchases even having the potential to make a profit* on resale. So her “taxpayers’ money” claim is also incorrect. Robbo we can excuse, he only has a PPE degree from Oxford. The Shadow Chancellor, a trained economist, is deliberately and wilfully misrepresenting the facts for political advantage…
*A market source says that marked-to-market the Treasury is currently in profit on the trade.
In the comments, one of Guido’s readers clarified what happens with the Asset Purchase Facility — APF — in this case:
It’s not from Treasury reserves. Treasury has no reserves. It’s not money from taxpayers either. Neither the bank nor Treasury has any taxpayer money.
The Bank has extended a loan to the APF, and credited the APF’s account in the Banking Department with an advance. That is then used to pay whoever is selling the Gilts to the APF, which result in a transfer from the APF’s account in the Banking Department to a commercial bank’s settlement account in the Banking department.
The end result is Gilt assets in the APF balanced by a liability to the Banking department of the Bank of England. The Bank of England has a loan asset to the APF balanced by a liability to the commercial bank.
It’s just good old bank lending. As happens a bazillion times every day across the banking system.
Another reader called out the media for lazy journalism:
All MSM are as bad, Sky and ITV actively promote their left-wing Labour bias too, especially activists like Ed Conway and Peston, respectively, are rarely challenged, and the public generally don`t realise they are being lied to and manipulated. Creating hysteria and headlines are more important now than the truth and lazy groupthink “journalists” just follow the herd. Where is the giant good news headline that the £ is now trading higher than before the mini-budget and the euro is below parity with the dollar, no, they prefer reporting negative UK news to deliberately topple this government.
Kwarteng’s U-Turn U-turn
Thankfully, Kwarteng has recovered from the shock of having to make an economic U-turn on the 45% rate of tax and, although that is still off the table for now, he is reneging on bringing forward a vote on a more detailed plan on November 23.
On Tuesday evening, The Telegraph reported that he has postponed this to next year:
Crunch votes to implement last week’s mini-Budget will not take place until next spring, The Telegraph understands, putting off potential rebellions until 2023.
Many of the tax-cutting measures which Kwasi Kwarteng, the Chancellor, announced last month will not need to be passed in the House of Commons until next March.
That includes bringing forward the 1p cut in the basic rate of income tax and scrapping a planned rise in corporation tax, two of the most costly moves in the package.
It means that Tory rebels hoping to attach amendments to the Finance Bill may have to wait almost six months, potentially buying Liz Truss some political breathing room …
There was confusion on Tuesday as Mr Kwarteng appeared to row back on Downing Street indications on Monday night that he would reveal his new fiscal plan earlier than planned.
Mr Kwarteng said that the so-called “medium-term fiscal plan”, which will spell out his approach to bringing down debt and restraining spending, was coming on November 23.
But that appeared to contradict word from his allies 24 hours earlier suggesting the announcement and the Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) forecast would actually come sooner.
The OBR forecast is another part of the ongoing anti-Truss narrative. Since its inception by then-Chancellor George Osborne over a decade ago, its forecasts have rarely been accurate. Guido regularly posts on how the economy does much better in reality, putting the OBR to shame.
Yet, the OBR is considered as an oracle:
The failure to produce an OBR forecast alongside the mini-Budget was jumped on by economists and critics to partly explain the reaction from the markets.
It is, in fact, useless.
On Tuesday, Kwarteng gave his reasons for the rushed fiscal event. Contrary to what the lefty narrative says, he was not blaming the Queen, just reminding people of the timeline:
Mr Kwarteng on Tuesday also appeared to cast some blame on the “pressure” of the Queen’s death for mistakes in his tax-cutting fiscal statement.
He said: “We had a nation in mourning and then, literally, four days after the funeral we had the mini-budget.
“It was a high speed, high-pressure environment and we could, as David Cameron used to say, have prepared the pitch a bit better.”
Kwarteng was rightly disappointed that the Government was not given credit for helping out the nation with their winter fuel bills. This is another part of the false lefty narrative that needs exposure:
Speaking at a fringe event at the Conservative conference on Tuesday night, Mr Kwarteng complained that his energy price freeze was getting too little attention because of the 45p tax row.
The Chancellor said: “If you look at the energy intervention, I mean, nobody’s talking about the energy intervention.
“That was a huge use of the balance sheet to help people. People were facing bills of potentially £6,000 next year, and we’ve intervened.
“There’s gonna be a limit of £2,500. That’s a huge intervention.”
Agreed. He did what people bayed for.
He criticised Rishi Sunak’s handling of taxpayer’s money, turning the former Chancellor’s cries of morality back on him:
Mr Kwarteng has also said the Treasury he inherited from Rishi Sunak and Boris Johnson was “unsustainable”.
He said: “We were spending billions and billions and billions and raising the money in tax.”
“How can that be sustainable, when we have a very, very high tax burden and very low growth? We had to come off that trajectory.”
He called himself a “compassionate Conservative” inspired by his mother …
He added: “It’s the people’s money – we raise it through tax. And if we do that we have a moral obligation to look after it.”
Benefits increases
In line with Kwarteng, Liz Truss wants to be careful about taxpayer’s money.
Benefits will have to be raised, but the question is by how much.
One tranche of Conservative MPs says that it must be in line with inflation. Another group says it should be in line with salaries.
Early on Tuesday, The Sun reported:
She is under pressure to hike benefits for the poorest after repeatedly refusing to confirm they will go up in line with inflation.
Speaking at the party conference in Birmingham, the PM said: “We face massive challenges as a country and we need to get through this economic crisis and this energy crisis.
“And we need Britain to come out stronger on the other side, and I want to win over hearts and minds in the country, but also amongst my parliamentary colleagues, to make sure that we are able to deliver for the people of Britain” …
Emboldened rebel MPs are now pushing for further changes having forced her to ditch one flagship measure — with efforts now focusing against a real terms cut to Britain’s benefits bill.
Even her own Cabinet Ministers are ratcheting up the pressure for Ms Truss to commit to raising benefits with inflation and not wages.
Penny Mordaunt told the Times it “makes sense” to uprate benefits with prices.
The Commons leader said: “I have always supported, whether it’s pensions, whether it’s our welfare system, keeping pace with inflation.”
But Ms Truss insisted no decision had been made, yet reiterated her promise to keep the pensioners’ triple lock.
She admitted the reaction to her Growth Plan had not been “absolutely perfect” but insisted it – and the energy – package will help struggling families braced for a gruelling winter.
It includes cutting stamp duty, income tax and capping the price of energy so the typical household will pay no more than £2,500.
Here’s The Spectator‘s list of the benefits rebels hoping for an increase with inflation rather than wages.
Penny Mordaunt was one of Truss’s rivals in the leadership contest and the other five — led by Michael Gove — were staunch Sunak supporters:
Penny Mordaunt
Michael Gove
Damian Green
Esther McVey
John Glen
Mel Stride
Who can forget the day MPs eliminated Mordaunt from the leadership contest, leaving Truss and Sunak as the last two standing?
On July 20, Guido wrote about Mordaunt’s last ditch appeal:
It turns out Penny Mordaunt’s effort to run a “clean” campaign that puts an end to “toxic politics” lasted as long as she thought she had a chance of winning. Now that Liz Truss is the bookies’ favourite, and Kemi Badenoch’s voters are up for grabs, the Mordaunt camp has other ideas. This morning, Mordaunt tweeted an Allison Pearson Telegraph article headlined “Tory MPs – vote for Rishi Sunak or Liz Truss today and you’ll murder the party you love”, which went down like a bucket of cold sick with just about everybody. Don’t bother trying to find the tweet – she’s since deleted it…
Truss wisely made Mordaunt Leader of the House, probably the safest place for her.
The benefits row is likely to erupt after Parliament reconvenes next week. Gove is pictured with Truss:
On Tuesday morning, Guido posted an audio clip of Mordaunt speaking to Times Radio about increasing benefits in line with inflation:
… on Times Radio … Leader of the Commons Penny Mordaunt was busy once again going characteristically off-script, claiming “it makes sense” to commit to the uplift come rain or shine. Michael Gove is – predictably – saying the same. Even DWP Secretary Chloe Smith has been going around saying “protecting the most vulnerable is a big priority for me”, which surely signals the way the wind is blowing…
However, as The Spectator‘s editor Fraser Nelson points out, Liz Truss is not being stingy in wanting to increase benefits with salaries rather than inflation:
Difficult decisions lie ahead for Liz Truss as she thinks of ways to constrain spending. One option is to increase benefits in line with average salaries (6.2 per cent), rather than CPI inflation (9.9 per cent): why, it might be argued, should someone on welfare see their income rise faster than someone in work? And with public sector wages rising at just 2 per cent, can government really give a near-10 per cent rise to those out of work? …
So she is considering, at very least, uprating benefits by earnings rather than inflation. But if she’s ready for a fight, then so are her Tory opponents. Intriguingly, Penny Mordaunt now seems to be among them.
… Truss may struggle to get a lean settlement through the House of Commons. That’s why it matters that Mordaunt, the leader of the House of Commons, has declared in favour of increasing welfare by inflation. Such open lobbying by a cabinet member is rare and indicates a collapse in discipline …
Uprating benefits to inflation would be hugely expensive due to the staggering number currently on out-of-work benefits: 5.3 million in total. This figure has yet to be acknowledged by the government (which prefers a more narrow definition of unemployment) and can only be produced by drilling into its website. There’s a six-month lag, such is the lack of attention to this figure. But it amounts to 13 per cent of the UK working-age population, rising to 20 per cent in Manchester and Birmingham and 25 per cent in Blackpool. Here’s the breakdown, which we keep updated on The Spectator data hub …
Nelson has included The Spectator‘s graph in the article. It’s rather shocking.
He says it is time to get the nation back to work but realises that could be a hard sell for Truss to make:
As I’ve argued, the real scandal here is the waste of human potential, more than the waste of money. We have a near-record number of vacancies in the UK – about 1.1 million (hence a lot of the pressure to relax immigration rules), and to combine this with near-record levels on welfare is quite a feat. But it’s also a very expensive situation and a problem that will not be helped by decreasing the factor by which people would be better-off in work.
This is a complex and difficult argument to make – and one distinguishing feature of Liz Truss’s government is that it struggles to have such discussions even with the Tory party, let alone the country …
… this is a pre-rebellion from Mordaunt: she is describing a situation she’d like, not one that exists. By declaring the restoration of cabinet government, are cabinet members taking back control?
I have written this before Liz Truss gives her speech on Wednesday morning, closing the conference.
The question remains as to whether she can stamp her authority on the Cabinet and Conservative rebels. A tired Tom Harwood, who was also at Labour’s conference last week, explains the situation on GB News:
I will feature brighter aspects of the conference in tomorrow’s post.
Poor Liz Truss.
My post yesterday about her and Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng’s U-turn on the abolition of the 45% tax rate showed how much the media were running Truss’s premiership.
Cracks are showing
Unfortunately, the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham has revealed the factions among Conservative MPs opposed to either Truss or her policies.
This indicates that the cracks in the parliamentary Conservative Party likely began during the mourning period for Queen Elizabeth II in the same way that anti-Boris Conservative MPs sent their no-confidence letters to Sir Graham Brady of the 1922 Committee during the monarch’s Platinum Jubilee bank holiday weekend at the beginning of June.
No sooner had Parliament reconvened on the first Monday in June than Conservative MPs held a confidence vote on Boris Johnson’s premiership.
One name has been brought up in the overall rebellion against Liz Truss: Michael Gove.
Gove ‘a natural plotter’
On Monday evening, The Spectator‘s Isabel Hardman asked, ‘What does Michael Gove want?’
As I wrote yesterday, Gove even turned against the Prime Ministers under whom he served in Cabinet, beginning with his first PM, David Cameron. That was over Brexit. The victory went to Gove.
He worked against Boris Johnson’s leadership campaign in 2016, after Leave won the Brexit referendum on June 23. He told Boris he would lead his campaign then pulled out just before Boris was to have announced his candidacy.
It’s no surprise that, when Boris became PM in July 2019, he gave Gove Cabinet positions in a ‘Keep your enemies closer’ move. Those lasted until this past summer.
After the 2022 leadership contest, Gove said he would take a back seat. But did he?
He currently seems to be involved in stirring the pot with regard to benefits — welfare — increases involving the new Work and Pensions Secretary Chloe Smith, who said at conference earlier this week:
protecting the most vulnerable is a big priority for me.
Isabel Hardman points out (emphases mine):
It sounds quite anodyne, but given one of the big battles of the autumn is going to be over whether benefits are raised in line with inflation, it was a clear marker that Smith doesn’t think that trying to get some savings this way is the right thing to do. She’s not a noisy cabinet minister and is much more likely to make her arguments behind closed doors. But she does also have a very helpful backbench campaign led by someone who loves a public fight: Michael Gove.
Hardman says that Gove is busy at work, doing the rounds at the conference’s fringe events:
What is Gove’s endgame? He hasn’t packed up his bags since Kwarteng U-turned on the 45p: instead, he was still touring the fringe this evening. He has made clear that the benefit rise must go ahead, and many of his colleagues have made the same point to Kwarteng themselves.
Gove could decide to use Trade Secretary Kemi Badenoch in his manoeuvres. He backed her in the summer leadership contest until she lost, at which point he backed Rishi Sunak:
But even if it does, that’s not going to be the former minister’s last battle. Tory MPs are fascinated by where he wants this to end. Is he still hoping that Kemi Badenoch, who he initially backed for leader, could yet take over from Truss? Badenoch had a really good stint on the conference stage in the most lively session of the [Monday] afternoon programme. She had members eating out of her hand as she talked about taking pride in Britain, about immigration, and about culture wars. Perhaps Gove might want her star to rise further. Or perhaps he is still holding out for Rishi Sunak, who he later backed, and who is staying away from the conference to allow Liz Truss to ‘own the moment’.
In any event:
there is a lot of bad feeling among MPs about the way some parts of his [Sunak’s] campaign operated. Then again, there’s just a lot of bad feeling and mistrust in the party now. The one thing Truss has managed to unite her party on is that MPs in every faction are now annoyed with her.
This year’s conference meeting schedule, centred more around fringe events than the main speeches, is likely to deepen these rifts:
Tory conference has long been more stage-managed than other party meetings, but this year the official speeches from ministers have also been condensed into a very strange late afternoon slot lasting just two hours. The rest of the time is free for fringe meetings and plotting.
The main addresses are supposed to be content-light this year, which is unlikely to please Party members:
Ministers and their aides have been told they have to keep their addresses to the hall announcement-lite, which makes those two hours feel largely pointless.
Kwarteng not only had to do a U-turn on abolishing the 45% tax rate, he also was forced into bringing forward his medium-term fiscal plan. That’s two U-turns by the second day of conference:
Kwasi Kwarteng didn’t announce very much at all, even though his two U-turns have dominated the day’s agenda. This morning, the Chancellor dropped the plan to abolish the 45p rate of tax, and this evening it has emerged that he is also bringing forward his medium-term fiscal plan from 23 November – something ministers had been asked to hold the line on.
Work and Pensions Secretary Chloe Smith held up a script at a fringe event to show that what appears to be spontaneous is actually scripted in advance:
A clue to the next potential U-turn came not in one of the speeches but in one of the considerably more-scripted and stage-managed ‘discussions’. These have been going on for years at Conservative conference: a minister or two is relegated from a formal speaking slot to a cosy and allegedly informal sit-down with someone who is often a very nice and slightly nervous small business owner, charity pioneer or environmental campaigner. The chit-chats involve a suspiciously large sheaf of notes: indeed, in this particular ‘discussion’, Work and Pensions Secretary Chloe Smith largely abandoned the pretence that this was spontaneous and held her script up so she could read from it verbatim. But within that script, Smith had a line that she may well end up using against her ministerial colleagues such as Kwarteng in future. She told the hall that ‘we know that people are struggling with some of the costs that are rising’, adding: ‘That’s why protecting the most vulnerable is a big priority for me.’
Former Conservative MP Anne Widdecombe, who switched her allegiance to the Brexit Party and served as one of their MEPs in Brussels before the UK left the EU said that the Conservatives are in a dire state.
On Monday, she told GB News’s Bev Turner that the removal of the 45% tax band would have cost £2 billion at most, in contrast to the £150 billion bail out in order to help Britons with their energy bills.
She said that Truss and Kwarteng should have held their nerve and not caved in over their fiscal event plans from Friday, September 23. She surmises that they were worried about how the conference would go if they had stuck to their guns. Widdecombe said that they were aware of divisions in the Party but the tax rate U-turn, she said, would not win them any votes.
Turner said that removing the cap on bankers bonuses, also announced on September 23, would seem to be a more controversial move. Widdecombe, however, disagreed, explaining that the EU put a cap on bankers bonuses in place so that London would not be able to compete as well against Frankfurt and Paris in the financial services market. Removing the cap, she added, was part of the Brexit plan and, although it doesn’t seem so to ordinary people, will actually help the UK’s finances in the long term.
Bev Turner then turned Widdecombe’s thoughts to Michael Gove and Grant Shapps’s manoeuvres behind the scenes at conference. These included the objection to removing the 45% tax rate.
Widdecombe said:
Michael Gove is extremely dangerous. He spends all his time conspiring and plotting … I’ve known him for years … What he is not is a good colleague. He gets bees in his bonnet and sets out to destroy everything in his path. He’s done it with Boris … He is a plotter. He is a natural plotter. Can’t help himself.
She said that Truss cannot have the whip removed from Gove, as Kwarteng has already U-turned on the 45% tax rate issue. For Truss to remove the whip after the fact, she said, would be useless. So, Truss can’t do anything to or about him for now.
Here’s the video, which is five-and-a-half minutes long:
How the U-turn came about
On Monday, October 3, The Sun‘s political editor Harry Cole got the scoop about how Truss and Kwarteng’s U-turn came about late on Sunday:
This is an incredible news story, revealing that Cabinet ministers did not know about the U-turn until they saw The Sun‘s website:
… our story, revealed at 12.20am, came as a shock to some of the most senior members of the government.
Four Cabinet ministers were enjoying a late-night drink when our story broke — leaving them speechless.
No one from No 10 had given them any warning.
After a brutal day of maulings from big beasts of the Tory party and dire warnings her mini-Budget would be voted down by MPs, the newbie PM was forced into a humiliating climbdown.
Gove and Shapps, along with other Rishi Sunak supporters, worked behind the scenes on Sunday:
Ex-Cabinet Ministers Grant Shapps, Julian Smith, Michael Gove, Mel Stride and Damian Green — all of whom backed Rishi Sunak — had spent the day stirring up rebellion and were confident that more than 40 MPs backed their concerns.
Was that why Sunak did not show up? He did say he wanted Truss ‘to own the moment’.
Graham Brady contacted Truss early on Sunday evening:
Sir Graham Brady, the chairman of the powerful 1922 Committee of Tory backbenchers, had been to see a worried Ms Truss at 7pm to warn her she did not have the numbers to ram her tax cut plans through Parliament — despite a majority of 71.
Meanwhile, Kwarteng was in Birmingham’s lively city centre, planning on tucking into a curry dinner. My commiserations go to him. Birmingham is home to some of the nation’s finest Indian restaurants:
… her screeching about-turn would come as a shock to the Chancellor, who had been about to tuck into a beef curry at an upmarket restaurant across town.
He left his dinner before his main course turned up, rushing back for crisis talks with Truss, who told him: “It’s time to rip off the plaster.”
Kwarteng agreed to the U-turn, sensing trouble ahead:
Once on board, Mr Kwarteng was told he would have to be the face of the surrender the next day.
But it was a painful blow as he had already trailed his big speech to the conference into the next day’s papers, insisting there would be no U-turns and saying: “We must stay the course.”
Taking to the stage on Monday afternoon for that speech, an exasperated Chancellor said: “What a day.”
The divisions are many and deep:
The mood among some Cabinet ministers is one of despair at the state of the Tory party, which is at risk of becoming unmanageable.
And that, in turn, will leave the Government unable to actually govern, leaving the country adrift at the worst possible time.
There are potential mutineers everywhere Truss turns.
After 12 years of Tory rule, there are more than 50 sacked and embittered ex-ministers who do not have much to lose.
This is a group that includes MPs who served under Theresa May and continue to be enraged by her Brexit downfall.
Then there are supporters of Rishi Sunak, who are enjoying the “I told you so” moment.
Some still think it’s possible to kill Truss now and have Rishi anointed in a coronation.
Throw in the still-ongoing Brexit wars — Truss, having converted from Remain, is firmly in the Remainiac crosshairs — and it’s a poisonous, chaotic mix.
One Cabinet minister said: “They’ve taken the bat off Boris, broken it into pieces and given chunks to the different warring sides to beat each other with. It’s like Lord of the Flies.”
However, a week is a long time in politics:
“All’s not lost yet”, one minister said.
“A week is a long time. We have two years to turn this around. We might not win the next election — but we can at least make ourselves competitive”.
City AM‘s Andy Silvester doesn’t hold out much hope, though:
What the public think
It’s difficult for those of us who are not economists to know what to believe about the upper tax rate U-turn.
And we trust journalists even less than ourselves. We are doing better researching the matter online through independent sites rather than the mainstream media.
The media told us that abolishing the upper rate of tax would affect Sterling. Hmm. On Tuesday morning, it was holding steady after the Bank of England’s intervention at the end of last week:
Did the U-turn have anything to do with exchange rates, though?
One Guido Fawkes reader said that it did not:
Good job Kwasi dropped the 45p tax cut, which, according to the MSM, affected the pound. Anyone knows it did not but he can use it to his advantage: if I borrow more for benefits, giving away money, it will damage the pound and interest rates causing more financial hardship to working tax payers.
So I would love to help but need to get inflation down.
Again being run by all the MSM at the same time to affect the government its disgusting.
He blames Michael Gove and, possibly, Boris’s former adviser Dominic Cummings:
Gove and likely helped by Cummings … maybe Truss could ask Boris come out against him that he is damaging the party first him now Truss. Truss did stay loyal to Boris. Gove destroying his own party does not make him a formidable politician …
Another commenter cannot understand what the rebels hope to achieve:
What on earth are the rebels trying to achieve? Collapse the government and shoo-in Labour? If not- what’s the end-game? Parachute in Sunak against the expressed wishes of the grassroots party membership? That’ll end well. Ultimately- Truss was chosen by the members on the basis of pursuing a pro-business, pro-growth agenda. She is now trying to do exactly that and is being undermined by people who offer no viable alternative.
Someone else said the anti-Truss movement is reminiscent of the anti-Brexit rebellion Theresa May had to endure in 2019:
It’s looking very much like this is going to be a repeat of the debacle over Brexit.
Mr Gove should have the good grace to accept the wishes of all Conservative Party members, who voted for Liz Truss, and not the legislative agenda of a few disaffected Blairite “Conservative” MPs, who bizarrrely seem to think that more of the same is going to free us from the social and financial quagmire such policy has led us to in the last 25 years.
I give the current government about 6 months.
Another said that Gove is firmly to blame:
One Cabinet Secretary telling the Daily Express they weren’t surprised by Mr Gove’s actions because he is a “disloyal ****”. When told about Mr Gove’s remarks another senior Cabinet Minister used the same four-letter expletive.
The next battle will be over how much to increase benefits: average salary rates or the inflation rate:
Chief whip needs to get a grip and threaten deselection to all those publicly declaring their duplicity and treachery. Removing the whip from Gove would be a good start. No rise in benefits when there are mass vacancies to be filled and when there is no pay rise for the private sector. Too many different factions in the Tories so no chance of collective responsibility.
More on that tomorrow.
On Friday, September 23, 2022, just four days after the Queen’s funeral, Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng delivered a ‘fiscal event’ designed to kick start the British economy.
In the days leading up to the fiscal event, so-called because it wasn’t a full budget, the media and Labour were clamouring for it. However, the nation was in mourning for the late monarch and, accordingly, Parliament was in recess.
Conservative critics — i.e. Brexit critics — asked, ‘Where’s Liz? Where’s the Chancellor? Something must be done!’
Parliament reconvened on that Friday to hear Kwarteng deliver a big, bold and beautiful economic plan, which included the abolition of the 45% upper tax rate.
Even Nigel Farage approved, going back in history to Margaret Thatcher’s time as PM:
What happened? The same critics blasted Kwarteng and Prime Minister Liz Truss for their rather Thatcherite plan, designed to reverse the nation’s economic course since the Labour days of the early Millennium under Gordon Brown to the present Conservative government:
Small-c conservatives hoped that Boris Johnson would have done this, but it was too big to take on. With the flak Truss and Kwarteng caught, it now appears that Johnson probably feared it would dent his popularity. That’s only my guess, but it makes sense.
Mortgage rate fears
I went to a small local event on Saturday, September 24. Before it began, one woman of pensionable age asked, ‘Has anybody seen the news today? I didn’t have time to look. Has the economy crashed yet?’ It was clear she was angry. Other people in attendance responded with jokes about supply-side economics.
Throughout the week, it was nothing but doom and gloom, even on GB News, which offered few correctives. The Labour Party conference took place last week, which did not help.
I went to the shops on Wednesday, September 28. On my walk, I overheard an estate agent talking to an older couple about their mortgage rate fears as a result of the fiscal event. The media had sent out ominous messages about rising interest rates. The estate agent told the couple that the turbulence would be short term and that it was taking place all over Europe — which is true.
On Thursday, September 29, the BBC’s Question Time aired. One young woman stoked fears about a hike in interest rates on mortgages, claiming — claiming — that hers was going up to over 10%:
But was this claim true?
Apparently, the claim is false:
Skipton Building Society said they had not offered a 10%+ mortgage rate for many years:
Once again, the Left — including the media — took charge of the Conservative narrative. They’re still at it.
Conservative Party conference opens
On Sunday, October 2, the Conservative Party conference began in the UK’s Second City, Birmingham, once our industrial capital:
Penny Mordaunt MP, Leader of the House of Commons, paid an excellent tribute to our late Queen, which was followed by a minute’s silence and the singing of the National Anthem.
Having seen the first few speeches on GB News, the mood from the MPs speaking was upbeat. However, the mood in the conference hall was sombre.
Rishi Sunak and several of his supporters, prominent MPs, did not attend. Sunak said he wanted to be absent so that Truss ‘could own the moment’. Ouch.
Boris Johnson also sent in his regrets.
Earlier that day, Truss appeared on Laura Kuenssberg’s Sunday show on BBC1.
Kuenssberg asked her about the abolition of the 45% tax rate. Truss said that was Kwarteng’s decision. Oh, dear. Guido Fawkes has the video:
Because the fiscal event had to be done quickly, Truss and Kwarteng did not consult other Cabinet members.
Also, because it was such a departure from the norm, it appeared shocking to Britons expecting more of the same. Truss told Kuenssberg that she and the Chancellor could have communicated it better (see video):
Truss rightly pointed out that ‘optics’ — rather than reality — dominated the fiscal event:
In the video, Kuenssberg ended by saying that optics were terribly important, implying that they make just as much of an honest representation as does reality. Oh, my days!
Returning to the Conservative Party conference opening day, Michael Gove stuck his oar in, saying that tax cuts are not conservative.
Whaaat?
Former Conservative MP Michael Portillo explained on his GB News show that Gove became an MP during David Cameron’s time as Prime Minister and, therefore, has a different take on economics.
The economy wasn’t the only issue on MPs’ minds. Other of Truss’s leadership rivals in this summer’s contest for PM were not happy.
As is common with party conferences, smaller events took place outside of the main venue.
Last week, Truss said she would like to see more immigration, something that won’t please folks who voted Conservative for the first time in 2019.
On Sunday evening, Trade Secretary Kemi Badenoch — the MP whom conservatives deeply admire — attacked Truss’s immigration plans:
Guido has the story, which reveals rifts in the Party (emphases his):
If Liz Truss thought the furore over the 45p rate would distract attention from MPs rebelling on other policy areas, Guido’s sorry to disappoint her. At the IEA/TPA DrinkTanks reception last night, guest of honour Kemi Badenoch openly rebuked the PM’s plans to let in more immigrants to boost growth. The Trade Secretary ignored any sense of collective responsibility as she told the assembled free marketeers:
Simply taking in numbers to boost GDP while GDP per capita falls is not the right way to do that. We need to look again at resolving our productivity issues and that means using capital better, not just getting cheaper and cheaper labour.
Kemi’s brazen and deliberate speech last night all but confirmed The Times’ article on Sunday reporting major Cabinet divisions over the plan, with Kemi and Suella Braverman at odds with the PM’s preferred free market solution. Like Liz, Guido doesn’t have a problem with skilled, legal immigration, it is the illegal immigration which is concerning. It seems Tory Cabinet ministers aren’t even pretending to play happy families anymore…
Also that evening, Leader of the House Penny Mordaunt spoke at a small gathering to complain — rightly — about poor Conservative communication over policy making:
She made her views known at an event called ‘Conservatives in Communication’.
Sadly, Guido points out:
… host Adam Honeysett-Watts had to tell the crowd to shut up and listen. Unfortunately, most of the attendees were far more interested in guzzling free booze and chatting to each other.
Meanwhile, Truss addressed a group of Conservatives, explaining the need for growth — now. She, too, said that Party communications are lacking:
She is not wrong, and she has to make up for the past two years, consumed by dealing with the pandemic.
The second day of conference brings U-turn on 45% tax rate
Did Michael Gove, the Scot who wants to become PM, exercise his influence once again?
Nothing against Scots, but their politicians do seem to think that people need to be micro-managed, which Gove does, and that we should continue a globalist agenda in, well, nearly everything.
For the first time in years, Gove is not in Cabinet.
That said, he has never supported PMs he has served, going all the way back to David Cameron. This comment comes from one of Guido’s readers (purple emphases mine):
Cameron, don’t forget Cameron. Gove mortally wounded him too with Brexit. I don’t disagree with Gove supporting Brexit obviously but the way he went about it was like a serpent to someone who called him his friend. His whole front line career has been poisonous towards the sitting leader.
At 7:17 a.m., Guido tweeted that Truss and Kwarteng were backing down on abolishing the 45% tax rate:
Kwarteng said he would still be going ahead with the rest of the fiscal event policy.
That U-turn will empower Gove and the Left — again, media included — to control the narrative even more.
Baroness Thatcher would have been so disappointed:
And I know what Thatcher would have done with Gove: withdrawn the Party whip.
Guido says that the reversal came about on Sunday evening and that The Sun had the exclusive:
After The Sun broke the exclusive of conference late last night, the Lobby’s just been informed that the government will now not be going ahead with the 45p rate abolition, with a u-turn expected to be announced within the next hour. Just yesterday the press were briefed that Kwasi was to tell conference “We must stay the course. I am confident our plan is the right one.”
This morning the course has not been stayed – it has been re-directed in another direction altogether. Kwasi’s statement:
From supporting British business to lowering the tax burden for the lowest paid, our Growth Plan sets out a new approach to build a more prosperous economy. However, it is clear that the abolition of the 45p tax rate has become a distraction from our overriding mission to tackle the challenges facing our country. As a result, I’m announcing we are not proceeding with the abolition of the 45p tax rate. We get it, and we have listened. This will allow us to focus on delivering the major parts of our growth package. First, our Energy Price Guarantee, which will support households and businesses with their energy bills. Second, cutting taxes to put money back in the pockets of 30 million hard-working people and grow our economy. Third, driving supply side reforms – including accelerating major infrastructure projects – to get Britain moving.
The move came after crisis talks yesterday between the PM and Chancellor; their hands forced by Tory MPs continuing to state on the record they couldn’t vote for the plans, despite an open warning from [new Party chairman, MP] Jake Berry that they’d lose the whip. Gove was at the forefront of the rebellion…
Guido’s cartoonist came up with this:
It is unclear how much of this has to come up for a vote in Parliament in order to proceed.
However, it is becoming apparent that a significant number of MPs have not united behind Liz Truss:
If enough Conservative MPs rebel in a vote, the Government could collapse. A collapse could trigger an imminent general election (GE). With the way things are, Labour could win and form a coalition with the other Opposition parties. That would be a disaster, particularly in voting reform if they push through a vote for 16-year-olds and immigrants to vote in a GE. Furthermore, they would probably also want some type of proportional representation to replace the centuries-old first-past-the-post.
Of course, the alternative is that Conservative MPs have another leadership contest, but that would look as if they were incompetent. One MP suggested that Conservative Party members be locked out of that vote altogether, which would anger them deeply.
An hour after Kwarteng announced the U-turn, he was on BBC Radio 4 with Conservative-loathing Nick Robinson. This is so sad:
Then Kwarteng went on Nick Ferrari’s LBC breakfast show. Ferrari pressed him to say ‘no more U-turns’ but the Chancellor repeated, ‘I’ve said what I’ve said’. Guido has the video:
As a result of the U-turn, the markets were no longer predicting a 6% rise in interest rates, but something slightly lower — 5.5% and 5.75%. Guido is right in saying this is an emotional response:
Sterling was also slightly up, but not hugely:
In closing, let’s return to Gordon Brown, who succeeded Tony Blair as PM — without an election, I might add.
Conservative MP Gillian Keegan put the blame squarely on Brown in an interview with Times Radio on Monday morning.
Guido has the story:
Foreign Office Minister Gillian Keegan was spot on when she told Times Radio this morning that the top rate of tax was a political time bomb left behind by Gordon Brown:
I always knew that it was going to be a political problem. I mean, let’s be honest, this was a political trap that was set by Gordon Brown in the dying days of his role as PM, right. And I paid the 50% tax. I was in business then. And I remember how devastating it was because actually, it meant you were paying about 65% tax. And there’s something in your mind, which is like, really, you know, only 35% for me? And I’m doing all these hours. I was a business person, then it was set as a political trap…. In theory it [the top rate of tax] should never have been there.
There is something immoral about the government taking the majority of your income in tax. It is also a disheartening disincentive; reversing this spiteful tax is the correct policy, though this might perhaps be the wrong time. Getting rid of a political tax that was only set up by Gordon Brown when he knew he was likely to be ousted –to hurt the Tories rather than raise revenue – was the right thing to do. Even the IFS’ Paul Johnson thinks in revenue terms “It might plausibly cost nothing at all”. The tax was not about raising revenue – it was about political positioning.
Back in Fife, Brown will be rocking in his chair laughing that his tax booby trap, announced only weeks before he left office, and which was expected to cause problems for his successor David Cameron, has finally exploded in the face of a Tory Chancellor. The fuse wire on Brown’s time bomb turned out to be 12 years long…
Truss and Kwarteng have learned a lot in the past month.
I do hope that they have learned something from their baptism by fire, especially Truss, for whom I have the greatest empathy. The Queen’s death delayed her getting off the ground running. Then when she was finally able to do something, the media attacked her even more for it. Now the Party’s MPs are angry with her. Some have already submitted no confidence letters to Sir Graham Brady of the 1922 Committee. The polls have been tanking. Two show voters giving Labour a 30% lead in the polls, something not seen for decades.
No one has even given Truss or the Chancellor a chance.
I will continue to pray for hers and Kwarteng’s success against all odds.
They are doing the right thing …
… which is why they are being attacked mercilessly.
This is the final instalment of my series on Boris Johnson’s downfall.
Those who missed them can read parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6.
Also of interest are:
Developing news: how long can Boris last as PM? (July 5-6)
Boris stays as PM for now but stands down as Conservative leader: ‘When the herd moves, it moves’ (July 6-7)
This post discusses two groups of people who are still wild about Boris: British voters and the Ukrainians.
British voters
On June 11, 2022, one week after Boris survived a vote of confidence by his fellow Conservative MPs, The Observer — the Sunday edition of The Guardian — posted the results of a poll they commissioned.
The findings were surprising for a left-wing newspaper (emphases mine):
Boris Johnson makes a better prime minister than Keir Starmer would despite Partygate, the cost of living crisis and the confidence vote in Johnson held by his MPs, according to the latest Observer poll.
Granted, the results were close, but Boris managed to come out on top, with the Conservatives two points behind Labour:
The Opinium figures, which will raise further concerns within Labour over the party leader’s performance, shows that the prime minister has a two-point lead over his opponent. It also reveals that Starmer’s party holds a narrow two-point lead, compared with a three-point lead in the last poll a fortnight ago. Labour are on 36% of the vote, with the Tories up one point on 34%. The Lib Dems are on 13% with the Greens on 6% …
While 28% think Johnson would make the best prime minister, 26% opted for Starmer.
On June 13, the i paper‘s Hugo Gye posted a few pages from the book Moonshot, by Pfizer’s chairman Albert Bourla:
Two excerpts follow. These pertain to late 2020 and early 2021:
From my perspective, the UK was doing an exceptional job under tremendous pressure.
At that time, the UK was the only vaccinating so quickly that demand surpassed supply. As a result, we worked on a plan to meet the UK’s needs …
Yet, in the UK, it was only the Conservatives and conservatives remembering Boris’s efforts during that time period:
On June 14, the Mail‘s Alex Brummer wrote a positive article about the British economy, explaining why things weren’t as bad as the media and pundits portray them:
So, yes, we face serious challenges. And yet I simply do not believe there is any justification for the gloom-laden interpretation by large sections of the broadcast media and fierce critics of Boris Johnson’s government.
These Cassandras peddle a diet of relentless financial woe as they carelessly claim that the nation is in recession or heading for one.
But closer inspection shows not only that things are nowhere near as bad as they claim, but that there are serious grounds for hope in certain sectors, too.
Brummer explored the possibilities of what could happen either way:
True, the UK economy lost momentum recently, shrinking by 0.3 pc in April.
But what no one has mentioned is that this was largely down to a statistical quirk, and respected City forecasters are still actually predicting a 3.2 pc expansion of the UK economy this year, followed by 0.9 pc in 2023.
The big danger is that the constant barrage from the doom merchants could begin to influence events and destroy the resilience of consumers and enterprise — resilience which is still delivering for this country.
What is more, with a change of tack in the Government’s approach, I believe the economy could be recharged.
Of course, the country will struggle if it is required to contend with inflation, rising interest rates and a mountainous tax burden all at the same time. If consumers and businesses are doubly squeezed by higher interest rates and higher taxes, household incomes will be devastated …
Brummer disagreed with Rishi’s tax hikes:
The truth is that, with the nation close to full employment and the City of London and services — comprising more than 70 pc of national output — performing well, there was absolutely no need to urgently hike taxes, if at all.
Income tax, national insurance receipts, VAT and corporation tax receipts have all been flowing into the exchequer in record volumes. All that future rises will do is stymie spending and the willingness of companies to invest.
And the main reason for that fall in output of 0.3 pc in April? It is because the Government suddenly ended the NHS’s Test and Trace operations — which had grown into a formidable industry, employing tens of thousands of people — as the country emerged from the pandemic.
In fact, April saw activity in consumer services jump by 2.6 pc. In spite of the £100-a-tank of petrol, the £8-a-pint of best IPA and rocketing food prices, a recession — defined as two quarters of negative growth — is unlikely.
Brummer did support Rishi’s help to the neediest families:
Even if Rishi Sunak does not cut taxes, his £15 billion package of targeted support to help poorer households with the rising cost of living means incomes should now rise in the second and third quarter of the year. It is equal to nearly 2 pc of their earnings and will boost the country’s spending power.
There were more reasons not to believe the doom-mongers, who, as I write in early September, are getting shriller and shriller:
What the doom-mongers fail to tell you is that investment bankers Goldman Sachs recently pointed out that consumer services are ‘robust’ and Britain’s economy is 0.9 pc larger now than it was before the nation went into lockdown.
Economic activity in the crucial services sector, meanwhile, is 2.6 pc higher.
But it is not just the consumer activity — along with the £370 bn plus of pandemic savings in the current and savings accounts of households — propping up the economy.
New data just released shows that the drive towards the UK becoming a high-tech, high-value nation continues to make Britain prosper.
So far this year, the country has sucked in £12.4 bn of investment into the tech industry, the highest level of any country other than the United States.
And let no one blame Brexit:
As for the argument that Brexit has done for Britain, it is comprehensively rubbished by the City consultancy firm EY, which argues that, when it comes to financial services, ‘six years since the EU referendum, we can be confident that Brexit has not damaged the UK’s fundamental appeal’.
Since the financial and professional services are the biggest generator of income for HMRC, and the UK’s most successful export to the rest of the world, this should surely be a source of national pride rather than Remoaner carping.
Indeed, wherever you look, the excellence of Britain’s life sciences sector — as evidenced by the rapid development and distribution of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine during the pandemic — continues to shine …
Ultimately, taxes do need to be cut:
But more needs to be done. And by that I mean Rishi Sunak must put an end to the tax hikes — or even reverse them …
… he froze personal tax allowances until 2025-6, along with the thresholds for capital gains tax.
… this will provide additional revenues to the Government of about £20.5 bn a year.
Sunak also opted to raise corporation tax from 19 pc to a whopping 25 pc next year. And to help pay for the NHS and social care, every employee and employer in the country is now paying a 1.25 pc surcharge on national insurance.
Together, all these measures (before inclusion of the windfall tax on oil production) mean that Boris Johnson’s government is raising more tax from the British people and commerce than any UK government since the 1940s.
Such a position, given the precarious economic circumstances we face, is completely unsustainable. If the Johnson government wants to fight the next election with a healthy economy, taxes have to be cut with a decisive policy shift.
And if that happens, it could just be the magic pill for a Tory revival.
Meanwhile, Boris took a brief staycation in Cornwall while he helped campaign for the Conservative candidate in Neil ‘Tractor Porn’ Parish’s constituency for the by-election, which, unfortunately, the Liberal Democrats won.
The Mail reported on Boris’s schedule:
Boris Johnson has been pictured walking on a Cornish beach with his son Wilfred as he chose a staycation amid weeks of chaos at Britain’s airports for millions desperate for a post-pandemic foreign break.
The Prime Minister has been in the West Country campaigning as he tries to win the Tiverton and Honiton by-election for the Tories on June 23, but is squeezing in a short family holiday.
And after a flying visit to the Devon constituency he headed to Cornwall to launch his food strategy at the wheel of a tractor before relaxing on the award-winning Porthminster beach, St Ives.
Unfortunately, on Wednesday, June 15, Lord Geidt quit as Boris’s ethical adviser, which made all of his opponents question whether he should still be in office. This came a day after Geidt had appeared before a parliamentary select committee. I saw parts of that session. Geidt did not exactly inspire me with confidence.
Lord Geidt, a former private secretary to the Queen, announced his resignation in a 21-word statement the day after MPs accused him of “whitewashing” Johnson’s conduct and questioned whether there was “really any point” to him.
Geidt, 60, came close to quitting last month after concluding that there were “legitimate” questions about whether the prime minister breached the ministerial code. He said that Johnson’s fine for breaking coronavirus rules threatened to undermine his role and risked leaving the ministerial code open to ridicule.
He also received a “humble and sincere” apology from Johnson in January after the prime minister withheld critical messages from Geidt’s inquiry into the refurbishment of his Downing Street flat.
A statement from Geidt published on the government website this evening said simply: “With regret, I feel that it is right that I am resigning from my post as independent adviser on ministers’ interests.”
In a bruising encounter with the public administration and constitutional affairs select committee yesterday, Geidt admitted that he had been “frustrated” by the prime minister’s approach to the scandal.
William Wragg, the Conservative chairman of the committee, told The Times: “Lord Geidt is a person of great integrity, motivated by the highest ideals of public service. For the prime minister to lose one adviser on ministers’ interests may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose two looks like carelessness.”
Then again, William Wragg is not a fan of Boris’s, prompting his supporters to think there was a stitch up, especially as Tony Blair had just been installed as a new member of the Order of the Garter.
Geidt’s letter seems to be focused on Boris’s fixed penalty notice for Partygate, but Boris’s response, published in The Guardian, is about steel tariffs:
GB News’s Patrick Christys explained this before going into Tony Blair’s offences during his time as Prime Minister, including the Iraq War and letting IRA terrorists walk free. It’s a shame the video isn’t clearer, but the audio is compelling. After Christys introduced the subject, a panel debate took place:
Christys ran a poll asking if Boris is more unethical than Blair. Seventy per cent said No:
Blair’s former adviser John McTernan said that, unlike Boris, Blair had been cleared of a fixed penalty notice (for an irregularity in paying London’s congestion charge). But was Blair actually cleared? The BBC article from the time suggests that he wasn’t:
On June 24, after the Conservatives lost Neil Parish’s seat to the Lib Dems and the Wakefield seat to Labour, The Telegraph reported that the co-Chairman of the Conservative Party, Oliver Dowden MP, resigned. He seemed to blame the loss on Boris, although mid-term by-election victories often go to an Opposition party, something Dowden should have known:
Oliver Dowden has resigned as chairman of the Conservative Party after it suffered two by-election defeats, saying in a letter to Prime Minister Boris Johnson that “someone must take responsibility”.
Mr Dowden’s resignation came at 5.35am, shortly after the announcement of the two defeats. He had been scheduled to appear on the morning media round before he decided to step down.
In Tiverton and Honiton the Liberal Democrats overturned a 24,000 Tory majority to win, while Labour reclaimed Wakefield.
The contests, triggered by the resignation of disgraced Tories, offered voters the chance to give their verdict on the Prime Minister just weeks after 41 per cent of his own MPs cast their ballots against him.
Guido Fawkes posted Boris’s generous letter of thanks to Dowden and his video explaining that mid-term by-election results often explain voters’ frustration with the direction of the Government:
As usual, Blair’s former spin doctor Alastair Campbell posted another inaccuracy, this time about Labour’s by-election results:
At the time, Boris was away in Kigali, Rwanda, for CHOGM (Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting). While there, he clarified sex and gender. The Times reported:
A woman cannot be born with a penis, Boris Johnson said last night, adding that there were “particular problems” around “issues of gender”, but he said it was important to be “as understanding of everybody else as possible”.
Asked whether a woman could be born with a penis, Johnson replied: “Not without being a man”.
This has been an ongoing controversy for the past year. Neither Rishi Sunak nor Keir Starmer have been willing to answer that question. Boris met that challenge.
By the time Boris resigned on Thursday, July 7, millions of voters thought it was a stitch up.
Dan Wootton expressed our thoughts magnificently in his editorial that evening on GB News:
Excerpts from his transcript follow:
They won, folks.
They got him in the end.
Let’s be honest for a moment, they were never going to stop until they’d secured Boris Johnson’s head.
Since December, the campaign by the political establishment, the Remoaner elite, the civil service blob and – crucially – the country’s biased broadcast media, notably BBC News, ITV News and Sly News, has been fever pitch.
Eventually, the Conservative Party decided it was impossible to govern while also fighting such dark and powerful forces.
These are deeply depressing times for British democracy.
Boris is the third Tory Prime Minister brought down in six years.
The febrile and hostile establishment and the MSM knows the power they have to bring political paralysis to the country.
And why were they so determined to destroy Boris?
Think about it.
He was a transformational Prime Minister.
A Prime Minister who stared them all down to finally deliver Brexit.
A Prime Minister who had vowed to cut the size of the civil service and demanded they return to their damned desks.
A Prime Minister who was going to scrap the hated BBC licence fee and sell the far-left Channel 4 News.
It’s not hard to see why they would stop at nothing to discredit him.
I mean, last night the BBC quoted a source saying Boris Johnson “is now like Putin”.
That’s how deranged and determined his critics have become.
The celebration that broke out across the airwaves today – especially on the Boris Bashing Corporation once known as the BBC – blew up any final suggestion that we have an impartial broadcast media here in Britain …
I wanted to share with you part of a conversation I had earlier today with a source close to the Prime Minister.
They told me: “People had no interest in talking about the quite historic leadership achievements be that dragging us through a pandemic, a world leading vaccine programme rollout and a quite uniquely special performance in regards to that European war.”
“Those people who wanted him gone never wanted to acknowledge that at any point. Never ever. It was always just the Westminster personality stuff. That was the only focus.”
“Labour has had not one policy or grown-up policy discussion. It has been an out and out campaign to remove Boris. And you always have to ask yourself why. Why did they want to get rid of Boris so much? Why did sections of the media do that? Ultimately, wounded or not, he is the Conservative’s best chance of winning an election” …
As the Daily Mail said today: “The truth is, Mr Johnson stands head and shoulders above almost all his assassins. Compared with the mountains he has scaled, their combined achievements are little more than molehills“ …
To Boris Johnson, it was a project not completed, largely down to external forces.
But thank you for delivering us Brexit; that is an achievement for the ages that will go down in the history books.
It was a sad evening, indeed.
However, in time, there might be an upside. Maybe he could appear on GB News now and again:
Boris won that night’s Greatest Briton accolade:
Wootton’s focus on Brexit was confirmed by The Telegraph‘s Sherelle Jacobs the following day. She fears that Boris’s resignation will give a lift to prominent Remainers:
… With the implosion of Boris Johnson, the Brexit war threatens to start anew. Tory Leavers must accept their vulnerability. The Prime Minister who ended the last battle by getting a Brexit deal done has just fallen in ignominious circumstances. Meanwhile, Remainers – who will never give up the fight – scent weakness.
While Andrew Adonis rallies against a “revolution which devours its children”, Michael Heseltine has declared that “if Boris goes, Brexit goes”. It might be tempting to dismiss all this as the hopeful rantings of bitter men. After all, Sir Keir Starmer has been at pains to reassure voters in recent days that Labour will not take Britain back into the European Union.
But even if the leader of the Opposition – a Remainer who voted six times against a Brexit deal – is genuine, he is powerless to stop the rejuvenation of the Remainer campaign. As support for Brexit in the polls has seeped away in recent months, in part because of the chaos that has gripped the Government, ultra-Remainers have been on manoeuvres. With the fall of Johnson, they think their time has almost come.
Over the next two years, they will likely proceed with a calculated mixture of boldness and caution. Already the public is being relentlessly bombarded with misinformation, which erroneously links every ill facing Britain with the decision to leave the EU. As the Tory party is distracted by internal dramas, negative Brexit sentiment will mount. This is already starting to happen, as critics in the business world become blunter in their criticisms – from the aviation industry to the CBI.
Meanwhile, some Tory MPs have been discreetly arguing in favour of a softer Brexit. Indeed, while the removal of the PM was by no means a Remainer plot, some of his internal enemies were motivated by a desire for greater alignment with EU rules – or at least by their opposition to what they consider to be an excessively aggressive attitude towards fixing the Northern Ireland protocol …
In truth, Conservative fealty to the Brexit cause has been disintegrating even under Boris Johnson, as the Blob has sapped the Government’s will …
The great fear is that the Tory party now elects a closet Remainer who does not have the conviction to take all this on. That Brexit dies with a whimper, smothered by bureaucratic inertia and then finally strangled after the next election. If Brexiteers want to avoid this fate, they must think like war strategists once again. That means confronting the extent of their current weakness, and taking their opponents seriously.
Boris also shares that same worry and said so in Parliament on July 19, the day of his final Prime Minister’s Questions:
Right after Boris’s resignation, an online petition appeared: ‘Reinstate Boris Johnson as PM’. It currently has over 23,000 signatures making it one of the top signed petitions on Change.org.
On Saturday, July 9, the i paper had an interesting report with several interviews:
The atmosphere sounded surreal:
“It was a bit weird”, a source said of the Cabinet meeting Boris Johnson convened on Thursday just two hours after he said he would step down, effectively putting Britain on pause.
The Prime Minister was flanked by senior ministers, some of whom, less than 24 hours, had earlier led a delegation of men and women in grey suits to No 10 to urge him to quit …
Bill committees examining legislation line-by-line had to be cancelled, or they had newly resigned ministers sitting on them as backbenchers, while the whips who lacked the required specialist knowledge of the issues at stake were leading for the Government …
Contenders to take over as PM, when Mr Johnson does go, have been preparing for a contest months as the writing has slowly been scrawled on the wall of No 10.
Tom Tugendhat, Penny Mordaunt, and Jeremy Hunt were the most active hopefuls this week, contacting MPs and arranging meetings …
As the leadership contenders jostled, the Whitehall blame game began over Mr Johnson’s spectacular fall from grace. The Prime Minister entirely overhauled his inner circle in February, after the initial “Partygate” allegations broke, and it is largely this team that will shepherd the Government through the final few months of his premiership …
The arrival of Guto Harri, one of Mr Johnson’s oldest allies, as director of communications is seen by many as a contributor to the Prime Minister’s downfall …
The spin chief had a habit of making up policies off the cuff, prompting advisers in other departments to joke about “the Guto special” when confronted with unexpected announcements from No 10. One Whitehall official concluded: “He is good for journalists, I’m not sure he’s good for HMG [Her Majesty’s Government]” …
But others pin the ultimate blame firmly at Mr Johnson’s door.
One of Mr Johnson’s closest former advisers told i that it “all went wrong for the PM” when he stopped listening to those from Vote Leave …
One of the former ministers who quit said on Thursday simply: “Everything is his fault. I spent months defending, or at least being generous about, his mistakes.
“Not after the last 24 hours. Appalling.”
On July 12, Guido reported that Boris loyalist Jacob Rees-Mogg thought that the Prime Minister’s name should be on the Conservative MPs’ ballot (emphases his):
… he affirmed it was “unjust” to deny the Prime Minister the opportunity to fight for his position amongst Tory members. This comes in the context of his previous arguments for the growing presence of personal mandates in British political leaders. Unfortunately, Guido doesn’t believe this strategy is quite in line with the contest rules…
I think this gave Boris’s supporters false hopes:
People in Conservative constituencies began emailing their MPs:
With no result, the question then turned to whether Boris’s name should be on the ballot for Conservative Party members.
On Saturday, July 16, The Times‘s Gabriel Pogrund and Harry Yorke posted an article: ‘How the Tories turned the heat on Rishi Sunak’. In it, they introduced Lord Cruddas, who would go on to campaign for Boris’s name to be on the members’ ballot:
Both men were Eurosceptics who had supported the Vote Leave campaign when it might have been politically advantageous not to do so. Both were the beneficiaries of Boris Johnson’s patronage. Cruddas had been given a peerage despite official objections. Sunak had been plucked from obscurity the previous year and made one of the youngest chancellors in history.
In 2021:
Sunak was the most popular politician in Britain and second only to Liz Truss in Conservative Home members’ polls, having overseen the furlough and Eat Out to Help Out schemes. In the chamber, Cruddas gave his own vote of confidence, saying Sunak’s budget “had established a clear path for the country to move from these difficult times”, praising his “thoughtful” approach and arguing it would “not just to reinvigorate the economy post Covid but to help propel the post-Brexit opportunities”.
By July 2022, everything had changed:
A week into the most toxic Tory leadership election in memory, the fact such comments were made feels inconceivable. Cruddas, 68, who remains close to Johnson, has shared posts on social media describing Sunak as a “rat”, “a snake”, a “little weasel”, a “backstabber”, “a slimy snake”, a “treacherous snake”, “Fishy Rishi”, “Hissy Rishi”, “Judas”, “the traitor”, “the Remainer’s choice”, a “sly assassin”, a “Tory wet” promoting high taxes and the leader of a “coup” who “must be removed at all costs”. Cruddas also retweeted claims about the financial affairs of Sunak’s wife, Akshata Murty.
Tonight the peer said there had indeed been a “coup”, adding: “I planned to donate a total of £500,000 this year but that is on hold and will not be paid unless the membership have a chance to vote on Boris being PM. I have no interest in Rishi who I deem to be not fit for high office due to his plotting and the orchestrated way he and others resigned to remove the PM.” He also accused Sunak, 42, of setting up his leadership “before Christmas” and choreographing his resignation to inflict maximum damage.
The problem for Sunak is that such sentiment — especially the notion that he behaved improperly and cannot be trusted on the economy — is not confined to a fringe on social media. He might be the frontrunner but “Anyone But Rishi” reflects the opinion of Johnson and a coalition within the party. This includes cabinet ministers, staff inside Downing Street and Conservative Campaign Headquarters (CCHQ), Johnson’s biggest donors, MPs opposed to higher taxes, and rivals for the leadership.
On July 22, The Telegraph‘s Christopher Hope added support for Boris’s return and, in the meantime, addition to the ballot:
Tim Montgomerie, a former aide to Mr Johnson who has since been critical of him, said he had been told by sources close to the Prime Minister that he was convinced he would be back.
In a well-sourced post on social media, Mr Montgomerie wrote: “Boris is telling aides that he’ll be PM again within a year” …
It comes as a row broke out among senior Conservatives about a campaign among party members to allow them a vote on whether Mr Johnson should continue as Prime Minister.
By Friday night, 7,600 members – all of whom have given their membership numbers – had signed a petition calling for the vote.
Lord Cruddas of Shoreditch, the former party treasurer who organised the petition, said “several MPs” had started to “make noises” about supporting his campaign …
Conservative MPs panicked:
The next day, The Times stirred the pot even more with ‘Is Boris Johnson really planning another run at No 10?’
On Wednesday afternoon, moments after Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak were announced as the final two Conservative Party leadership contenders, a group of “red wall” MPs met on the House of Commons terrace to reflect on the result. “Is it too late to withdraw my resignation letter?” mused an MP, who held a junior ministerial role until the coup against Boris Johnson. “Shouldn’t we just bring back Boris?” she said, leaving the question to hang in the air …
… Much like the Roman republic after Caesar’s assassination, Whitehall is now riven by internecine warfare and a government paralysed by indecision …
For a man who just 18 days ago was brutally ousted from the job he has coveted his entire political life, Johnson appears to be living out his final days in Downing Street in a cheerful mood. Freed from the never-ending cycle of Westminster scandals, Johnson is relaxed and has spent the past few days hosting friends, relatives and other allies at Chequers and preparing a number of set-piece events leading up to his departure from No 10 in September …
Johnson, who allies claim remains furious with Sunak for his part in the coup, has sought to distract himself from the race to select his successor through media-friendly stunts …
Several MPs who helped oust Johnson have received a backlash from their constituents, stoking fears that they may face the same electoral retribution inflicted on Conservative MPs who ousted Margaret Thatcher. Backbenchers in red wall seats have been inundated with emails from voters who are furious at their role in ousting the prime minister.
They added that their postbag was filled with messages from newly converted Tory voters who have warned they will not vote for the party again now Johnson is gone. A colleague of Gary Sambrook, MP for Birmingham Northfield, claimed he had received hundreds of emails from constituents since he stood up in the Commons earlier this month and accused Johnson of refusing to accept responsibility for his mistakes …
Johnson leaves, aides say, with the air of someone with unfinished business. Whether this is the end of the Johnsonian project, or a precursor to his own Hollywood-esque sequel, remains to be seen.
On July 25, Christopher Hope wrote that the Boris petition had garnered 10,000 signatures:
Insiders say he is obsessed with delivering for the 14 million voters who voted Conservative in 2019, many for the first time because of him.
There are already stirrings of a revolt among the members. By Saturday night, 10,000 Conservative members had signed a petition organised by Lord Cruddas of Shoreditch, former Party treasurer, and David Campbell-Bannerman, former Tory MEP, demanding a say over his future.
The members want a second ballot to confirm MPs’ decision to force his resignation, to run concurrently with the official leadership ballot between Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak.
That evening, Dan Wootton stated his belief that Boris’s name should be on the members’ ballot:
He asked his panel, which included Boris’s father Stanley about it:
You can see relevant portions in these shorter extracts: Stanley supporting his son, Stanley verbally sparring with a journalist for the i paper as well as the opinion of former Boris adviser, Tim Montgomerie.
In the end, nothing happened. There was no Boris ballot.
Early this week, I heard one of the campaigners tell GB News that CCHQ are asking the organisers to do a sanity check on the signatories, confirming their Party membership number and clearing out any duplicates. If the number is still sizeable, CCHQ will discuss a possible changing of the rules for any future contests.
This is good news, in a way, but it will not help the Conservatives in the next general election. Boris’s supporters are still angry.
Ukrainians
The Ukrainians will miss their biggest supporter.
They were saddened by his resignation:
Boris offered them his reassurance:
Volodymyr Zelenskyy even made a special announcement to the Ukrainian people about it:
Guido Fawkes wrote:
After leaving office Guido suspects Boris may end up reflecting more proudly on his work supporting Ukraine than even his Brexit legacy. Since the announcement of his resignation, Ukrainians have come out en masse to voice their sadness about his impending departure … Taking to Telegram late last night, Zelenksyy posted a touching video saying “Today, the main topic in our country has become the British topic – Boris Johnson’s decision to resign as party leader and Prime Minister” …
Boris’s hair has become a bit of an icon there (just as Trump’s had in the United States). Guido has the images:
Boris’s popularity among Ukrainians has already been well-reported since the outbreak of war. Streets have been named after him, as have cakes in a Kyiv patisserie. Yesterday Ukraine’s national railways redesigned their logo to include an unmistakable mop of blonde hair, as did major supermarket Сільпо…
Boris once joked that the reason he’d left journalism for politics was because “no one puts up statues to journalists”. It seems that, thanks to his efforts in Ukraine, he did manage achieved his wish for public deification – just not in the country in which he was elected…
On July 8, Ukraine’s youngest MP made a video praising Boris:
Boris Johnson took a clear stand when so many others looked the other way.
In August, someone was inspired to paint a mural of Boris:
On August 24, Boris made his farewell — and surprise — visit to Ukraine on the nation’s Independence Day:
Guido wrote:
Boris has made yet another surprise visit to Ukraine on its independence day — and the sixth month anniversary of its invasion. He used the visit, his last as PM, to announce a £54 million aid package to the country of 2000 state-of-the-art drones and loitering munitions …
Slava Ukraini…
Guido also posted this video:
GB News had more on the story:
Mr Johnson’s visit came as Ukraine marked 31 years since its independence from Moscow’s rule.
And it also came six months on from Russia’s invasion of Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s nation …
He said in Kyiv today: “What happens in Ukraine matters to us all.
“That is why I am in Kyiv today. That is why the UK will continue to stand with our Ukrainian friends. I believe Ukraine can and will win this war” …
The Prime Minister used his meeting with Mr Zelenskyy to set out a further package of military aid, including 2,000 drones and loitering munitions.
He also received the Order of Liberty, the highest award that can be bestowed on foreign nationals, for the UK’s support for Ukraine.
Mr Johnson said: “For the past six months, the United Kingdom has stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Ukraine, supporting this sovereign country to defend itself from this barbaric and illegal invader.
“Today’s package of support will give the brave and resilient Ukrainian armed forces another boost in capability, allowing them to continue to push back Russian forces and fight for their freedom.”
The package includes 850 hand-launched Black Hornet micro-drones – smaller than a mobile phone – which can be used to provide live feeds and still images to troops, particularly important in urban warfare.
The support also includes larger drones and loitering weapons, which can be used to target Russian vehicles and installations.
The UK is also preparing to give mine-hunting vehicles to operate off the coast, with Ukrainian personnel being trained in their use in UK waters in the coming weeks.
Ukraine’s ambassador to the UK Vadym Prystaiko marked the occasion by urging UK citizens to be “patient” as the war-torn country “cannot afford to lose your support”.
He said: “You are playing a very important part in this fight. Ukraine will do what it takes to claim victory.”
But will Britons continue to love Ukraine as much when the winter and higher fuel bills kick in?
Boris told us that we must do it, we must suffer, for Ukraine:
He has a point, but I do wonder how well this will play by the end of the year.
At least Boris got his Churchillian international claim to fame.
What next?
This week, Boris made a farewell tour of the UK, topped off with a dawn police raid of a house:
Guido has the video and explains the greeting:
This morning Boris accompanied the police on a home raid. Given we’re now comfortably into the 21st century, it didn’t take long for one of the occupants to realise the PM was in his home and film the experience, asking Boris ‘wagwan‘. Boris politely asked the filming resident “how you doing?”. The Snapchatter could have at least offered Boris a cuppa…
It’s rumoured that Michael Gove might be off to edit a newspaper:
Guido has the story and the audio of Gove’s plans:
This morning Michael Gove laughed off the suggestion he’s planning an imminent return to Fleet Street, insisting on the Today Programme he’s “definitely planning to stay in Parliament” and won’t be stepping down any time soon. Rumours have been building in SW1 that Gove had his eye on the editorship of, erm, one particular Murdoch-owned broadsheet, should a vacancy become available …
No, no. I think my first responsibility and duty is to my constituents in Surrey Heath. I’m going to stay on as MP, argue for them, and also argue for some of the causes in which I believe. I think it’s vitally important that we continue to make the case for levelling up. I think Boris Johnson is absolutely right to focus on the need to provide additional support for overlooked and undervalued communities…
Gove added he still has “a reservoir” of affection for Boris despite being the only Minister the PM actually sacked in July. Boris is also rumoured to be sticking around until the next election. Could make for awkward small talk on the backbenches.
I predict they will stay on as MPs until the next election, just show up less often in the Commons.
As for Rishi, The Guardian said on Friday, September 2, that he was being compared with Michael Heseltine, one of the MPs who brought down Margaret Thatcher:
One of the most familiar refrains of the Conservative leadership contest was candidates earnestly inviting comparisons to Margaret Thatcher.
But after his resignation as chancellor brought down Boris Johnson’s wobbling house of cards, a Tory insider said Rishi Sunak found himself with “the curse of Heseltine hanging round his neck”.
Despite long having been talked of as a likely future prime minister, Sunak struggled to shed the parallel with the man who helped bring down Thatcher but failed in his own tilt at the top job – before coining the famous political cliche: “He who wields the knife never wears the crown.”
I’ll leave the final word to The Spectator‘s political editor James Forsyth, who muses on what politics will look like after Boris leaves:
His absence will reshape the political landscape because his presence defined it.
We will find out who Boris’s successor is on Monday. The Guardian has a report on what we should expect:
The candidate who receives the most votes will be revealed on Monday by Sir Graham Brady, the chair of the 1922 Committee, a gathering of Conservative backbench MPs (not named after the average year of birth of its members but the year in which it was founded) …
The formal handover will take place on Tuesday. The Queen is recovering from the outgoing prime minister’s tenure in her Scottish pile Balmoral and will appoint the new PM there, which will be a challenge as it requires the winner to leave Westminster.
Johnson is expected to make a farewell address outside 10 Downing Street at about 9am on Tuesday. It is not known whether he has written two versions of the speech, one based on staying, one based on leaving.
More next week as a new chapter in Conservative politics begins.
End of series
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 two instalments of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s downfall can read them here and here.
Today’s post will focus on Michael Gove.
Yesterday, I left off with Boris firing Gove in a telephone call.
Gove must have been stunned.
Yet, even he cannot deny that he and Boris got on well. Apparently, they knew each other at Oxford and were hardly best friends then.
2016 betrayal
As for more recent events, author and journalist Douglas Murray gives us a précis of Gove’s parliamentary career in an article for UnHerd: ‘Michael Gove’s faultless prophecy’.
Unlike me, Murray is a Gove fan, but there are a few excerpts from his article worth exploring.
Gove has been in various Cabinet and ministerial positions since 2010, when we had a coalition government under David Cameron (Conservative) and Nick Clegg (Liberal Democrat).
Under Cameron in those years, Gove was in the Department for Education.
After Cameron’s re-election in 2015 which gave the Conservatives a clear majority without the need for another coalition, Gove continued receiving appointments to various departments:
After the 2015 election, he became known in Whitehall for his mastery of his brief. Most ministers who go from portfolio-to-portfolio struggle to understand the complexities of just one of their jobs, let alone each of them in turn. Yet this is exactly what Gove did at Justice — even though he was there for less than a year — and in each of the cabinet positions he subsequently held.
He knew what way the wind was blowing with the 2016 Brexit referendum:
Before Gove chose to vote for “Leave”, there were concerns that the Brexit campaign would suffer from being led by too few senior politicians: an operation with Chris Grayling and Bernard Jenkin as its figureheads was unlikely to inspire a democratic revolt. Gove recognised this — and while campaigning to leave the EU was entirely in keeping with the principles that defined his political career and the years in journalism that preceded it, it still took bravery for him to step up. It alienated Gove from much of his friendship group (not least the Camerons), and could have cost him dearly politically.
Cameron resigned as Party leader the morning after the referendum result, as if suffering from sour grapes because things didn’t go his way. It was around 9:30 a.m., if I remember rightly.
A Conservative leadership contest resulted, which Theresa May won.
However, Boris and Gove were in the mix, too.
Murray describes the atmosphere not only in Parliament but in the country as well from June 24, the day of Cameron’s resignation, throughout much of the summer. This period also turned Conservative voters against Gove (emphases mine):
The thing, though, that Gove was most right about, and for which he has been praised for the least, is the act which made him most infamous. It gave him a reputation for snakery. This was, of course, his decision in the immediate aftermath of the referendum to turn on Boris Johnson.
It is not easy to forget the febrile atmosphere of June 2016; every hour turned up enough news to last a month in normal times. But it was also a perilous time: people were genuinely afraid. Basic questions remained unanswered. Would EU citizens be allowed to remain in the UK? Who is running the country? Once David Cameron left office and his Chancellor, George Osborne, decided to punish the country further by disappearing completely, only the Governor of the Bank of England emerged to say anything on behalf of the nation. “We are all prepared for this,” Mark Carney reassured the country. Yet it was a moment of maximal instability.
The Leave campaign “victory” press conference the morning after the referendum was like a funeral. Perhaps the news of David Cameron’s political demise, and the looming Tory chaos that would follow, cast a pall over proceedings. Or perhaps it was the realisation of the task that lay ahead. In those uncertain hours, the one thing that seemed clear was that to the victor most go the spoils. Boris Johnson had led the Leave campaign and it seemed inevitable that he should become the leader of the Conservative Party and the Prime Minister …
But Michael Gove put a stop to all that. Over the weekend after Brexit, something changed. Some people claim that Gove suddenly had visions of his own ascent to a higher office … Or was it that, in the aftermath of the referendum, Gove watched Boris Johnson and saw a man who was fundamentally unfit for the role of Prime Minister?
Murray would disagree with my assessment, but Michael Gove really did stab Boris in the back that summer:
When Gove held a press conference in which he announced that he would not be leading Johnson’s campaign for the leadership, he immediately assumed a new role in the public imagination. Suddenly, he was Gove the turncoat, Gove the assassin, Gove the backstabber. The Gríma Wormtongue of British politics. The party swiftly showed its disapproval.
Murray has left out a few details here. Gove ran for Party leader that year along with Andrea Leadsom and Theresa May.
Gove despatched Boris quickly. The referendum was held on June 23, and one week later, on July 1, this was the state of play, as Isabel Hardman reported in The Spectator:
As Michael Gove finished speaking, the bookmakers have reported that Andrea Leadsom has overtaken the Justice Secretary when it comes to betting on who will be the next Tory leader. Theresa May remains the favourite at 1/3, with Leadsom at 7/2 and Gove at 12/1.
Now of course the bookies are not clairvoyants and can get elections—and referendums—very wrong indeed. But these odds reflect the mood in the Tory party, which is currently registering a sense of disbelief that Michael Gove could do something like this. Many senior figures believe that the way he has turned on Boris Johnson is beyond the pale, and are preparing to back Andrea Leadsom, while I understand that a group of former Boris backers are considering declaring their support as a block for Leadsom on Monday too.
Leadsom had a good referendum campaign, performing well for the Leave side. Her key disadvantage is that she has never held a Cabinet role – though this is not down to lack of ability so much as it is down to George Osborne’s personal dislike of her following criticisms she made of the Chancellor in 2012. He bears grudges, and exacts revenge by slowing down the careers of people who have angered him. Leadsom took much longer to make it into government than she should have done. But this disadvantage may be a little easier to shrug off now Gove has such a trust problem with his own party.
Boris’s sister Rachel had much more to say in the Daily Mail on July 2: ‘Michael Gove’s wife Sarah Vine “detonated the Boris Johnson bomb” claims RACHEL JOHNSON’. Sarah Vine was, and still is, a Mail columnist.
Rachel tells us how Gove’s candidacy unfolded with his wife’s help:
It was funny ha-ha at first when she wrote in her column that she and her hubby Michael Gove would be running the country on a joint mandate.
‘Given Michael’s high-profile in the Leave campaign,’ she wrote, ‘that means he – we – are now charged with implementing the instructions of 17 million people. And that is an awesome responsibility.’
That royal ‘we’ between dashes was borderline bonkers enough, but it was followed by a leaked private email that ended up on the front pages because in it, Vine urged Gove to be his ‘stubborn best’, as he deployed his ‘leverage’ with his Brexit buddy Boris …
Nobody knew whether it had been leaked, or had misfired, but it was a bit whiffy and rum.
Even at that stage only the most crackpot conspiracy theorists could have guessed what was to come next in this multi-act, rolling, live-blogged Shakespearean tragedy.
Michael Gove knifed Boris Johnson in the back and in the front, pushed him under a bus, ran over him several times (thank you Piers Morgan for this image) and then declared he was running for the leadership himself.
This, coupled with the new arithmetic in terms of supportive MPs, meant that Gove’s co-skipper was holed below the waterline and forced to abandon ship at his own launch.
Now we are where we are, as everyone keeps saying, and we know a bit more about where that is.
Rachel gave us more insights into the real Michael Gove:
Brexit means Brexit. At some point Article 50 will be invoked. And never again listen to what a politician says. Watch what he or she does.
Gove was well known to be an ideological ninja, with his posters of Che Guevara and Chairman Mao on his wall, but when it came to the top job he was an avowed cleanskin.
He had no leadership ambitions. After all, he’d said so many times: ‘If anyone wants me to sign a piece of parchment in my own blood saying I don’t want to be PM I’m happy to do that.’
‘I’m not equipped to be PM. I don’t want to be PM.’
‘I am an inconceivable choice. I don’t want to do it. I wouldn’t do it. It wouldn’t matter how many people asked me to do it,’ etc, etc…
And then, on Thursday, he executed the most egregious reverse ferret and act of treachery in modern political history since… well, let’s just say since Michael Gove backed Brexit against the wishes of his good friend David Cameron.
He did a lap of honour of the studios, saying to interviewers that friends had been begging him to do it and telling him: ‘Michael, you’d be marvellous.’
‘I’ll explain to anyone who asks why I think I am the right person to be PM,’ he said.
Then on Friday he delivered a substantial 5,000-word manifesto that he’d obviously prepared earlier, to be acclaimed on his new home, Twitter (he has come aboard with the handle @gove2016, so far following no one).
She went on to tell us that Gove had as his adviser Dominic Cummings, who was also part of the Leave campaign, masterminding proceedings in the background. However, the Goves and the Osbornes were closer:
OK, I accept that it was more likely detonated by the combined agency of his wife; his former adviser, Dominic Cummings; and also of course George Osborne, with whom the Goves maintain close contact.
They are, indeed, due to go on family holiday ensemble this summer.
So of course it was inevitable, given this domestic scenario, for the Goves to dump a chap who is very much not numero uno assoluto with the Osbornes either.
Think of the pressure from the wives to stick the knife in, get the job done, before the two families had to break bread over the prosecco and antipasti in Italy.
Rachel cited two longstanding Conservative MPs’ reservations about Gove:
As it happens, Westminster suicide bomber is not a good look for anybody, which explains why many former Govistas – even one of the newspaper barons who supported him as recently as last week – are leaping on to the TM4PM (Theresa May for PM) bandwagon so fast.
As Michael Heseltine warned: ‘I personally would keep an eye open for Gove. First he abandoned his friend David Cameron now Johnson has felt the blade.’
Ken Clarke has told Gove to fall on his sword and fast. The classical quotation that comes to mind in all this is not so much ‘Et tu, Brute’ but ‘Those whom the Gods want to destroy, first they make mad.’
However much Gove tries to remind us what a nice, caring guy he is in his long leadership pitch, the ‘signalling’ around this personable and civilised candidate is, I’m afraid, that he’s acted like a political psychopath run by his wife (Vine), an acknowledged sociopath (Cummings) and a lame duck Chancellor.
And this Machiavelli still wants us to want him to be Prime Minister …
At his leadership launch, Michael denied his wife had urged him to run, denied he was giving Dom Cummings a job, but I don’t necessarily take everything the most polite man in Parliament says on trust any more.
Rachel was and is a Remainer. And political people, whatever their stripe, often mix in the same circles, as she acknowledges of the Goves:
I like them. They are both lively company and huge fun.
Indeed, we sometimes say that we must have supper soon, and perhaps we will, when the bleeding bodies of the fallen are removed from the smoking battlefield of this campaign.
Murray makes no mention of this intrigue but says that Gove might have been dismayed with Boris’s seeming lack of gravitas:
… perhaps there really were things in the immediate aftermath of the referendum that persuaded him that Johnson was fundamentally unfit to lead the country; the weekend after the vote, as the country desperately looked around for a leader, Johnson decided it was the perfect time to host a “boozy barbecue” and a cricket match.
And why not celebrate? No one but no one in the media or politics on the Remainer side thought that 52% of the nation would vote Leave in the largest plebescite in British history.
In the end, Gove lost Conservative MPs’ votes to Andrea Leadsom and Theresa May.
Afterwards, Leadsom said she could not understand why May did not want children. Leadsom got a lot of Party backlash for that. She stood down, leaving May as the last candidate standing.
As such, Conservative Party members did not have a vote that year.
Murray admits that no one ever forgot his hero’s betrayal but says that Gove appeared to be a loyalist — on the surface, anyway, as far as I am concerned:
This cloud, by and large, has not left him. Only yesterday, one embittered newspaper columnist saw fit to describe Gove as “a conniving, reptilian politician”. Is this really true? He did, after all, survive through Theresa May’s premiership, and stuck loyally beside her when other people would not. He even entered Johnson’s own cabinet, and excelled in the roles he held in that short-lived administration. And not only is he the only politician who has remained at cabinet level through this tumultuous decade and a half, but he is also one of the few people from Cameron’s cabinet who is still in the House of Commons. Some lost out on the top prize and huffed off. Others whose abilities could have been of use to the country decided that the country did not deserve them — though various investment funds, as chance would have it, did.
A few days ago, Gove announced that he did not expect another role in the high echelons of government.
But did he really mean that?
It seems unlikely that Gove will actually remove himself from frontline politics. I read his announcement at the weekend as an act of cynical self-deprecation. Or perhaps a hint that he needs to simply “step back” for a bit.
Murray’s conclusion is interesting:
In 2016, Gove didn’t simply backstab Johnson; he issued a warning. It took the rest of the Parliamentary party and much of Britain another six years to decipher his warning: that when Johnson finally lumbers out of No 10, he will leave defeated and humiliated. Don’t say we weren’t warned.
The Goves’ break-up
In June 2021, The Sun published photos of Matt Hancock and his female adviser in a tight clinch in his office at a time when social distancing was still in force. Hancock abruptly left his wife when the photos were published.
On July 2, the Goves announced they, too, would be divorcing, although for different reasons:
Guido Fawkes’s post referenced Sarah Vine’s Mail on Sunday column a week earlier on June 26:
This official announcement to the Press Association will surprise no one in SW1 where rumours have been rife for months. At one point Lobby hacks were asking the PM’s spokesman under what roof was Michael Gove sleeping. Sarah Vine’s article this week in the Mail on Sunday was not subtle.
While she did not mention her husband at all, she did write that politics can alter home life irrevocably, as in the case of the Hancocks:
The problem with the wife who has known you since way before you were king of the world is that she sees through your facade.
She knows your fears and your insecurities. She knows that, deep down inside, you are not the Master of the Universe you purport to be. And some people don’t like to be reminded of that …
In the end, there are two types of politicians. Those who can walk away from power – and those who can’t. And who will compromise everything for the sake of it.
How the Gove family found out about his sacking
On July 7, 2022, Sarah Vine wrote an article for The Mail about how she and the children found out that Boris sacked Michael.
Note that she is still friends with Rachel Johnson.
The news came via text messages as Sarah and the children were watching Love Island:
The teenagers and I were watching Love Island when the news broke — a text, to my son, from a mate: ‘Is it true that Boris has fired ur dad?!’
A split second later, my phone also pinged. It was my friend Rachel (Johnson, Boris’s sister): ‘My bro has just fired your ex!!’ Blimey, I thought. Even I wasn’t expecting that.
They turned off the television to find out more:
‘Get him on speakerphone, get him on speakerphone!’ squealed my daughter. So we got him on speakerphone (Michael, not Boris). What on earth happened?
‘Well,’ he explained, ‘The Prime Minister rang me a few minutes ago and told me it was time for me to step back. I said, respectfully, ‘Prime Minister, if anyone should be stepping back, it is you.’
‘Go on!’ said my son, leaping off the sofa and punching the air.
‘What are you going to do now?’ I asked. ‘Have a glass of wine and a slice of salami and see what tomorrow brings,’ he replied.
What tomorrow brought, of course, was the Prime Minister’s resignation, following the resignations of pretty much anyone of any consequence.
Vine was generous in her assessment of Boris’s premiership but she, too, agreed with her husband that he just wasn’t serious enough:
I still don’t quite see what is to be gained, politically, from getting rid of him. There isn’t a brilliant replacement waiting in the wings, and the country could really do without the disruption of a whole summer of rudderless government, or worse, a snap general election.
Especially since, as prime ministers go, he was not by a long shot the worst this country has seen.
He delivered Brexit, albeit imperfectly — but then after the horlicks Theresa May made of it, it was a miracle he managed it at all.
Like every other leader on the planet, he was blindsided by Covid — but handled the pandemic with bravery and vision, rolling out the vaccination programme at record speed, pulling the country out of lockdown as quickly as possible.
He was spot-on with the war in Ukraine, moving quickly to offer Britain’s support against Russia.
On the big stuff, as the cliche goes, he was good. Better than good, actually. But in politics, that’s not enough any more …
It’s not enough to be a serious politician; you also have to be a serious human being. And the problem with Johnson is that he just isn’t. That, ultimately, has been his downfall.
Everything that has gone wrong for him — the lockdown parties, the questionable donations, the dinners with oligarchs, the misguided loyalties, the tenuous grasp of the facts — it all stems from that.
Vine then tells us how angry Gove got with Boris when he was running for Mayor of London, a post he held for two terms, from May 2008 to May 2016:
At the time Boris was running for mayor of London, doing a round of fundraisers. My (now) ex-husband and I had been to one the night before, a dinner somewhere or other, where Boris was speaking.
It was a disaster. I remember he arrived late, delivered a thoroughly lackadaisical performance and left early, underwhelming the assembled, many of whom were astonished that such a man could even contemplate a life in politics. He seemed incapable of buttering a bread roll, let alone a room of donors.
The next day, Michael rang Boris and gave him both barrels. How dare he waste everyone’s time and effort like that; didn’t Boris realise how many people had put themselves out to organise that evening, for his benefit? It was embarrassing, it was rude — and, worst of all, it was irresponsible.
Boris was suitably contrite. ‘Sorry, Gover, I hear you Gover,’ was his response, deploying his customary bashful charm. It didn’t wash. Michael hung up.
Despite being almost two decades ago, the incident sticks in my mind because a) I had never seen Michael so angry and b) it is emblematic of Johnson’s biggest problem, one that lies at the root of all his troubles: he just can’t take anything seriously.
She brought up Boris’s childhood ambition of being ‘king of the world’, which I covered in Part 1.
Then she told us about his 2016 candidacy for leader of the Conservative Party:
Everyone was exhausted, but they threw themselves into it. Meetings, phone calls, speeches, media rounds — it was relentless. Boris was running to replace Cameron, Michael having decided — largely at my behest — not to.
There was support to be garnered, deals to be brokered — all the usual stuff that goes on in a leadership contest.
Everyone was going all out to get Boris elected. Except, it seemed, for one person: Boris. While the rest of the team were busting several guts, he appeared to have taken a leaf out of Cameron’s book — and seemed to be mostly chillaxing.
He was supposed to meet so-and-so; he didn’t. He was supposed to draft a letter; he didn’t. Make a phone call; didn’t happen. Oh, I’ll do it in the morning, oh I left it at home. Not quite the dog ate my homework, but not far off. Sometimes he would just go AWOL, leaving the team scrabbling for excuses.
Everyone was taking things deadly seriously; Boris, meanwhile, seemed to think it was all just one big joke.
Things finally came to a head when the team found him holed up at home in the countryside, flipping burgers, drinking rosé and playing cricket with his mates while the fate of Brexit — this thing that he had supposedly been so passionate about, that had brought down a government, that had overturned everyone’s world order — hung in the balance.
That night, Michael walked through the front door ashen-faced. ‘I’ve made a terrible mistake,’ he said. ‘Boris is a disaster.’ And the rest, as they say, is history.
Michael paid a very heavy price — both politically and personally — for that judgment call. As we saw from this week’s events, Boris never quite forgave him — and who can blame him.
She left out the part where Gove then decided to throw his hat into the ring!
She still stands by her man in this respect:
It’s hard to hear the truth about yourself at the best of times, even harder when it’s from an old friend. As it was again this week when Michael told him the game was up.
In closing, Tim Loughton MP described Boris’s sacking of Gove the best, even if he makes it sound as if it were done in person:
I think it was Michael Gove who went to Number 10 with the metaphorical bottle of whisky and the revolver – well, clearly Boris has downed the whisky and turned the revolver on Michael Gove.
Finally.
I do hope that Liz — or Rishi (we still have nine days to go) — forgets about Gove and moves ahead with fresher, newer talent in Cabinet: people who are actually in tune with what Britons are thinking.
Tomorrow’s post will highlight other resignations from early July. I’ll never forget keeping track of Guido’s Twitter feed during that time.
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.
Churchmouse Campanologist 