UK Parliament debates coronavirus response and excess deaths

N.B.: New posts will be intermittent for the time being. Home responsibilities at the moment have overtaken my spare time. My apologies! At any rate, I hope to continue with exegeses of Lectionary readings and Forbidden Bible Verses as a minimum.

On April 18, 2024, an Independent MP (former Conservative), Andrew Bridgen, representing North West Leicestershire, was granted a Parliamentary debate, ‘Covid 19: Response and Excess Deaths’.

Bridgen has a degree in biology with a focus on genetics. As such, the effect that coronavirus vaccines have had on the general population has been of great interest to him, in particular, the number of excess deaths during and after the pandemic.

The link above is to the transcript from Hansard. I will excerpt Bridgen’s introduction, contributions from two other sceptical MPs and the Government minister’s conclusion at the end of the debate.

Andrew Bridgen

Bridgen has always doubted the narrative that the vaccines were and are ‘safe and effective’.

He introduced the debate as follows (emphases mine):

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the covid-19 pandemic response and trends in excess deaths; and calls on the covid-19 inquiry to move onto its module 4 investigation into vaccines and therapeutics as soon as possible.

We are witnesses to the greatest medical scandal in this country in living memory, and possibly ever: the excess deaths in 2022 and 2023. Its causes are complex, but the novel and untested medical treatment described as a covid vaccine is a large part of the problem. I have been called an anti-vaxxer, as if I have rejected those vaccines based on some ideology. I want to state clearly and unequivocally that I have not: in fact, I am double vaccinated and vaccine-harmed. Intelligent people must be able to tell when people are neither pro-vax nor anti-vax, but are against a product that does not work and causes enormous harm to a percentage of the people who take it.

I am proud to be one of the few Members of Parliament with a science degree. It is a great shame that there are not more Members with a science background in this place; maybe if there were, there would be less reliance on Whips Office briefings and more independent research, and perhaps less group-think. I say to the House in all seriousness that this debate and others like it are going to be pored over by future generations, who will be genuinely agog that the evidence has been ignored for so long, that genuine concerns were disregarded, and that those raising them were gaslit, smeared and vilified.

One does not need any science training at all to be horrified by officials deliberately hiding key data in this scandal, which is exactly what is going on. The Office for National Statistics used to release weekly data on deaths per 100,000 in vaccinated and unvaccinated populations—it no longer does so, and no one will explain why. The public have a right to that data. There have been calls from serious experts, whose requests I have amplified repeatedly in this House, for what is called record-level data to be anonymised and disclosed for analysis. That would allow meaningful analysis of deaths after vaccination, and settle once and for all the issue of whether those experimental treatments are responsible for the increase in excess deaths.

Far more extensive and detailed data has already been released to the pharma companies from publicly funded bodies. Jenny Harries, head of the UK Health Security Agency, said that this anonymised, aggregate death by vaccination status data is “commercially sensitive” and should not be published. The public are being denied that data, which is unacceptable; yet again, data is hidden with impunity, just like in the Post Office scandal. Professor Harries has also endorsed a recent massive change to the calculation of the baseline population level used by the ONS to calculate excess deaths. It is now incredibly complex and opaque, and by sheer coincidence, it appears to show a massive excess of deaths in 2020 and 2021 and minimal excess deaths in 2023. Under the old calculation method, tried and tested for decades, the excess death rate in 2023 was an astonishing 5%—long after the pandemic was over, at a time when we would expect a deficit in deaths because so many people had sadly died in previous years. Some 20,000 premature deaths in 2023 alone are now being airbrushed away through the new normal baseline …

Bridgen reminded MPs — and us — of the traditional ways that the medical world once treated viruses and why some people die from them:

The average time to death from experiencing covid symptoms and testing positive was 18 days. It is a little-known fact that the body clears all the viruses within around seven days; what actually kills people is that some, especially the vulnerable, have an excessive immune response. Doctors have been treating that response for decades with steroids, antibiotics for secondary pneumonia infections and other standard protocols, but they did not do so this time.

Coronavirus changed all of that and probably not for the better:

Even though the virus was long gone, doctors abandoned the standard clinical protocols because covid was a “new virus”—which it was not. They sent people home, told them to take paracetamol until their lips turned blue, and then when those people returned to hospital, they sedated them, put them on ventilators and watched them die.

The protocol for covid-19 treatment was a binary choice between two treatment tracks. Once admitted, ill patients were either ventilated in intensive care or—if they were not fit for that level of care—given end of life medication, including midazolam and morphine. The body responsible for that protocol, NG163, which was published on 3 April 2020, is called the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, or NICE. Giving midazolam and morphine to people dying of cancer is reasonable, but there is a side effect, which is that those drugs have a respiratory depressant effect. It is hard to imagine a more stupid thing to do than giving a respiratory suppressant to someone who is already struggling to breathe with the symptoms of covid-19, but that is exactly what we did …

Remember how nearly every cause of death during the pandemic was classified as from or with coronavirus? Once the vaccines were distributed, no deaths were seemingly attributed to them:

After a positive covid test, any illness and any death was attributed to the virus. After the experimental emergency vaccine was administered, no subsequent illness and no death was ever attributed to the vaccine. Those are both completely unscientific approaches, and that is why we have to look at other sources of data—excess deaths—to determine whether there is an issue.

Then there is the question surrounding the words ‘safe and effective’:

The fear deliberately stoked up by the Government promoted the idea of being rescued by a saviour vaccine. The chanting of the “safe and effective” narrative began, and the phrase seemed to hypnotise the whole nation. “Safe and effective” was the sale slogan of thalidomide. After that scandal, rules were put in place to prevent such marketing in future by pharma companies, and they are prohibited from using “safe and effective” without significant caveats.

That did not matter this time because, with covid-19 vaccines, the media, the Government and other authorities turned into big pharma’s marketing department, and it is very hard now to hear the word “safe” without the echo of the words “and effective”, but they are not safe and effective. In March 2021, when the majority of UK citizens had already received these novel products, Pfizer signed a contract with Brazil and South Africa saying that

“the long-term effects and efficacy of the Vaccine are not currently known and…adverse effects of the Vaccine…are not currently known.”

That is verbatim from the Pfizer contracts.

These so-called vaccines were the least effective vaccines ever. Is there anyone left under any illusion that they prevented any infections? When he was at the Dispatch Box for Prime Minister’s questions on 31 January, even the Prime Minister, in answer to my question, could not bring himself to add “and effective” to his “safe” mantra. In his own words, he was “unequivocal” that the vaccines are “safe”. The word “safe” means without risk of death or injury. Why is the Prime Minister gaslighting the 163 successful claims made to the vaccine damage payment scheme, totalling £19.5 million in compensation for harm caused by the covid vaccines? Have these people not suffered enough already? Those 163 victims are the tip of the iceberg, by the way. It also should be noted that the maximum payment is only £120,000, so each of those 163 victims got the maximum possible award, which should tell us something. The same compensation scheme paid out a total of only £3.5 million between 1997 and 2005, with an average of only eight claims per year, and that is for all claims for the entire country for all vaccines administered. So much for “safe”.

How about effective? On 25 October 2021, the then Prime Minister—the right hon. Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip, Boris Johnson—even admitted that the vaccine “doesn’t protect you against catching the disease and it doesn’t protect you against passing it on” …

Those who imposed these vaccines knew full well that they could never prevent infection from a disease of this kind. An injection in the arm cannot do that. Only immunity on the surface of the airways and the lungs can prevent viral infection; antibodies in the blood cannot. In Dr Anthony Fauci’s words,

“it is not surprising that none of the predominantly mucosal respiratory viruses have ever been effectively controlled by vaccines.”

He continued:

“This observation raises a question of fundamental importance: if natural mucosal respiratory virus infections do not elicit complete and long-term protective immunity against reinfection, how can we expect vaccines, especially systemically administered non-replicating vaccines, to do so?”

They knew that the so-called vaccines would never protect from infection, which explains why they never tested for protection from infection …

Bridgen highlighted Australia, which, interestingly, distributed the vaccine before there was a Covid outbreak; the state governments had effectively quarantined their residents:

The Australian Government have launched an inquiry into Australia’s excess deaths problem. Australia is almost unique as a case study for excess deaths; as it had the vaccine before it had covid, its excess deaths are not so easily blamed on the long-term side effects of a virus. Like us, it saw a rise in deaths, which began in May 2021 and has not let up since. The impact was evident on the ambulance service first. South Australia saw a 67% increase in cardiac presentations of 15 to 44-year-olds. That increase peaked in November 2021, before covid hit. We saw a similar, deeply worrying effect here. In the UK, calls for life-threatening emergencies rose from 2,000 per day to 2,500 per day in May 2021, and that number has never returned to normal.

By October 2021, despite it being springtime in Australia, headlines reported that ambulances were unable to drop off patients in hospitals, which were already at full capacity …

In April 2022, Yvette D’Ath, Queensland’s Health Minister, said about the most urgent ambulance calls, called “code ones”:

“I don’t think anyone can explain why we saw a 40% jump in code ones… We just had a lot of heart attacks and chest pains and trouble breathing, respiratory issues. Sometimes you can’t explain why those things happen but unfortunately, they do.”

I think we could explain this if we were to look at the link to the vaccine roll-out. Omicron did cause some excess deaths in Australia from 2022 onwards. However, there was a huge chunk of excess deaths prior to that, which doctors have not been able to blame on the virus. Could those deaths be caused by the vaccine? Very few people dare even ask that question.

Bridgen explained how traditional vaccines are made contrasted with the ones for Covid-19:

Traditionally, the key to making a vaccine is to ensure that the pathological, harmful parts of the virus or bacteria are inactivated, so that the recipient can develop an immune response without danger of developing the disease. In stark contrast, the so-called covid vaccines used the most pathological or harmful part of the virus—the spike protein—in its entirety. The harm is systemic because, contrary to what everyone was told, the lipid nanoparticles, encapsulating the genetic material, spread through the whole body after injection, potentially affecting all organs. At the time, everyone was being reassured that the injection was broken down in the arm at the injection site. Regulators ought to have known that those were problems.

It is possible that the way the coronavirus vaccines work can lead to cancer in certain cases:

Cancer is a genetic disease disorder that arises from errors in DNA, allowing cells to grow uncontrollably. Moderna has multiple patents describing methods for reducing the risk of cancer induction from its mRNA products. That risk comes from the material interrupting the patient’s DNA. It turns out that an mRNA injection has very high quantities of DNA in it, and that massively increases the risk of disturbing a patient’s own DNA. Worse still, the DNA that was injected contained sequences that were hidden from the regulator. That is the SV40, or simian virus 40 promoter region, which has been linked to cancer and has been found in the Pfizer vaccines. That was no accident. Yet again, crucial information was hidden from the regulator and the public with absolute impunity. An independent study in Japan, published last week, has found links between increased cancer rates in Japan and those who took the first and subsequent booster vaccines. Perhaps that explains why Pfizer acquired a cancer treatment company for a reported $43 billion earlier this year.

Those are the main points from Andrew Bridgen’s introduction.

The Gallery

The coronavirus vaccines and their effects are a controversial subject in the UK, as it no doubt is elsewhere in the West. The Gallery had quite a few members of the public in attendance.

After the second speech from Sir Christopher Chope MP, the Deputy Speaker of the House, Dame Rosie Winterton said:

Order. Before I call the next speaker, I want to be absolutely clear, for the benefit of everybody who is watching our proceedings or participating in them, that if there are any more interruptions from the Gallery and it has to be cleared, I will have to temporarily suspend the House, which may mean that those who want to participate will be denied the opportunity. To be clear, I am trying to create a situation whereby everybody can have their say.

Graham Stringer

Graham Stringer, who holds a degree in chemistry, is the only Labour MP I hold in high regard, including during the pandemic restrictions, which he opposed.

Let it be noted that Graham Stringer was an outlier within Labour, which clamoured for earlier and longer lockdowns.

He began by noting that politics and science make strange bedfellows:

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Christchurch (Sir Christopher Chope), who has done remarkably good work on vaccine-damaged people. I co-chair his all-party parliamentary group’s sister group, the APPG on pandemic response and recovery, which has allowed me to see that we have a whole body of expert opinion before us. Medics, lawyers, experts in childcare and a whole range of politicians have come to very different views on what the right response to covid was and, in some cases, on both the law and the science itself.

Before I go any further, let me say that my experience of the APPG, and of climate change or global warming debates, is that science and politics make very uneasy bedfellows. There is often an attempt in a political debate to resolve matters that are only resolvable by looking at the evidence, doing more experiments and finding out the truth of the matter, which is not always possible in a debate where people feel very strongly about things.

He went on to discuss how the virus affected the general public and how the Government adopted a one-size-fits-all lockdown policy:

I want to talk about something we have not really talked about so far: the disease itself. People have different views about the damage done by covid. Some people think it is harmless and just another flu, whereas some treat it as though it were the plague. It is neither. It was a nasty disease for some people who got it, but its major characteristic was the profile of people who were killed or made ill by it. It affected older people much more severely. I think the median age of those who died was 82 for men and 84 for women, so it was a disease of the elderly. Those below 50 were relatively safe—some died, but not many. That was known at the beginning of the epidemic.

This comes back to the point about politics, and the protection of Government politicians, being more important than looking at the science. A rational response to a disease with the profile of covid-19 would have been to put a cordon sanitaire around those people who were vulnerable because of their age or because they had other diseases, such as lung diseases, and to let the rest of us go about our business and take the risk, as we do every year with seasonal flu, but the Government did the opposite. They locked everybody up and sent untested people back from hospital into care homes, where they infected other people, which led to a spike in deaths.

At the same time, the Government were telling us that they were following the science. I have a scientific background—it is not in biology, but I have a degree in chemistry—and I believe in following the science and finding out exactly what is going on. The science was not followed, and not only because the response did not follow the natural profile of the disease. In their early statements, people from the NHS, and both Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance, said that masks were a complete waste of time and that lockdowns were ineffective because there would be a peak six months later that would probably be worse than if we had not locked down. That advice changed very quickly, I believe under political pressure. Again, I think that was a mistake.

One country that did follow the science, Sweden, made mistakes—it made the same mistake that we made by sending infected people back into care homes—but it did not lock down and it did not restrict people’s freedom, or it did so in only a moderate way. It came out as about the best of comparable countries in Europe in terms of deaths.

He thinks that the UK ended up in a parlous financial situation for no good reason:

Another consequence, which we see in every debate in this House, is that there is no money left. We spent £400 billion on covid, a lot of it wasted. We can read National Audit Office reports on the test and trace system, which was money almost totally wasted. There is also the money given to people who could quite easily have gone about their jobs. The businesses needed the money, given the decisions that the Government had taken, but the Government should not have taken those decisions.

I agree, but Labour — Stringer’s party — would have done the same, if not worse.

Stringer discussed that point, after another MP commented about the benefit of hindsight:

I therefore voted against my own party, which supported the Government and more on this issue. I went through the [voting] Lobby with a small number of colleagues from my party and the hon. Gentleman’s party to say that what was happening was wrong, and that the damage being done by the policies was probably worse than covid. It might be hindsight for March and April 2020, but not for the rest of the time and the second lockdown.

He talked about the general lockstep of the media during the pandemic:

Our democracy’s second important check and balance is the fourth estate. These publications are not normally my politics but, with the exception of The Daily Telegraph and The Spectator, and the Daily Mail to a certain extent, the rest of the media, led by the BBC, were quite uncritical of what was happening. People say that BBC reporters were told not to criticise and not to ask difficult questions, and political journalists—not specialist health journalists who might have asked more pertinent questions—were sent to the press conferences. It was a political question, but it was also a science and health question. We were really let down by the BBC primarily, and by other parts of the media.

He then went on to address the possible futility and very real expense of the ongoing Covid inquiry, led by Baroness Hallett:

The hon. Member for Christchurch and other hon. Members have talked about the Hallett inquiry. I supported the inquiry but, having seen the way it has gone, I have given myself a good talking to. I do not think I will ever again support an inquiry. Do we really want to spend half a billion pounds on this inquiry? I attended the previous debate on recompense, and we heard how lawyers are getting fat on all these inquiries. I do not know when the Hallett inquiry will report, but it may well last for years and cost half a billion pounds. It certainly will not provide us with any advice on what to do if there is a pandemic next year—I suspect that advice is what we all want. By the time it reports, there may have been another Government or two and it will be a historical document. Sweden is not a perfect society, but its inquiry has reported. The motion before us calls for the fourth part of the inquiry, which will be on vaccines, but is the inquiry really the technical body to do that? I do not think so.

In the first stage, the inquiry has shown an extraordinary bias towards believing in lockdowns. I would want to know a number of things from an inquiry: did the lockdowns work? Did they save lives? Have they cost lives? Where did the virus come from? The inquiry is not even looking at that and it is not dealing with any of those things, but it is taking a long time. It has made it abundantly clear that it is going to look at the impact of the virus on social divisions and poverty. I am a member of the Labour party and I can tell the inquiry, because I know, that poor people come off worse from diseases. It can go back to look at the Black report from 1981, I believe it was, if it wants to see that, as it talks about both regional and class disparities. We do not need to look at this issue, as we know that poor people do badly when there are epidemics—that has been true for all time.

He talked about the absurdity of what happened during the pandemic with regard to policy compared with events that occur daily:

I have never made this point before, and I hope I am not going off-piste too much, Madam Deputy Speaker, but every time there is an horrific murder of a child we get a report with 90-odd recommendations, and the question is: does that protect the next child? No, it does not. I do not believe that these inquiries do. We need serious cultural change in many of these organisations, rather than another report on something. That is an easy thing to say and a very difficult thing to achieve.

Stringer then attacked the statistics from the pandemic:

Let me come on to the other part of the debate, which is about excess deaths and the number of deaths. It appears that just over 200,000 people were killed in this country by, or died of, covid. I had my doubts about these figures from the beginning. On a number of occasions, right from the start of covid, the Science and Technology Committee heard from statisticians. We had Sir Ian Diamond and Professor Spiegelhalter in to talk to us about the statistics. We heard from people from what is now the UK Health Security Agency but was then a named part of the NHS. We asked them whether they had the statistics on the difference between people who died from covid and those who died with it. If someone was dying of cancer and went into hospital, there was a fair chance that they would have got covid, because there was not perfect protection within hospitals. Such a person would then be registered as having been a covid death, but clearly they were going to die of cancer. From the very beginning, that obscured the statistics.

Dr Kieran Mullan, a Conservative MP, defended the statistics and the clinicians involved in completing death certificates.

Stringer replied to two of Mullan’s interventions. Ellipses separate the two responses:

The hon. Gentleman makes a fair point, but I happen to know that in some local authorities, instructions went out to the people who were registering deaths essentially to say, “If there is a cough involved in this, we want it down as covid.” There was a different process because the health service was not working under normal—[Interruption.] …

… I am suggesting that at that time, when it was difficult to examine people because there was a distance between clinicians and the people who had suffered death, there was a temptation and a view that covid should go on the death certificates. I suggest no conspiracy, though. I do not believe in conspiracies.

Stringer concluded by addressing the excess death data:

I want to move on to excess deaths over the last couple of years, since covid, and the figures during covid. One of the ways of measuring the impact of covid was looking at excess deaths during covid. They were measured against a five-year average—that was the gold standard; it is the way it has been done—and that gave quite large figures. That is interesting given what has happened when the excess 100,000 deaths per year over the past two years have been looked at. The Office for National Statistics has moved away from that basis and on to a different one, and the figures are coming down.

We need an anonymised account of those excess deaths—this was part of a recent Westminster Hall debate—because that will help us to understand what is going on. The pharmaceutical companies have been given that information, but Ministers just give reassuring statements that there is no evidence that excess deaths are caused by the covid vaccinations—by the mRNA vaccinations. How do they know? They do not tell us that. We need to know, first, how they have come to that conclusion and, secondly, if that is a fair, reasoned and balanced conclusion. We also need a detailed look at the anonymised statistics, so that we can ask further questions about the problems that are worrying us—that certainly worry me—and so that we can make better decisions in future.

Neale Hanvey

Neale Hanvey is one of two MPs belonging to Alba, a Scottish independence party made up of MPs who broke away from the Scottish National Party (SNP). He has a medical degree, which led him to a 25-year-long career in the NHS and as a contributing author to medical textbooks.

He began by making three points about the thorny issue of raising doubts about the coronavirus vaccines — and others, such as gender identity:

I will begin by picking up on a few of the points that have been raised this afternoon. First, there is a parallel with a very important report that we received last week, and to which the Government responded on Monday: the Cass review. When concerns were first raised about what was happening in gender identity development services, those of us who spoke up at that time suffered both political and public pile-ons that were very uncomfortable. It gives me no pleasure to have been vindicated by the content of the Cass review. Certainly, when the hon. Member for North West Leicestershire (Andrew Bridgen) first raised his concerns on this issue, he was also subjected to a political and public pile-on. The reason I raise that is that this cannot be how we tackle thorny issues. We must have a much more reasoned and mature approach to these things, where ideological positions are not sacrosanct and we have the flexibility to engage with, and look at, the points that are being raised.

My second point is about the discussion regarding correlation versus causation. It is fair enough to say that correlation does not necessarily mean causation, but it is sufficient evidence for us to start asking questions about what is actually there. That is a fundamental question that anybody who has been involved in any scientific endeavour must surely understand.

My next point is a slightly more difficult issue to raise, because it is quite emotive. Like many others in this Chamber, I have had two vaccines and a booster. My family had the same, but there is a question about the presumption that that is what saved lives. We cannot prove that, unfortunately—that is just not the way it works—but what we do have to grapple with is the fact that the treatment we were given, like any agent, can cause harm. We have a responsibility to interrogate those concerns, which is why I am very disappointed that module 4 of the inquiry has been delayed.

My last point is about the record-level data and the importance of how it is tabulated. The methodology for assessing excess deaths has changed; that might be a reasonable change in practice at a time of peace, if you like, but we have just come through a very difficult period with the pandemic. Changing the methodology immediately afterwards seems perverse at best and deeply concerning at worst, because it is important that from this moment on, we are able to understand how trends are changing in a directly comparable way. With a change in methodology, that becomes impossible, so it is not a good idea—just in terms of scientific rigour, it is problematic.

He then drew on his personal experience of clinical trials:

I will start off my contribution by expanding on some of the comments I made during the debate on 16 January, because we had very limited time to speak in that debate. I want to take us a step back, away from the emotive issue of whether there is correlation, causation, and a relationship between excess deaths and the covid vaccine, and remind ourselves of the principles that underpin how clinical trials should be conducted. The ethical principles that underpin those trials have their origin in the declaration of Helsinki and are consistent with internationally published good clinical practice guidelines and, obviously, all of the regulatory mechanisms that fall out from those guidelines.

Anybody who has been involved in clinical trials of any type will know that, as I have said, any agent has the potential to cause injury or harm. That is just the nature of the beast, and one of the things we try to establish during a clinical trial is to find out the harm, however minimal or maximal it may be, so as to mitigate it, manage it or rule the agent out because it is too risky. Performing such a test rigorously is the foundation of good clinical practice, and I make these comments as someone who has been involved in the management and delivery of clinical trials over many years. I think that, as politicians, as clinicians and as the industry, we all carry a duty of honesty and candour in these matters.

The aforementioned Dr Mullan intervened, as if to question what Hanvey said.

Hanvey replied:

Well, the hon. Gentleman can shake his head, but that is my experience. I worked at University College London Hospitals and the Royal Marsden, and those are the principles that we applied in such a context. I can only speak to my experience.

Dr Mullan intervened again.

Hanvey elaborated on questions surrounding the available vaccine and death data as well as possible harm:

… The principles I have been outlining are there because they are the basis on which good science is established and based.

Let me move to some of the questions that we must raise and answer today, openly and transparently, and with full access to ONS record-level data. I am not saying that that should be disclosed to all and sundry, but surely the Government cannot defend the position that they are not willing to release that information to interested clinicians and clinical academics as a minimum. Those are the people who need to interrogate the data. It is of little relevance to me—I do not have the means or academic ability to interpret it—but it is something that interested clinical academics should have access to.

Let me move on to what we know about some of the issues surrounding mRNA technology. We know that it does not replicate locally, as we were assured it would do on launch. It metastasises to distant tissue, and replicates spike protein systemically distant from the site of administration. That is problematic for a number of reasons. According to the University of London Professor of Oncology, and principal of the Institute for Cancer Vaccines and Immunotherapy, Professor Angus Dalgleish, this has precipitated various serious and sometimes fatal consequences due to antibody development mediated by the spike protein. I will not go into the detail of that, but at a meeting convened by the hon. Member for North West Leicestershire, Professor Dalgleish told us that the UK Government and their agencies are in serious denial about this issue, resulting in many deaths being poorly understood.

Let me give a couple of examples. Vaccine-induced immune thrombotic thrombocytopenia is one of the principal causes of blood clot formation, which can cause stroke, pulmonary emboli, and other cardiac-related events including heart attacks, all of which can be life-limiting or fatal. Another antibody linked to the spike protein exerts an effect on myelin, and is associated with Guillain-Barré syndrome and transverse myelitis, which is a swelling around the spinal cord. Professor Dalgleish believes that that constitutes medical negligence, because the facts are there for all to see. He contends that many deaths are as a direct result of unnecessary vaccination. Furthermore, he advises that there are a greater number of yellow cards in MHRA for covid vaccines than for all other vaccines recorded, and nothing has really been done.

In a recent written answer to me, it was confirmed that the MHRA has received 489,004 spontaneous suspected adverse drug reaction reports relating to the covid-19 vaccine, up to and including 28 February this year. Across the United Kingdom, 2,734 of those reports were associated with a fatal outcome. Of course the true number is unknown—that is the nature of yellow card reporting, as only a fraction of adverse events are reported—and that is probably because of limited public awareness about some of the potential consequences and complications of vaccines, and the well-understood under-reporting of those adverse events. That is important, because the yellow card system is a key element of safe and effective clinical care. If things are not being evaluated properly, I can think of no greater betrayal of the MHRA’s clinical governance responsibility. I suggest that accountability for that must be swift and decisive. The rigorous assessment of these data is essential and must be actioned urgently. Will the Minister now engage with the MHRA and invite it to come to the House to explain the facts on these reports?

I was delighted to see that someone used data correctly: in the plural. Datum signifies the singular.

Hanvey then zeroed in on the MHRA, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatatory Agency:

Another issue, which arises from a further written question that I tabled, relates to the role of the MHRA. It has a crucial role—in fact, it is a statutory function—to provide post-marketing surveillance and to operate the yellow card system, but the Minister responded to my question about the assessment of the potential implications of the BMJ article “Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is ‘likely’ responsible for deaths of some elderly patients, Norwegian review finds” by stating:

“The MHRA communicates safety advice based upon consideration of the totality of evidence from all relevant information sources, rather than the strengths and limitations of individual data sources.”

Surely, a fundamental step in any meta-analysis of published data is to interrogate the robustness of those data and for the public to have confidence that that is happening.

That point links right back to where I started, on the Cass report. One of the fundamental failings that the report identified was circular citation among various different organisations. They were validating one another’s position to create a false impression that there was an evidence base for the practice they were involved in. If the MHRA will say, “We do not interrogate the data when we do a meta-analysis,” who does? Who will validate the data? If I can hand over to the MHRA a whole load of numbers and it will just count them and accept that I have said my methodological rigour is robust, that is not good enough as far as I am concerned.

The Minister’s response to my written question was that the MHRA does not

“assign causality at the level of individual reports,”

as that is not its responsibility. If that is the case, whose responsibility is it? Who is interrogating the data and making that decision? If no one is, how can we get from correlation to a developed picture of causation? That is an essential step. It raises fundamental questions about that responsibility and the reliability of the data that the MHRA is relying on. If we are to learn anything from the general implications of the Cass report, we must have a clear steer from the MHRA on how these fundamental scientific principles will be observed and upheld …

Hanvey discussed other coronavirus-related issues and included quotes from the aforementioned Professor Dalgleish:

Let us move on to what we do not know. We have had no real progress on the points raised in the debate, particularly on record-level data. We need either that data to be released to clinical academics and others or a cogent explanation for why that is not happening. Why were those concerns kept hidden by the FDA? Are similar concerns or issues being hidden by the UK Government? Some of the points made about the delay in the MHRA taking action on clinical impacts is relevant to that point.

According to a House of Commons Library briefing, the Government-operated vaccine damage payment scheme, which has been discussed in both this debate and the previous one, provides only a one-off tax-free payment, which is currently a modest £120,000, to applicants where a vaccine has caused severe disablement. Data on VDPS claims relating to covid-19 vaccination is not routinely published, so we do not have particular metrics that establish how many claims are being made against those vaccines.

The most recent data is from September 2023. According to the NHS Business Services Authority, at that time it had received 7,160 claims relating to covid-19. Following medical assessment, 142 claims—just under 2%—were awarded, and 3,030 were rejected. A further 192 claims were found to be “invalid”. We need to understand why that was. What are claims being measured against and who is interpreting the clinical assessment information? We must also ask whether the exclusion criteria are reliable, given the concerns raised in the debate.

Based on the data that I have here, there are currently 3,796 unresolved claims, 1,010 of which have been unresolved for more than six months. If the 142 successful claims receive the full payment, the total cost will be around £17 million. If there are a further 177 successful claims from the unresolved cases, the associated cost will be a further £21 million. I am advised that the Government set aside some funding for this issue, but this has the hallmarks of the contaminated blood scandal [a decades-long one, only being resolved with the current Government] written all over it. We must get ahead of the game and make sure that people get the compensation that they desperately need at a time when it is important to them.

There is another question: why are the Government so willing to pick up the tab on vaccine injury, however inadequate the scheme is, given the fatalities and the significant life-limiting impact on the victims? These concerns have been amplified significantly following the publication in The Spectator Australia of an account by genomics scientist Kevin McKernan of his accidental discovery. It states:

“While running an experiment in his Boston lab, McKernan used some vials of mRNA Pfizer and Moderna Covid vaccines as controls. He was ‘shocked’ to find that they were allegedly contaminated with tiny fragments of plasmid DNA.”

His concern has been considered further by Professor Angus Dalgleish, who noted that the contaminant, simian virus 40, is

“a sequence that is ‘used to drive DNA into the nucleus, especially in gene therapies’ and that this is ‘something that regulatory agencies around the world have specifically said is not possible with the mRNA vaccines’. These SV40 promotors are also well recognised as being oncogenic”—

or cancer-inducing genetic material. Other scientists have confirmed those findings. Professor Dalgleish further notes:

“To put it bluntly, this means that they are not vaccines at all but a…Genetically Modified Organism that should have been subject to totally different regulatory conditions and certainly not be classed as vaccines.”

Worryingly, Professor Dalgleish also notes that oncologists have contacted him from across the world, and the consensus is that this is thought to be precipitating relapse in melanoma, lymphoma, leukaemia and kidney cancers. He concludes with the following warning:

“To advise booster vaccines, as is the current case, is no more and no less than medical incompetence; to continue to do so”—

with his cited evidence—

“is medical negligence which can carry a custodial sentence.”

Neale Hanvey concluded, in part:

Personally—I say this frankly—I will never accept another mRNA vaccine, and I am far from alone. Will the Minster agree to full disclosure of the data and an investigation of the facts? Will she also commit to instructing the Office for National Statistics to release the record level data, or will it take someone like New Zealander Barry Young, a whistleblower imprisoned for publishing its record level data, to surface concerns about the covid vaccine programme? As we have seen with the Horizon scandal, the Government must never bury the facts when lives are being lost and futures destroyed. There is no greater betrayal.

In closing, the foundations of good clinical practice are under threat. I will put that in context with the December 2023 Pathology Research and Practice paper on “Gene-based covid-19 vaccines” from Rhodes and Parry. They gave the following warning:

“Pandemic management requires societal coordination, global orchestration, respect for human rights and defence of ethical principles. Yet some approaches to the COVID-19 pandemic, driven by socioeconomic, corporate, and political interests, have undermined key pillars of ethical medical science.”

None of these clinical experts are quacks or conspiracy theorists. As the Government said so often during the pandemic, we must follow the science.

Maria Caulfield, speaking for the Government

Maria Caulfield MP (Conservative), a nurse, spoke for the Government.

She said, in part:

As I said, we have had a number of debates on this issue, including in January, when I acknowledged that the hon. Member for North West Leicestershire [Andrew Bridgen] was correct to say that we have seen excess deaths in recent years. However, excess deaths are not new; they were happening before covid and have happened since then as well. It is important to look at the figures, because the Office for National Statistics indicates that the number of excess deaths has been reducing, year on year, since the high in 2020, when there were 66,740 excess deaths in England. I can only talk about England because health is obviously devolved and the Governments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland will have their own data. In 2022, that number went down to 37,701, and in 2023, there were just 10,206 excess deaths in England. It is important to remember that every single one of those is a person, a family member, and a loved one, but it may reassure hon. Members greatly, as it does me, that the ONS has reported negative excess deaths for every week so far in 2024.

When Andrew Bridgen questioned the figures, she replied:

The hon. Gentleman may have missed my last sentence before his intervention. I said that the ONS data shows that in every week in 2024 so far, we have had negative excess deaths. That goes specifically to his point …

Routine treatments and access to appointments are difficult even now, given the backlog of examinations and tests that need to happen. When we looked at this, we saw that last year, the rate of deaths from cardiovascular disease was 2% higher than expected, with there having been more than 2,200 excess deaths.

That is why we are reinvesting in our NHS health check. It was on pause during covid, when people could not get their blood pressure or cholesterol checked and could not go on smoking prevention programmes. We restarted those, and as a result, excess deaths from cardiac disease are starting to fall. We want to use the opportunity to roll out our new digital health checks. We recognise that access to GPs is sometimes difficult, but this roll-out is expected to deliver an additional 1 million checks in the first four years. We also have a £10 million pilot to deliver cardiovascular checks in the workplace. Again, that is about making it as easy as possible for people to get checked. We have our Pharmacy First roll-out as well. That is all for general health purposes. We know that all these things contributed to excess death rates.

I want to touch on the crux of the matter, which is the covid vaccine; that has come through in all these debates. I was not a Health Minister at the time, so I did not have to make these difficult decisions, but the hon. Member for Blackley and Broughton is absolutely right: as the pandemic preparedness Minister, I want the findings of the inquiry. I have to make difficult decisions now about potential future pandemics that may never happen, but could happen tomorrow—we just do not know. The results of the inquiry with regard to lockdowns, face masks and vaccines will all be really useful information, and at the moment, I am not much the wiser on those results.

On module 4, I want to see any evidence about vaccine safety, because that is how we learn. I think we are all singing from the same hymn sheet. We want to do the best, but during the pandemic, when we watched TV footage from around the world, and the media were often pushing us to lock down harder, faster and longer, we had to make difficult decisions without the benefit of hindsight.

I went back to the wards during covid, and I looked after covid patients who were being treated for cancer. We lost many of them, and we lost a number of staff, too. I have seen this from both sides of the fence.

Dr Mullan intervened to say that he, too, worked on the front lines during the pandemic.

Caulfield issued the usual praises and the pot-banging (every Thursday night at 8 p.m.) narratives by way of thanks. You can read the transcript.

Of the vaccine data, she said:

The Office for National Statistics published data last August showing that people who received a covid-19 vaccination had a lower mortality rate than those who had not been vaccinated. Given that 93.6% of the population has been vaccinated with either one or two doses, or multiple does, it is almost impossible to determine correlation versus causation. Vaccinated people will feature highly in excess death numbers because most people have been vaccinated, which is why we need to go through the data really carefully and not just take the first data at face value.

The covid virus continues to circulate, and we are now living with covid. Some people are still very vulnerable to covid, although the current variant is obviously less severe than the initial variant. We have just had our spring vaccine roll-out, and those who are invited should please go to get their vaccine. We know that it makes a difference to the most vulnerable. Over this winter, after both the flu and covid vaccine roll-outs, we have seen a significant reduction in hospital admissions.

She went on to say:

I will answer some of the many questions that have been asked in this debate. I reiterate that no medicine or vaccine is completely risk free. Even simple paracetamol has the potential to kill people if it is not taken properly, and people with certain conditions might not be able to take it at all. We have monitoring systems in place. The MHRA, which I know has come under criticism, took a stand when in April 2021, following concerns raised through the yellow card system, it reduced access for the under-30s and then for the under-40s. When concerns are raised, it absolutely takes action. There are now recommendations about the type of vaccine, and about whom we vaccinate, bearing in mind the current evidence.

I have said that no vaccine is 100% safe, which is why we have the vaccine damage payment scheme. I hear concerns about that, and I have met my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Sir Christopher Chope) to discuss it. We took the scheme off the Department for Work and Pensions and moved it into the Department of Health and Social Care to speed it up and get claims turned around more quickly. We have had more than 4,000 claims, 170 of which have been awarded. Roughly speaking, the majority of claims are decided on within six months, and the vast majority are decided on within 12 months. Of course, we want to speed up on those. We recognise the time limit of three years, which is why we are working as hard as we can to get through as many claims as possible, so that if people have been affected by the covid vaccine, they get some help and support through that funding.

My hon. Friend the Member for South Basildon and East Thurrock (Stephen Metcalfe) raised the issue of research. We are absolutely researching the issue of covid-19 vaccines—not just future types of vaccines, but their safety. There is £110 million from the National Institute for Health and Care Research going specifically into covid-19 vaccine safety, and I encourage all Members to keep an eye on that as the evidence comes forward.

I have to give the hon. Member for North West Leicestershire a few minutes to reply, so I will just say that we take this issue extremely seriously …

I have been as open and transparent as I can be. If there are concerns, we will always look into them, but there is no doubt that covid vaccines save lives. There is no doubt that some people have experienced harm from them—we acknowledge that, and we want to help and support people who have been affected—but the vaccines did get us out of the pandemic and we need to be mindful of that as well.

Conclusion

Andrew Bridgen concluded:

… I wish this debate were not needed; I wish the experimental covid-19 vaccines were safe and effective, but they are not. The longer we go on not admitting the problem, the bigger the problem that will come, and the greater the harm that will continue to be caused. Those in this House can continue to deny that the vaccines are causing harm and deaths, and the legacy media can continue to censor all reports of vaccine harms and excess deaths, but the people know, in increasing numbers, because they are the ones who are losing their loved ones and relatives. I urge the Government: release the control-level data, and let us sort this out once and for all.

I could not agree more.

The Hallett inquiry could do much better, too.

I fear there will be doubts for years to come on coronavirus vaccines, further polarising the public’s view of them.

Valete, Dehenna Davison, a Red Wall MP

Dehenna Davison was one of the rising stars of the 2019 Conservative MP intake.

Unfortunately, she is not standing for re-election.

Amazingly, she was the first Conservative to win in the northern — County Durham — constituency of Bishop Auckland, created in 1885. Until her victory, only Liberal (forerunners of the Liberal Democrats) and Labour candidates represented that constituency, never a Conservative.

We found out early on that ‘Dehenna’ rhymes with ‘Vienna’.

Why she ran

Four days before the election, on December 8, 2019, the Mail published a profile of Davison, which included a photo of her with then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s girlfriend — now wife — Carrie Symonds on the hustings (campaign trail).

The article told us of her tragic circumstances growing up (purple emphases mine):

The poster girl for Boris Johnson‘s Election assault on Labour’s heartland has spoken in detail about the family tragedy that now guides her politics.

Dehenna Davison was just 13 when she learned her father Dominic had been killed by a single blow to the head in the pub.

Ms Davison, a Tory hopeful in a Co Durham seat which has never elected a Conservative MP, recalled how she sat in a hospital waiting room as doctors battled for 45 minutes to save her father’s life.

‘I can still picture it. I can tell you what the colour the walls were and everything,’ she said. ‘They [the doctors] stopped and I went to see my dad’s body, which is not something you expect to do at such a young age.’

Later on:

She recalled the trauma of attending every day of the resulting murder trial – and her lasting bitterness that the alleged attacker was found not guilty.

‘It gave me a very clear sense of injustice,’ she said. ‘I grew up overnight, literally overnight.’ At 16, she was representing ‘myself, my mum and my nan’ at a criminal injuries compensation tribunal. Even almost 13 years on, Ms Davison puts her real life experience age at 45 – not 26.

Since 2019, she has wanted a ‘one-punch law’ to be enacted, which would find perpetrators who caused the death of someone in that way guilty of murder. I am not sure that she has achieved that in the way that she envisaged. Although the Conservative government has toughened up sentencing in general through new legislation, this week, news reports have circulated wherein judges are asking for mitigating circumstances to be taken into account.

Returning to the Mail, we discovered more about her background:

She studied politics at Hull University and spent a year as an aide to [veteran Conservative MP] Jacob Rees-Mogg. Ms Davison, who has received support on the campaign trail from Mr Johnson’s girlfriend Carrie Symonds, said politics was about helping people ‘get their benefits claim through, getting a pothole filled’.

The former computer game shop worker admitted the ‘poster girl thing’ was probably due to her tragic backstory and her ‘slightly unusual demographics’. But she added: ‘I just want to get stuff done.’

Reality television marriage

After the election, reality television aficionados no doubt thought that Davison’s face looked familiar.

On December 14, two days after she was elected as an MP, The Sun told us:

A YOUNG woman, whose relationship with a man 35 years older than her was explored on a reality TV show, has been elected as an MP.

Dehenna Davison, 26, stood as the Conservative candidate for former Labour-stronghold Bishop Aukland – just a year after starring in Channel 4 programme Bride & Prejudice with now-husband John Fareham …

Dehenna was studying politics at Hull University when she met John, a Conservative councillor.

They fell for one another while out campaigning in Kingston upon Hull North, where she stood as a candidate in 2015.

John proposed to Dehenna – who also once worked as a parliamentary aide for Jacob Rees-Mogg – in 2015, but they still had to convince her grandfather Paul, eight years older than her other half, to support their relationship.

In the TV show, Dehenna and John, who was 59 when the programme aired, sought his approval for their marriage.

“Age doesn’t matter if two people really care about each other,” the future MP told the camera.

John added: “I had asked her before, but she told me to ask her properly.

“At my age, going down on one knee was going to be a bit tricky. It wasn’t the going down, it was the getting back up again.”

When the show aired, viewers rushed to give the couple their blessing – and criticised Paul’s unhappiness at the union.

One person wrote: “She’s 24 let her decide who to marry” …

The article included her election victory tweet, dedicated to her family:

I did it for them. 💙

Mum, thank you for always supporting me, whatever life has thrown at you.

Dad, thank you for teaching me what it is to be a Davison.

Nannan, thank you for inspiring me to be the best version of myself.#ToryGain #Best4Bishop pic.twitter.com/IAKu6SL8PP

— Dehenna Davison MP (@DehennaDavison) December 13, 2019

Grandfather Paul was right.

Just ten days after the election — on December 22, 2019 — HullLive reported that the marriage was in tatters:

A new Tory MP, who studied and married in Hull, has split from her councillor husband, it has been confirmed.

Dehenna Davison married Bricknell ward councillor John Fareham in 2018 but, in an interview with The Telegraph on Saturday, she confirmed the news.

Cllr Fareham and Ms Davison appeared together on Channel 4 show Bride and Prejudice last year, which documented the couple’s push for acceptance from her grandfather, before they tied the knot.

The show picked the pair as one of six couples as Dehenna, then 24, was 35 years younger than John, 59, who was similar in age to her grandfather.

However, their relationship has since come to an end, according to the interview released this weekend.

Activity outside of Parliament

It wasn’t long before the left-wing Hope Not Hate activists targeted the loveliest of new MPs.

On Valentine’s Day 2020, The Guardian reported:

Calls have been made for an investigation after photographs emerged linking a newly elected Tory MP with two alleged far-right activists.

Dehenna Davison, the MP for Bishop Auckland and a prominent member of the party’s new contingent of northern representatives, was pictured holding a County Durham flag with Andrew Foster, a man described by anti-racism campaigners as a “Muslim-hating extremist of the very worst kind”.

The images, revealed following an investigation by the campaign group Hope Not Hate show the MP with Foster at a party celebrating Brexit in a pub on 31 January. At the same event she was also pictured with Colin Raine, a former Tory activist banned from the party after allegations that he was behind a far-right protest and made Islamophobic comments online. Raine has denied that he has any far-right links.

Davison, 26, sought to distance herself from any links with the two men. “These photos were taken at an event open to the public and I in no way whatsoever condone the views highlighted of the individuals concerned,” she said in a statement …

On March 4, 2020, Guido Fawkes posted a photo of a selfie that a glamorous Davison took of fellow Conservative MP Matt Vickers and — oddly enough — then-Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn at the Kebab Awards (yes, it’s an annual event). Perhaps she wanted Corbyn in shot to counter the Hope Not Hate smear?

On April 16 that year, nearly a month into lockdown, The Mirror reported that Davison posted a video of herself on TikTok, to which the defeated Labour incumbent Helen Goodman objected:

A Tory MP has been branded ‘self-indulgent’ for posting a sweary rap video video in which she appears to complain the coronavirus lockdown has left her bored.

Bishop Auckland MP Dehenna Davison posted a TikTok clip, lip-synching to “Bored in the House” by rapper Tyga.

The clip shows her doing her washing, talking to her self in the mirror pouring a large glass of red wine and rapping “I’m bored in the mother f***in’ in the house bored”.

But the former Labour MP who Ms Davison replaced in December said she’s been left to answer queries from Ms Davison’s constituents, who can’t get an answer from their MP.

Ex-MP Helen Goodman said she was “shocked and horrified” by the video …

Ms Davison, 26, has since deleted the video.

She told the Mirror: “This was nothing more than adding to light-hearted content being produced by millions to stay positive during this lockdown.

“We should be celebrating the actions of 3.6 million people staying safe during lockdown rather than belittling them for keeping themselves and others entertained whilst following government guidance to stay home, protect our NHS and save lives.”

Ms Davison said the 3.6 million figure referred to the number of TikTok users who had made videos using the same song …

On September 7, when life with coronavirus was returning to normal in England, Davison wrote a pro-Brexit and pro-Boris editorial for The Sun:

… Knocking on doors during the election last year, three resounding messages on Brexit were clear: 1 – let’s just get on with it. 2 – Boris is the man to deliver it. 3 – we need to stand up to Brussels.

Now as talks reach the final furlong, more than ever, we need to remember that third message.

The Brussels bully boys will only blink if they recognise equivalent displays of strength from UK negotiators.

That is why I was so pleased to see the Prime Minister set out a definite deadline of October 15 for negotiations to be concluded or we will walk away.

We needn’t be afraid.

Whether we leave with or without a deal, Brexit marks the start of a bright future for Britain.

A future where we are free to strike our own trade deals, manage our own borders, make our own laws, and where we open our arms to the world as a truly global Britain …

In April 2021, Guido Fawkes told us that Davison was one of 40 MPs to join the think tank IEA’s Free Market Forum. Davison was one of the co-chairs of the group along with fellow Conservative MP Greg Smith.

Other members included future Prime Minister Liz Truss, then-Home Secretary Priti Patel and future Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng.

GB News began broadcasting in June 2021. Davison was a presenter on the new channel’s Sunday morning current events show The Political Correction along with Nigel Farage, blue Labour activist Paul Embery and, occasionally, the former DUP party leader — now Dame and Baroness — Arlene Foster.

On Monday, October 11, she gave an interview to fellow GB News presenter Gloria de Piero, a former Labour MP, in the series The Real Me, in which MPs featured:

In the interview, Davison revealed her bisexuality to de Piero, which generated a few news articles in response.

GB News recapped it:

Dehenna Davison said her sexuality is not a big deal and “just part of who I am …

“If anyone were to explicitly ask me, I certainly wouldn’t try and hide it because I don’t think it’s anything to be ashamed of.

“The reason I haven’t done a kind of ‘By the way, guys’ is because I don’t want being bi to be considered a big deal.

“If I did a very public kind of coming out parade, that would be me saying there’s something really unusual about this and trying to make a big deal of it when to me it’s not. It’s just part of who I am.”

She also spoke about her divorce and the future. By then, she was in a new romantic relationship — with a man:

“It’s going really well, and I’m very excited about it. But we’ll see, the future is a very exciting place.”

In 2018, Miss Davison appeared in the Channel 4 programme Bride And Prejudice, which showed the then 24-year-old marrying John Fareham, a Conservative councillor who is 35 years her senior.

In a tweet on Sunday evening, she added: “Really overwhelmed by the outpouring of love this evening. Thank you so much for your support.”

The Mail had more soundbites about her sexuality:

Conservative MP Dehenna Davison said her sexuality is just ‘part of who I am’ as she came out publicly as bisexual today …

In an interview on GB News, set to be broadcast today, Ms Davison said: ‘I’ve known that I’m bisexual for quite a lot of years. All my close friends and family know’ …

On October 12, the Mail reported on the hate she received on social media.

The Telegraph‘s chief political correspondent Christopher Hope, who now works for GB News, included her political insight:

In the interview, she described the shock of learning that her father, Dominic, had been killed by a single blow “in the side of the neck” when she was just 13 …

Her father’s assailant pleaded self-defence and was not convicted of the assault, she said. She has set up an all-party parliamentary group on one-punch assaults to see whether more needs to be done for victims and on sentencing assailants.

Not having been raised in a political family, Miss Davison said she had “genuinely thought growing up that Winston Churchill was a Labour prime minister”.

She admitted that she occasionally thought about leading the Tory party, adding: “You kind of fantasise and see who’s in at the moment and you think, ‘maybe this is something that I could do’ – but would I like to?

“The upside is you get a chance to really try and shape the country and try and make it better, which is what we all get into politics to do anyway. And what better way than by leading a party and potentially going on to lead the country? But I think there are so many downsides too. I mean, that complete invasion into your personal life.

“It’s hard enough being a backbench MP… and I’m just not really sure whether that’s something that I’d really want to do. And certainly I wouldn’t want that pressure put on my family.”

Once Boris Johnson’s Partygate became a regular feature in parliamentary debates, Davison was accused of being part of the Pork Pie Plot — said to have originated with the Conservative MP representing the home of pork pies, Melton Mowbray — to oust him as Prime Minister.

On February 4 2022, the Mail told us of Davison’s latest relationship, again with a man.

As to her divorce from John Fareham, the article stated:

It is not clear whether that divorce is complete.

We discovered an interim relationship from 2021:

Last May she informed parliamentary officials she was in a relationship with Ahzaz Chowdhury, 35, a parliamentary lobbyist. She later announced that the five-week relationship had ended.

The article told us about her latest — and current — relationship, complete with photos:

A prominent MP is having an affair with a dashing but married diplomat likened to James Bond …

… the Mail can now reveal the 28-year-old is in a relationship with Tony Kay, 49, a Middle East expert at the Foreign Office.

Awarded an OBE for his work during the Arab Spring uprising, the father of two has been deputy ambassador to Israel and once threw a fancy-dress screening of a Bond film for hundreds of official guests.

His latest post is as head of the Arabian peninsula department at the Foreign Office.

His affair with Miss Davison is potentially sensitive given his high-profile position. Foreign Secretary Liz Truss and Middle East minister James Cleverly have been informed about the relationship, a source said.

On Wednesday Miss Davison and Mr Kay were seen walking hand in hand down a quiet street on the south side of the Thames in London. They then walked to Waterloo station where they embraced and kissed for several minutes before he caught a train.

It is believed he was travelling to the million-pound house he and his 47-year-old wife bought three years ago in Ascot, Berkshire …

Apparently, everyone who needed to know knew:

It is believed that Mr Kay and Miss Davison met in July 2019 when she was in a small group of prospective parliamentary candidates on a Conservative Friends of Israel trip. The group visited Gaza and the West Bank.

The pair have been growing closer ever since and he has moved into her expenses-funded home.

A Whitehall source said: ‘The relationship between Dehenna and Tony hasn’t been going on since they met in 2019 – it’s six months. His wife has known for half a year, the kids know, the Foreign Secretary Liz Truss knows, James Cleverley knows, his line manager knows, the permanent secretary knows.

‘He’s done absolutely everything by the book, and kept his line manager informed throughout. He’s going through a divorce process with his wife, he’s still married.

‘It’s not entirely unreasonable for him still to be going to the family home, but his marriage is over. Dehenna’s flat is her flat, and she’s entitled to have whoever she wants in her flat.’

A few days later, on February 12, The Times Magazine did a big splash interview with glamorous photos of Davison in retro-1960s clothes asking if she was the future of the Conservative Party.

Janice Turner, the interviewer, wrote:

Before we met, I’d assumed a 28-year-old MP who got married on reality TV, shares a GB News sofa with Nigel Farage and posts TikTok videos plucking her eyebrows to Taylor Swift’s …Ready For It? might well be a showboating lightweight of no fixed political abode. Instead I’m surprised to find Mrs Thatcher’s granddaughter: a serious operator, with well-honed conservative views, fluency, ambition and drive. I doubt Dee, as her friends call her, is going anywhere except up the slippery Tory pole.

‘Dee’ denied being part of the aforementioned Pork Pie Plot. Instead, she gave a lot of credit to Boris and Carrie:

So what was her involvement in a plot? The red wall MPs, she says, held a secret ballot about whether to put in letters calling for Boris Johnson to resign. Has she? “No.” Is she tempted? “I honestly don’t know.”

… Davison says her view hasn’t changed. “What matters… is the PM really gets a grip of No 10 and over policy, to make sure we are delivering for people in the red wall.” In other words, she is sitting tight to see which way the wind blows.

Yet Davison acknowledges she owes her victory in large part to Johnson. “It wasn’t just Brexit. He does have this incredible charisma,” she says. “You know, there aren’t many party leaders you can take to a beachfront in Hartlepool and people stop every four steps for selfies and to shake his hand. That’s a rock-star politician, something you don’t see very often at all.”

But she’s also equally indebted to his wife. In 2019, Carrie Johnson contacted her, saying she wanted to support female candidates and could she campaign in Bishop Auckland. “And I said, ‘Yes, I would absolutely love that.’ And we got messaging a bit through the election; she’d check in to see how I was doing. When I was down in London for some work stuff, I visited her. My first time in No 10, actually, was to go and see Carrie and the dog.”

There’s also a 2019 campaign photo of her, Carrie, Dilyn the dog — and none other than Rishi Sunak MP.

Davison, an only child, admitted to be an annoyingly good student in school:

It’s clear why Carrie Johnson would take Davison under her wing: young Tory women are scarce. Mrs Johnson, the arch-political strategist, must have considered this attractive, TV-ready working-class girl from a Sheffield council estate and thought the party had struck gold. What better vision of modern conservatism than the only child of a stonemason and a nursery nurse, who was so bright that her teacher, Mrs Burton, insisted she apply to the private Sheffield High School. “I had a really inquisitive mind. I always wanted to race to the end of the work so I could do more, learn more. I was one of those really annoying kids.”

The family worried that she’d win a place and they wouldn’t be able to afford to send her. But Mrs Burton even offered to pay the fee for the entrance exam, so insistent was she that Dee would win a scholarship. Which she did.

Davison, who was in the catchment for one of the city’s worst-performing comprehensives, believes private school changed her life. “I don’t think I’d be here [in parliament] today. Absolutely not. And one of the greatest things about an all-girls school is there was never a second when I was told I couldn’t do something because I was a woman. It was really: ‘If you work hard, you can do it.’ ”

The article revealed that Davison’s divorce was still going through, even though the Mail alleged that she and Tony Kay — now Tony Kay OBE, no less — were living together. John Fareham was either a member of or a guest at three of London’s most prestigious private men’s clubs:

… Davison did the most unfathomable thing: she married a Hull Conservative councillor, John Fareham, who at 59 was 35 years her senior. (“We went clubbing my style, to the Carlton, the Athenaeum and the Garrick,” he said.) And she did so on a reality TV show, Bride & Prejudice, about couples who face family opposition. Davison’s grandfather is shown weeping miserably before he gives her away. Does she regret the show? “I don’t think there’s much point regretting it because it’s happened. But, yes.”

Amateur psychologists might suggest she was looking for a father figure: “Oh, I get the daddy issues trope all the time.” Her marriage is a closed chapter, she says: her divorce is still going through. She’s now seeing a 49-year-old diplomat, Tony Kay, a Middle East expert with the Foreign Office, who is also getting divorced from the mother of his two children.

The Times Magazine‘s Janice Turner concluded:

Whether she keeps her seat or not, she’s clearly in the party for the long haul. When [Labour’s Deputy Leader] Angela Rayner called Conservative voters “scum” [in the House of Commons], Dehenna Davison wore and gave away “Tory Scum” badges. “I wanted to reclaim the narrative. If they’re going to call us scum, I’d rather embrace it.”

Well, one could only wonder at the time.

Nine months later, on November 25, Guido Fawkes gave us the answer. By then, Boris had been forced to resign, as had Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak was the Prime Minister, by fiat from Conservative MPs.

Red emphases Guido’s:

The Tories’ 2019 poster girl, Dehenna Davison, has announced she’s to stand down as an MP after just one term. Dehenna won her seat of Bishop Auckland in 2019, with a swing of 9.5%. However after a meagre five years in the Commons, Davison is to depart at the next election. The third Tory MP to announce they’re doing so…

Davison explains the reason she’s departing:

For my whole adult life, I’ve dedicated the vast majority of my time to politics, and to help make people’s lives better. But, to be frank, it has meant I haven’t had anything like a normal life for a twenty-something.

Dehenna is the third Tory MP to make such an announcement, after Chloe Smith and Will Wragg. It’s not like they’re leaving a sinking ship. At 25 points behind Labour, they’re on the ocean floor … 

Guido added an update to say that Davison was the eighth Conservative MP to announce there would be no run for re-election.

The Telegraph reminded us that Davison had had a ministerial role at that point, so was no longer on the backbenches. Having watched her on BBC Parliament, I can say that she did very well at the despatch box:

Tory rising star Dehenna Davison has become the latest MP to announce she will stand down at the next election.

The Levelling-up Minister, who is only 29, made history in 2019 by becoming Bishop Auckland’s first Conservative MP.

The article also gave us more of her resignation statement:

I will always be humbled to have had the opportunity to serve as a Member of Parliament. But now the time feels right for me to devote more of my attention to life outside politics – mainly to my family and helping support them as they’ve helped support me.

That’s why I won’t be standing in the next general election.

On September 18, 2023, Guido reported that Davison resigned as Levelling-up Minister because of chronic migraines, an ailment she had not had before:

Dehenna Davison has resigned as Levelling Up Minister this afternoon, citing health reasons in her letter to Rishi Sunak. Davison had already announced she will stand down at the next election, though she has decided to step back a year or so early owing to chronic migraines:

Unfortunately, for some time now I have been battling with chronic migraine, which has had a great impact on my ability to carry out the role. Some days I’m fine, but on others it is difficult, if not impossible, to keep up with the demands of ministerial life – and the timing of such days is never predictable. Though I have tried to mitigate, and am grateful to colleagues for their patience at times, I don’t feel it is right to continue in the role. At such a critical time for levelling up, I believe the people of communities like mine, and across the country, deserve a minister who can give the job the energy it needs. I regret that I no longer can. And, as my capacity is currently diminished, it feels right to focus it on my constituents, and on promoting conservatism from the backbenches.

Davison was the government’s youngest Minister, and only joined the Commons benches in 2019. She’s done the full MP lifecycle in record time…

That was an excellent observation from Guido.

Another competent Red Wall MP, Jacob Young, replaced Davison.

As we are well into 2024 and awaiting Rishi Sunak’s date for the general election, MPs from all parties wish the agony of waiting would end soon.

On March 17, The Observer, weekend edition of The Guardian published interviews with several MPs who discussed their eagerness for an election date to be called and gave their thoughts on what life in Parliament was like. Dehenna Davison was one of them:

In her office, Dehenna Davison curls her legs beneath her on a sofa, seemingly oblivious to the whopping great Dr Martens on the end of them. “Colleagues keep saying: ‘You’re counting down the days,’” she tells me. “But we don’t know how many days are left.”

The article delved deeper into what she thought about the House of Commons.

She said:

There have been moments when the abuse has been so vile. There’s definitely an element of misogyny.

She has received hateful online messages. Even though she had worked as Rees-Mogg’s intern and thought she knew what went on in Westminster, she realised that the reality of being an MP was something quite different:

Dehenna Davison’s office is in a building whose long, rather desolate corridors resemble those of a three-star hotel, and it’s so small: as we talk, our knees are practically touching. She seems very young – she’s sipping a drink via a straw from a huge, multicoloured plastic cup – and if not vulnerable, exactly, then like someone who hasn’t had the easiest time since she won Bishop Auckland just over four years ago (for the 84 years before her election in 2019, the town had always had a Labour MP). She took the decision not to stand again in part because she felt that by devoting her 20s to politics, she’d missed out on “normal adult life”. But the longer she talks, the more obvious it becomes that the bigger factor by far may be the abuse she receives online.

“You have to have a thick skin to go into parliament,” she says. “And I’ve always argued that the internet is a great thing. But the level of abuse online is something I never anticipated. There have been moments when it has been so vile. I’m not talking about policy stuff. We’re always going to have people who disagree with us; that’s legitimate. It’s the personal attacks [that are upsetting]. There’s definitely an element of misogyny there. When I posted a memorial to my father who passed away in 2007 [he died after being punched in a pub], I got one message that said: ‘I bet he’d be turning in his grave, knowing you’re a Tory.’ Another one said: ‘You’re such a slut, I bet he’s looking down, and seeing all the disgusting things you’re doing – though maybe he likes that.’” One troll received a police caution, having posted 100 messages online in 24 hours. Another, she says, is subject to a restraining order. What support does parliament offer in this situation? She laughs. “When I was elected, I sat down with the police. They gave me some general advice: not to be controversial, and not to post in real time where I am.”

Davison wasn’t intimidated when she arrived: she’d been an intern in Westminster, and knew her way around. But her status as a rising young star who’d won a seemingly impossible seat made things difficult at times.

“I got a lot of media attention, which I hadn’t sought. I think my colleagues thought my motivation was the limelight. It became very isolating as time went on, hearing indirectly what people had been saying about me, all the backbiting.”

Like her colleague Charles Walker, she likes the division lobby: the chance to brush shoulders with cabinet ministers and even the prime minister. But the system of whipping leaves a lot to be desired. “When I was elected, my whip asked me in for a chat. His first question was whether I wanted to be prime minister.” Was he trying to weaponise her ambition? She nods. “You know that [if you rebel] you’re putting down a marker against yourself getting any kind of future promotion.” When she once voted against a government motion, a male politician “stood too close to me, being quite aggressive”.

Davison insists the Tories can hang on to Bishop Auckland, and that a lot can change electorally in six months: “Don’t believe everything the polls say.” But about the future of the party, she sounds less certain – especially if there is a Labour rout. “Then there’ll have to be some soul searching. It will be interesting to see who’s left, and in what direction that takes us. I’ve a suspicion the membership would want to see a move towards the right, a more authoritarian approach. Whether that’s the right thing in this age, I can’t say. I find myself economically pretty rightwing, but socially I’m very liberal, so I wouldn’t want to see us doing a massive shift to the right.” She smiles. “But you know, by that point, I’ll be just another [Conservative Party] member…”

She slurps on her straw. Her heart, I sense, is already elsewhere.

I think so, too.

My far better half said that some of the 2019 Red Wall MPs never expected to be elected. Perhaps Dehenna Davison is one of them.

The latest we heard from her was in a Point of Order in Parliament on March 18, when Labour Deputy Leader Angela Rayner and a few other Labour MPs visited Bishop Auckland without letting her know. All MPs going to another’s constituency in a public capacity must advise the sitting MP of their visit before it happens.

Guido had the story and the video:

Guido wrote, reminding us of Rayner’s current controversy over her living arrangements some years ago, which could, at the very least, involve a tax liability:

It looks like Angela Rayner is forgetting the rules. Bishop Auckland MP Dehenna Davison has asked in the Commons why Rayner, along with four other Labour MPs, parked up in her constituency unannounced to launch the Labour candidate for North East Mayor’s campaign. Anything to avoid a media interview…

The Commons Rules of Behaviour are clear – if an MP wants to visit a constituency of another “all reasonable efforts should be taken to notify the other Member“. Speaker Lindsay Hoyle weighed in to tick off rule-breaking MPs. Maybe Rayner was too tied up in domestic matters to remember the rules…

In any event, valete, Dee. It was nice knowing you, if only off the telly and in the papers.

Who really runs the UK? Neither the Government nor the Palace

On Tuesday, March 19, 2024, UnHerd‘s Mary Harrington had an excellent article on who governs the UK, ‘Penny Mordaunt: the perfect head for the headless Tories’.

I will skip the bits about Penny Mordaunt, known the world over as the sword bearer at King Charles’s coronation.

The nub of Mary Harrington’s argument is that the UK is no longer governed in the way people have come to understand it historically (emphases mine):

Back in 2019, [Boris] Johnson won his landslide by promising to scotch the Blob and “Get Brexit Done”, thereby defying every bureaucrat, NGO-crat and Sensible Centrist who was seeking to circumvent the referendum result. He gained his mandate and Brexit was duly Done; but the power of the Blob was in no way scotched, as evidenced by the fact that Brexit did not get Done in any of the ways that actually mattered to the electorate. Nor was it Done in any way that limited those judicial, regulatory, and other extra-political curbs that have come increasingly to characterise British public life, and whose impositions on parliamentary sovereignty and popular preference occasion such widespread resentment. (Once the cost of all the lawfare is added in, for example, even if it passes the proposed “Rwanda plan” is projected to cost £1.8m per migrant.)

But what if Brexit in this sense can’t be done? Since the referendum, I’ve found myself wondering whether the project failed, at least in its populist incarnation, because it was impossible. Impossible because we’ve somehow concocted for ourselves a civilisational order that’s too complex and rudderless for even intelligent non-specialists to govern competently. When, for example, just the safeguarding guidelines for schools run to 178 pages, and there are also curricula, budgets, estates unions, pay, funding, meals, and much else besides all clamouring for attention, is it really reasonable to expect all of the Secretaries of State for Education to have acquired a complete mastery of their brief, in the sometimes very short (there were five in 2022 alone) time they spend in the job?

But this has some less than appealing implications for how government actually works. It suggests that the majority of expertise really does rest with the headless Blob of appointees, NGOs, procedures, and interchangeable bureaucrats, that populists so viscerally loathe. But what’s the alternative? Without it, we are surely just hurtling from calamity to cock-up with a leadership of under-informed blowhards.

A third option, and the one I suspect we now enjoy, is governance in practice by the former, with the latter granted a sort of ceremonial role. As though, perhaps somewhere around the point where we gained a Supreme Court [a Tony Blair initiative], the doctrine of Parliamentary supremacy was discarded, much as absolute monarchy was in 1688. The settlement we ended up with, after absolute monarchy was abolished, was known as “the Crown in Parliament”: constitutional monarchy, which is to say a defanged monarchy that serves as the symbolic head of a sovereign Parliament. What if, much as after 1688 we retained only a constitutional monarch, now we also only have a constitutional Parliament? Perhaps, to save our overburdened education secretaries, we set the machine on autopilot — and now we’ve forgotten how to fly the plane. If so, no one is really in charge — but a kind of headless swarm now wields authority.

That would make Britain’s de facto regime “the Crown in Parliament in the Blob”. If this is in fact how we’re ruled now, it would explain several otherwise baffling features of contemporary politics — not least the Royal Family’s current sense of both crisis and bathos. If we’ve moved to a constitutional Parliament, the living representative of the Crown in Parliament, Charles III, is now the ceremonial centrepiece of a Parliament that has itself become ceremonial. Even more than his current illness, this would help explain the sense of a once-magnificent institution ending not with a bang, but a whimper.

It’s hardly original to note how hopelessly the Conservative Party lags His Majesty’s Opposition, in grasping how this now vocal, organised, and well-resourced post-political ecosystem works. From Thatcher on, every Tory leader has made angry gestures at the Blob, while doing little either to dislodge prominent enemies within it or even cut funding to groups that oppose stated Tory aims. Despite noises to the contrary, this only grew more pronounced under Johnson and subsequent Tory leaders. By contrast, Starmer’s [Labour] government-in-waiting is already making repeated assurances to that ecosystem that Labour will keep the funding spigots open, and efforts at control to a minimum.

We can assume, then, that whether endured resentfully or supported enthusiastically, this new order of constitutional Parliament will shamble on, at the head of a headless state, for which Penny Mordaunt would be the perfect, interim, largely symbolic head. For notwithstanding her jam-and-Jerusalem aesthetics, Mordaunt herself is the epitome of steely-eyed Blob ambition. After an early career oscillating through an ecosystem of PR, student politics, third-sector administration, and political campaigning, she joined Parliament as that most pro-Blob of Tories: a Cameroon [ally of David Cameron]. Since then, she’s risen without trace; apart from carrying the sword, the moment she came closest to being noticed by the public was after her defeat by Liz Truss in the last Tory leadership bloodbath but one.

Ultimately, we have faceless, unelected people making national decisions which affect all of us:

… wielding influence via elite groups with closed membership, and equally closed objectives … they remain closed, vanguardist bodies. And their relation to official forms of power is hence every bit as oblique as in any other closed society …

… Certainly, if we’re stuck with this new regime, we must learn to ask a great deal more of our unelected “experts” — and find new means of holding them accountable …

That will never happen, which is what we have been seeing more clearly over the past several years. It only gets worse, not better.

Interestingly, Guido Fawkes’s political sketchwriter, the veteran journalist Simon Clark, wrote about this phenomenon in his take on March 20th’s PMQs.

Older Britons know that the late Conservative Prime Minister Edward ‘Ted’ Heath still divides opinion. Clark posits that Heath and his opposite number in Labour, Denis Healey, would be positively statesman-like these days. Clark’s theme is Broken Britain, also the theme when Heath and Healey were at their apex in politics in the 1970s:

Three-day weeks, ballooning debt, a crippling energy crisis, a slaughterhouse of a health service – there’s one particular difference between this and the 70s.

Our modern leaders have so little personal effect that listening to them is like reading them off an iPad.

When Edward Heath spoke in the Commons – I only heard it once … – it was an event. The rafters trembled slightly. Tigers sound like he did, surrounding their listeners. No one has a voice like that in modern politics. Heath had been on Normandy Beach, of course. Denis Healey had been Beach Master at Anzio.

Opposing Rishi Sunak’s and the Conservatives’ stasis are Labour’s Keir Starmer and his shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves who pledge to revive the UK. However, Clark, like Harrington, sees no change ahead:

How can Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer, with their adenoidal oratory, sell us national rejuvenation with all the carnage that requires? …

Police, Health, Justice, Energy – they are not out of the control of Parliament, but beyond control.

The question on which Edward Heath fought the 1974 election was “Who Governs Britain?”

The answer then was, “Not you, chum.” The answer after the next election will very likely turn out to be, “And not you, either.”

Both Harrington and Clark are correct.

We are at a dangerous impasse, because, since the time Boris Johnson’s Government got going in earnest in January 2020, we are now fully aware of who runs the UK. It certainly isn’t the Government, whether Conservative now or, in future, Labour.

Ahead of 2024’s general election: MPs might not be running again, but many are old-timers now

Much has been made in recent months of British MPs who are standing down at the next general election, anticipated to be held later in 2024.

The three main reasons for this are constituency boundary changes, the surprise at some 2019 winners at being elected and the age of some serving MPs, particularly among the Conservatives.

Objectively speaking, it is hardly astounding news, yet the media have made much of it.

On Sunday, March 17, 2024, The Guardian published interviews with a few of the outgoing MPs, including the Mother of the House — longest serving female MP — Labour’s Harriet Harman, a recent widow after the death of her husband, Jack Dromey MP. She has been an MP since 1982 (emphases mine):

Why is she going now? Wouldn’t she have liked to see in a new Labour government? She shakes her head. “I would have gone earlier, but the party was in such bad shape under [former Labour leader Jeremy] Corbyn. I felt the ship was rocking.” On election night, she will still be up until dawn, touring the TV studios as a commentator. But beyond that, she cannot quite see. There is the Fawcett Society, which she chairs (the group campaigns for women’s equality). And perhaps, too, there is work to be done on widowhood. Harman’s husband, Jack Dromey, also an MP, died unexpectedly in 2022 – “his office was right there, next door,” she says – and this has brought her to think about women who find themselves in the same situation. She is 73, which is no age at all these days. “There used to be a cultural norm about widowhood, which was that it’s a very sad and terrible thing; that the good part of your life is over. But my mum lived for 30 years after my dad died. You can’t say that a third of your life is going down the drain. We need a feminist take on widowhood. This is the next chapter of our lives, and we’re going to do it very differently.”

Then there are MPs who have been affected by mental health problems. Interestingly, Sir Charles Walker and William Wragg are Conservatives.

Walker, who has been an MP since 2005, has made some thought-provoking contributions in recent years, including on the pandemic:

Walker chairs the committee that drew up Smoothing the cliff edge, and he tells me that in this parliament, outplacement services are finally to be introduced: MPs will get help with such things as their CV. In the next parliament, vocational accredited training will be available. “People should be thinking about their last day in parliament on their first day,” he says. “Because it really is very transitory” …

When Charles Walker found himself getting crotchety with his constituents, he took it as an early sign that his time in parliament might be coming to an end: “My stepfather was an MP, and he said that once you start getting short-tempered, it’s time to go.” In 2019, he was at a political event – admittedly, this was not in his constituency – and it struck him as “one of the most unpleasant evenings” he’d ever had. “They thought they could be as rude as they liked,” he says. “So I basically told them what I thought of them: find yourself a new guest speaker, I said, because I’m going home. I called my wife from a service station. ‘I can’t do this any more,’ I said. She was the one who pointed out that I would have to do it for another five years because my name was on the ballot paper, and the nominations had closed two weeks earlier.”

Walker loves the House of Commons. He has never been a yes man, intent on clambering the greasy pole: on his first day in parliament in 2005, he got into a “terrible row” with his fellow Tory MPs when he said that they had to give up their outside jobs, and focus on the task in hand. He had no ministerial ambitions; he wanted only to be a good parliamentarian. “And I have been.” He is the fourth longest-serving select committee chair in the House, a former vice-chair of the 1922 Committee, and he has often amended legislation. In this sense, he has no regrets. But there is, he thinks, a problem. “I’m going to say something very controversial, which is that we’re far too close to our constituents. MPs’ offices are nearly all now staffed by five caseworkers, who just plough through the inbox, solving people’s problems. That’s a very noble thing to do, but ultimately, it’s not the role of a member of parliament. We’re here to legislate. I know it sounds like heresy, but we have to put some distance between ourselves and them. Most constituents are self-sufficient. So you end up working for about 1,000 people.” Walker believes passionately that more homes need to be built. Conservative MPs, however, are stymied by their constituencies if they talk about the green belt. “The Tory party has had numerous housing bills, but when it comes to the crunch, we find ourselves campaigning against them.”

His low point in the almost two decades he has been here was, without question, the period of the pandemic. Walker suffers from OCD. “I would happily have had the vaccination up my nose, or on a brioche… But I am needle phobic. It was absolutely awful when we started getting aggressive with those who hadn’t had a vaccination. I just hated it. The lack of empathy. The lack of humanity. All these nice middle-class people with their gardens lecturing others. I thought that was obnoxious.” But he thinks he began to “fall out of love with parliament” in the period after Brexit (he was a Brexiter, though he is much more agonised now about how it all played out). “I remember in a meeting of the 1922 Committee Theresa May being reduced to tears by the brutality of some colleagues around that table. If you were a shrink, you’d say that’s when I really started thinking I’d had enough.”

Some other complaints and observations. Boris was “chaos”, though he had “the Kryptonite of political stardust… and Truss was just a disaster. I mean, it really was, wasn’t it?” However, the media, with its obsession with gotchas, must also take some of the blame for the low quality of political debate: “The biggest decision any presenter of the Today programme has ever had to make is: what do I ask next?” He worries that parliament no longer attracts the brightest or the best. But so far as reform goes, he is resolute. Those who complain about outmoded practices “clearly don’t understand how the place works”. He likes nothing better than a vote in the division lobby, where anyone is free to nobble the secretary of state for this or that. How does he feel about the election, whenever it may be? Does he fear a rout? “I’ve always said that while governments come and go, parliament is a constant – and that’s fantastic. I really don’t know what’s going to happen, but I do know how democracies work, and that’s a cause for celebration, not regret.”

William Wragg confessed:

I was in a depressive state and I asked myself: is this how I want to continue?

I found Wragg a bit of a bully, especially towards then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson in his final months. I am trying to square that with his mental health, which he has discussed openly in the House of Commons on occasion:

For Conservative MPs, the summer of 2022 was stormy – and it took its toll. “It was after the confidence votes in Boris Johnson,” says William Wragg. “I got back for the summer recess, and having come away from all that energy, tension and adrenaline, I just felt as if the ground from under me had opened up. I was in a depressive state, and I had to take some time out. It was then that I asked myself a blunt question: is this how I want to continue? Because it wasn’t going to be sustainable as a working life.” He waited. Best not to rush into anything. He told himself he might be able to push on. But it was no good. “We went through another tumultuous period. The party turned very introspective. The thought settled in my mind. I wanted more autonomy over my own life.”

Wragg has been open about his struggles with his mental health. But while this is the single most important reason for his decision to leave parliament, he doesn’t want to be defined by it. Does he think life as an MP is particularly hard for those prone to depression? “It’s hard on anybody, and it’s changed very much in the time I’ve been here.” Social media in particular has made life more difficult: “Maybe it’s one of the effects of the Brexit referendum, but the discourse doesn’t allow for any nuance.” The general public, he tells me, struggles to remember that MPs are human beings too: “A lady came to see me after I’d announced my decision, and she said: ‘You know, Mr Wragg, there’s no way I’m going to vote Conservative, and that’s how I’ve voted all my life. What have you got to say to that?’ When I said, ‘Well, it’s not just voters that can become disillusioned’, the look of surprise on her face…” Wragg is one of those who thinks long careers in politics may belong to the past. “No one is indispensable. But it’s a shame. There’s a lot of people with a lot more still to give who are leaving.”

As of February 12, 2024, Guido Fawkes estimated that 60 Conservatives will not be running for re-election.

One of them in Tracey Crouch, who first entered the Commons in 2010 and suffered with cancer during this Parliament. I fully empathise with her decision and, yes, she was an active participant in debates, showing up with a shaved head because of her cancer treatment. In any event, her seat of Chatham and Aylesford in Kent appears to be a safe seat for the Conservatives.

Sir Robert Neill, an absolute brainbox when it comes to the law, has served the Kent (outer London) constituency of Bromley & Chislehurst — soon to be Bromley and Biggin Hill — since 2006. He began his career as a local councillor 50 years ago, so he’s doing the right thing. The new constituency could well go to Labour. We can but see. I do not trust polls anymore.

Another proper Conservative, Colonel Bob Stewart, will be standing down from his Kent (another outer London) constituency Beckenham after many years. He has served his constituents well.

Sir Graham Brady, who heads the 1922 Committee, entered Parliament in 1997. He will also be standing down from his seat in Altrincham and Sale West:

I have decided to bring this fascinating and fulfilling chapter of my life to a close while I am young enough to pursue other opportunities and interests, so I will not be standing at the next election.

In physician Dr Kieran Mullan‘s case, after boundary changes, he was deselected in another constituency. Guido says:

Now that Mullan has nowhere to chicken run to he’s decided to fly the coop of Crewe and Nantwich, citing boundary changes and his personal life.

Mike Freer, who represents Margaret Thatcher’s former constituency in north London, is standing down after someone set his campaign office alight, allegedly regarding the Hamas-Israel conflict. Freer is not Jewish, incidentally, and says that the attack was the final straw with regard to his professional and personal life.

Sir James Duddridge, an MP since 2005, announced that he will be standing down from his seat in Rochford and Southend East:

I think I have done my time. Forgive me for moving on to do other things.

Steve Brine, who has represented Winchester (Hampshire) since 2010, will stand down, too, so that he can spend more time with his wife and children.

Dehenna Davison, who represents Bishop Auckland, was a surprise Red Wall win in 2019. I will have more on her in another post, but she will be standing down after one term. She has been plagued by unexpected physical health issues over the past five years.

Although that is just a small selection of Conservatives, their reasons are valid. I don’t know about Dr Mullan, but the others have pulled more than their weight not only on the backbenches but in ministerial or committee roles over the years.

Suspended Conservative MP Lee Anderson defects to Reform Party

The big political news of Monday, March 11, 2024, was Lee Anderson’s defection to Reform.

One week ago, I wrote about Anderson’s criticism of London Mayor Sadiq Khan and the MP’s subsequent suspension from the Conservative Parliamentary Party.

By 9:30 yesterday, Guido Fawkes told us that the rumour mill was in full flow (red emphases his):

Reform UK is making a “major” announcement today, setting Westminster abuzz with rumours of what it may be about. Some speculate that it could be about Lee Anderson defecting to the party following his suspension of the Tory whip. Something Lee himself has not ruled out…

An hour later, all became clear. Recall that, in his constituency of Ashfield, Anderson was a Labour councillor then ran into trouble with them for his conservative — common sense — perspectives. He became a Conservative comfortably in time to run as Ashfield’s MP in December 2019. He was in the ascendant after Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister, speaking to various Conservative associations and later serving as Deputy Party Chairman before he resigned over the Rwanda Bill earlier this year. Then he was suspended for his comments over Khan.

Guido gave us the news, a video and a reminder of where Anderson stood in January this year:

Reform UK Party Leader Richard Tice has announced that Lee Anderson has defected to Reform UK, to be the party’s first MP and their “champion of the Red Wall“. It’s the third party Lee’s been a part of in six years…

Despite the fact that just this January Lee said “Reform is not the answer. It leaves the door open for Sir Keir Starmer to get into No. 10 and undo all the hard work we’ve tried to do so far,” Lee took to the stand today saying: “My country has to come first, I’m scared that we are giving our country away,” pointing to his parents and constituents as inspiration for defecting to Reform. Tice went on to say that he’d be “surprised” if more MPs didn’t defect to Reform before the election… 

For me, that’s a lot of bouncing around, even if the Conservatives did suspend him. Anderson said that he was under parental pressure to embrace Reform. Perhaps, but how will this look in future? It looks as if 30p Lee — referring to his ability to make dinner on the cheap — has 30p principles, too.

At the New Year, Reform’s leader Richard Tice and Anderson didn’t exactly see eye to eye:

Two months on, however, and the Conservatives seem to be moving ever closer to the One Nation Party, i.e. one that is all-embracing, clearly centrist and not too Thatcherite. This is no doubt an influence from former Prime Minister David Cameron, now Lord Cameron, our Foreign Secretary. GB News presenter and former Conservative MP Michael Portillo says that the Party is too concerned about right-wing extremism and not enough about what’s coming from the other side:

Yesterday afternoon, The Telegraph had more on Lee Anderson’s defection (purple emphases mine):

Lee Anderson has announced his defection to Reform UK, declaring “I want my country back”.

The former deputy chairman of the Conservative Party was suspended from the Tories last month over his refusal to apologise for his claims that Islamists had “got control” of Sadiq Khan and London.

Mr Anderson accused the Conservative Party of “stifling free speech” by forcing him to retract the remarks, as he insisted that he was speaking “on behalf of millions of people up and down the country who agree with me”.

He revealed that his elderly parents had pleaded with him over the weekend to quit the Tories, saying they could only vote for him if he joined Reform UK.

Announcing the defection at a press conference in Westminster on Monday morning, Richard Tice, the Reform UK leader, said Mr Anderson would be the party’s first MP …

Mr Anderson told the press conference: “I will start by saying I want my country back. Over the last year or so I’ve had to do a lot of soul-searching on my political journey. I don’t expect much in politics other than to be able to speak my mind.”

He said that led him to be “labelled as controversial,” but argued it was “not controversial to be concerned about immigration” or to “fight back in a culture war”.

Mr Anderson continued: “It is no secret that I’ve been talking to my friends in Reform for a while. And Reform UK has offered me the chance to speak out in Parliament on behalf of millions of people up and down the country who feel that they’re not being listened to.

“People will say that I’ve [taken] a gamble. And I’m prepared to gamble on myself, as I know from my mailbag how many people in this country support Reform UK and what they have to say. And like millions of people up and down the country, all I want is my country back.”

Later, in a huddle with print journalists, Mr Anderson said he had been “umming and ahhing” about the move for some time, while “trying to throw you lot off the scent” …

Mr Tice said he expected more Tory MPs to follow the Ashfield MP in joining Reform, while Mr Anderson said: “It’s a sad day that I’m leaving my colleagues. But if I’m honest, this time next year they’ll be sat on the same benches as me.”

In a swipe at Rishi Sunak, the Ashfield MP said “nothing’s changing” under the Conservatives “apart from words”, adding: “People want more than words, they want action.”

“You sort of live in hope that things are going to get better and they’ve not got better. The Conservative Party is, what, 25 points behind, probably, in the polls. We keep saying that’s going to close nearer the election, well every day’s nearer the election… we drop a point every week,” he said.

Mr Anderson said there have been “several tipping points” for him over the past few months, including his “unpalatable” suspension “for speaking my mind” …

I do not know whether he will be allowed to sit on the Conservative benches, as he has done since his suspension. He could be confined to the other side of the chamber at the top row behind Northern Ireland’s DUP MPs. We shall see.

Not everyone in Reform, a tiny political party, is taken with Anderson. Businessman and recent failed parliamentary candidate Ben Habib, who is always eloquently expressed when he appears on GB News, appeared to take a swipe at Anderson yesterday afternoon.

Guido reported:

While Richard Tice is swinging with his newest member of Reform (and first MP) Lee Anderson, it seems not all of his party share the same enthusiasm for the latest recruit. Reform UK’s Deputy Leader and former candidate for Wellingborough Ben Habib has come out with a rather luke-warm reaction to Lee Anderson’s defection. Having said last month that Lee wasn’t good enough for the party, he said today on GB News:

I am circumspect about all Tory MPs…particularly Tory MPs who can’t express themselves clearly…I picked [Lee] up on this when he said Sadiq Khan is controlled by Islamists. Clearly Khan is not controlled by Islamists.

While Reform sources say nine or ten Tory MPs are in advanced talks to join Reform UK, time will tell how Reform juggles internal politics whilst rolling out the welcome mat for fresh faces… 

Well, that’s me done with Lee Anderson, because I was never going to write about no-hope Reform, the party (limited company, actually) that hasn’t a chance now or in future.

How Arabist influence is controlling what goes on in London

Last Wednesday evening, February 21, 2024, I was appalled to see a rolling graphic of an infamous Palestinian chant appear on the Elizabeth Tower, home to Big Ben.

I thought it was photoshopped. Sadly, it was not.

No offence committed

As the Elizabeth Tower is part of the Parliamentary estate, the Speaker of the House has to give permission for any messaging on it. However, it seems that the image was superimposed with no permission sought: a bit of guerilla warfare, if you will.

On Thursday, February 22, The Times posted scenes of the graphic, which until now has been seen as anti-Semitic in content, and stated that the Metropolitan Police found that no offence had been committed (emphases mine):

An investigation was launched after activists beamed “From the river to the sea” onto the Elizabeth Tower, which houses Big Ben, on Wednesday night. The Metropolitan Police assessed the incident and found it did not constitute an offence.

Wow. Unbelievable.

Fortunately, several Conservative MPs spoke out about anti-Semitism in the capital:

Andrew Percy, a Conservative backbencher, raised concerns about the “genocidal call” after demonstrators took to Westminster to demand a ceasefire in Gaza during the Commons debate on the issue.

On Thursday, MPs spoke out about the rising tide of anti-Semitism, expressed fears over their safety and warned threats from “Islamist extremists” were stifling democracy.

Percy told the Commons: “[On Wednesday] night, a genocidal call of ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ was projected onto this building. That message says no Jew is welcome in the state of Israel or in that land. This is going to continue happening because we’re not dealing with it.

“For months I’ve been standing up here talking about the people on our streets demanding ‘death to Jews’, demanding Jihad, demanding intifadas as the police stand by and allow that to happen.”

Penny Mordaunt, the Commons leader, said: “British Jews are suffering a grotesque level of hatred and abuse which quite frankly shames our country. There cannot be any tolerance or quarter given to those individuals that threaten and try to prevent MPs conducting their business and honouring the obligations they have to their constituents to use their judgement when they come into this place.”

She said the incident was being looked at by “the Speaker’s Office, parliamentary security, the Metropolitan Police, and Westminster city council, who will be responsible for pursuing prosecutions in that case”.

Robert Jenrick, the former immigration minister, said: “We have allowed our streets to be dominated by Islamist extremists, and British Jews and others to be too intimidated to walk through central London week after week. Now we’re allowing Islamist extremists to intimidate British members of parliament. This is wrong. It has to stop.”

I could not agree more. It must stop. But will it? And who will do it?

This is how the images appeared:

The rally was organised by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, which has been behind regular weekend marches, including one last Saturday that passed near the Israeli embassy. Among the messages projected onto parliament were “Stop bombing Gaza,” “Ceasefire now” and “Stop war now”.

Planning laws require permission to be granted before any projection onto parliament but authorities said they did not grant permission for slogans to be beamed onto Big Ben …

The Met said: “This is a chant that has been frequently heard at pro-Palestinian demonstrations for many years and we are very aware of the strength of feeling in relation to it.

“While there are scenarios where chanting or using these words could be unlawful depending on the specific location or context, its use in a wider public protest setting, such as [Wednesday] night, is not a criminal offence.”

Amazing — and not in a good way.

This was the Jewish response:

Claudia Mendoza, the chief executive at the Jewish Leadership Council, said: “This incident has contributed to an intimidating environment for MPs, for people working in parliament and for the Jewish community. It feels like there’s no single arena where this toxicity is not manifesting.”

Mendoza said that Jewish trust in the police is lessening:

In December, a survey conducted by the Jewish Leadership Council in conjunction with Jewish News, a newspaper, found that before the October 7 attacks more than 60 per cent of British Jews generally had faith in the police. However since then 50 per cent of those questioned said they trusted the police less than they did before the attacks.

Mendoza added: “We are fielding calls daily from members of the community who feel like the police are not taking strong enough action. I’m sure if the poll was repeated today the level of trust would not have improved and, quite possibly, worsened.”

It seems apparent that the Metropolitan Police are comprised of Arabists, the subject of my post yesterday. How else to explain their kowtowing?

Last Wednesday’s ceasefire debate

Well, this was a turn-up for the books.

For a start, it was one of three debate days allocated to the SNP, whose topic was a ceasefire in Gaza.

However, Labour decided to take the SNP motion away and replace it with their own.

This took some time to arrange, as Chris Bryant said that Thérèse Coffey’s Ten-minute Rule Bill was unnecessary and then proceeded to lecture the Conservatives on knowing what laws were on the books.

He spoke for ages, excerpted below:

Mr Deputy Speaker, I am very grateful for your reminding me that I have to speak in opposition to the legislation, but given that the Government themselves oppose the Bill, as the right hon. Member has just pointed out, I presume that the Government will be opposing it as well this afternoon.

While I commend the right hon. Lady for her diligence as a Back Bencher in introducing a series of ten-minute rule Bills over the last year—for instance, last year she introduced the Schools (Gender and Parental Rights) Bill, which fell at the first hurdle because it did not get a Second Reading, with 40 people voting No and 34 voting Aye—we have the same right to oppose her Bill today if we think that it is not appropriate, relevant or necessary. She referred to the fact that she considers this to be—[Interruption.] …

I believe—I think the Government do too, because so far the Department for Transport has refused to budge in the direction that the right hon. Lady suggests—that this is an inappropriate Bill that would do harm rather than good. It would not lead to greater safety, but actually imperil safety in the UK …

My final point is that there are 78 private Members’ Bills listed on the Order Paper that will be called for Second Reading on 23 February, 1 March, 15 March or 22 March, all of which are before the final date for calling a general election on 2 May. I do not think that a single one of them will enter the statute book. There are actually 26 in the name of Members called Christopher, and I feel rather left out that not one of them comes from myself. The serious point is that we keep putting more Bills on to the Order Paper but not putting them on to the statute book, because we still have a system for ten-minute rule Bills and private Members’ Bills that is completely and utterly bust. The Procedure Committee has said time and again that we are bringing the whole process into disrepute, and that is why we should not be adding yet another ten-minute rule Bill to the Order Paper when we have no intention of putting it on the statute book. I therefore urge all hon. Members to vote against the measure today.

And, lo, so it happened: 63 Ayes versus 81 Noes.

At 1:30, Mr Speaker took his place in the chair:

We now come to the Scottish National party motion on Gaza. I understand that the second motion on the Order Paper will not be moved today.

This is a highly sensitive subject, on which feelings are running high, in the House, in the nation and throughout the world. I think it is important on this occasion that the House is able to consider the widest possible range of options. I have therefore decided to select the amendments both in the name of the Prime Minister and in the name of the Leader of the Opposition.

Because the operation of Standing Order No. 31 would prevent another amendment from being moved after the Government have moved their amendment, I will, exceptionally, call the Opposition Front-Bench spokesperson to move their amendment at the beginning of the debate, once the SNP spokesperson has moved their motion. At the end of the debate, the House will have an opportunity to take a decision on the official Opposition amendment. If that is agreed to, there will be a final Question on the main motion, as amended.

If the official Opposition amendment is not agreed to, I will call the Minister to move the Government amendment formally. That will engage the—[Interruption.] Order. I am going to finish. That will engage the provisions of Standing Order No. 31, so the next vote will be on the original words in the SNP motion. If that is not agreed to, the House will have the opportunity to vote on the Government amendment. Proceeding in this way will allow a vote to take place, potentially, on the proposals from each of the three main parties.

I can inform the House—[Interruption.] Just let me finish. I can inform the House that there is a precedent for an official Opposition spokesperson being called second in the debate and moving an amendment before—[Interruption.] Order. Does somebody want to leave? I am determined to finish. I can inform the House that there is a precedent for an official Opposition spokesperson being called second in the debate and moving an amendment, before a Minister has been called to speak in the debate. In that circumstance, however, no Government amendment had been tabled.

I should also inform the House that the Clerk of the House will be placing in the Library a letter to me about today’s proceedings. I have asked for that letter to be made available in the Vote Office as soon as possible.

Finally, I should tell the House that in my opinion the operation of Standing Order No. 31, which governs the way amendments to Opposition day motions are dealt with, reflects an outdated approach—[Interruption.] Order. Members will be going and not be voting—

Mr Speaker was not best pleased to hear Sir Desmond Swayne say sarcastically, ‘Bring back Bercow!’ He referred to the previous Speaker of the House who did much to stymie the way of Brexit, ultimately resulting in Boris Johnson proroguing Parliament for a general election in December 2019.

So, what happened last Wednesday?

Andrew Pierce exposed everything for the Daily Mail on Thursday, February 22, starting at the end of Wednesday’s PMQs when:

Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle dived with some alacrity behind his chair, heading for the tiny Reasons Room, which seats just eight people, in the bowels of the Chamber.

And that’s where things got interesting. All day, the Westminster tea-rooms had been simmering with talk of the SNP’s forthcoming motion on a ‘ceasefire’ in Gaza – a move that threatened to rip the Labour party in two. MPs had been surprised that Sir Lindsay hadn’t made a statement on the imminent debate before PMQs.

Labour’s chief whip Sir Alan Campbell followed Sir Lindsay into the Reasons Room – and hot on the two men’s heels, I have established, was Starmer himself. The Labour leader barged his way in – and the Speaker, I understand, was astonished to see him do so. Normally, party leaders have no business attending private meetings between the Speaker and the whips. So what exactly was Starmer doing there?

And that’s not the only troubling new detail I have uncovered about yesterday’s extraordinary events at Westminster.

Also spotted lurking near the Reasons Room after PMQs was none other than Sue Gray, the ‘neutral’ ex-civil servant who presided over the Partygate inquiry that helped to torpedo Boris Johnson’s premiership in 2022.

The steely Gray is now Starmer’s chief of staff, working diligently to secure a Labour victory at the next election. No wonder the Tory MPs who glimpsed her presence in the vicinity of the Speaker before such a crucial conversation immediately smelled a rat.

‘Sue Gray should have been nowhere near that meeting,’ one former minister hissed last night. ‘The moment we saw her, we knew there was an operation against the Speaker about the Gaza vote. She needs to learn the art of subtlety.’

Yesterday, Sir Lindsay categorically denied having spoken directly to Gray. But her fingerprints are all over what some have called a ‘backstairs stitch-up’ of the SNP – one that clearly favoured Hoyle’s own former party, Labour.

We come to understand why Chris Bryant was running decoy in the Commons:

While the private arm-wrestling between the Speaker, the Labour leader and his chief whip took place behind closed doors, back in the Commons Chamber, an unrelated Private Member’s Bill about rural transport was rumbling on (raised by Tory ex-minister Therese Coffey).

Unusually, a frontbencher, Labour’s Sir Chris Bryant, hoisted himself to his feet to respond to Coffey’s fairly arcane speech. Bryant managed to string out his contribution for seven long minutes, even pausing to tell bemused MPs that there were 26 further Private Member’s Bills from MPs called ‘Chris’ in Parliament’s pipeline.

‘He was filibustering – time-wasting,’ says another Tory MP. ‘Now we know why. They were stalling to give Starmer more time to mug the Speaker.’

The irony of Bryant taking such a role in this tawdry affair was not lost on his fellow MPs. Last year, the shadow minister felt moved to publish a book: Code of Conduct: Why we Need to Fix Parliament and How To Do It. ‘This self-appointed purist deliberately exploited the very rules of the House that he railed against in his own book!’ cries one exasperated MP.

Here is where Bryant and Starmer timed it perfectly:

Just before Bryant sat down, Starmer returned to his frontbench seat in the Commons chamber. Wreathed in smiles, his private meeting with Hoyle had clearly gone well.

And then came the Speaker:

Minutes later, the Speaker himself arrived, and then made the bombshell and possibly career-ending announcement that he had turned decades of tradition on its head by allowing a vote on Labour’s motion instead of the SNP’s – a vote which had been crafted to prevent another massive revolt by Starmer’s backbenchers. Sir Lindsay’s deputies had no idea he was going to do this.

On the one hand, the Speaker’s statement appeared as one wishing to protect the safety of all MPs. However, was that merely a plausible cover for keeping Labour happy?

Neither Hoyle nor Starmer will discuss what went on in their private meeting. But it’s clear the Speaker was warned by Labour luminaries that he might have ‘blood on his hands’ if he didn’t do as they wish: Islamist extremists had threatened violence against Labour MPs who failed to vote for a ceasefire. In his statement, Hoyle admitted as much, saying he was ‘very, very concerned about the safety of all MPs’.

Pierce explains through the voices of other MPs how Speaker Hoyle had departed from the norm:

Hoyle, whose own father was a Labour MP, was first elected in 1997 – but is supposed to surrender all political allegiance as Speaker. He has done serious damage to his reputation – and he knows it. Stephen Flynn, the SNP’s Westminster leader, said Sir Lindsay’s position was now ‘entirely intolerable’. Some have dubbed him a ‘lame duck’.

Tory MPs suspect Hoyle bowed to arm-twisting from Starmer who was trying to avoid a damaging backbench rebellion, expected to number as many as 90 MPs.

There is even talk now that the Tories might break with tradition and put up a candidate to oppose Hoyle in his Chorley constituency at the next general election. (By convention the Speaker is elected unopposed.)

Many Labour MPs are also unhappy – as they want to protect the independence of the Speaker. John McDonnell, who was shadow chancellor under Jeremy Corbyn, said: ‘I just don’t know if Starmer & Co tried to threaten or influence Hoyle,’ adding: ‘Maybe everyone should come clean about what meetings took place.’

This was another telling moment:

his prospects were not helped yesterday when he went into the Commons tea room and a number of Labour MPs loudly applauded him.

Rumours of bullying circulated from that point on.

The debate was a lengthy and well-considered one. It ended with Madam Deputy Speaker Dame Rosie Winterton (Labour) in the chair.

Penny Mordaunt, the Leader of the House, rose to speak objecting to Mr Speaker’s decision that afternoon:

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. I know that Mr Speaker is a servant of this House and that he takes his responsibilities to us extremely seriously. It is that duty towards us and our rights as Members in this place that commands our respect of him.

We all have obligations in this place to ensure that all views can be expressed, and that individual Members and parties of all colours and sizes can have their say. As a Member on the Government Benches, sometimes that is difficult during Opposition day debates, as motions are always deliberately confected to try to engineer the greatest possible backlash against Members. But we on the Government Benches have never asked that the procedures of this House be upturned to militate against such pressures, even when we have faced extreme abuse. Mr Speaker has stated in the decision that he has taken today, and that he is entitled to take, that he wished for all propositions on the Order Paper to be put to the House.

However, that decision has raised temperatures in this House on an issue where feelings are already running high, and that has put right hon. and hon. Members in a more difficult position. It also appears, from the advice of his Clerk, that the decision was taken against the long-standing and established processes and procedures of this House, and that the consequence may be that the Government are not able to respond to Opposition day motions. As such, the Government do not have confidence that they will be able to vote on their own amendment. For that reason, the Government will play no further part in the decision this House takes on today’s proceedings.

I would like to stress that the Government’s position on Israel and Gaza remains unchanged, as my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister outlined today. We want to see the fighting in Gaza end as soon as possible, and we never again want to see Hamas carry out the appalling terrorist attacks that Israel was subject to. We know that just calling for an immediate ceasefire now, which collapses back into fighting within days or weeks, is not in anyone’s interests. We will be reiterating the Government’s position via a written ministerial statement. I fear that this most grave matter that we are discussing this afternoon has become a political row within the Labour party, and that regrettably—[Interruption.]

I fear that, regrettably, Mr Speaker has inserted himself into that row with today’s decision and undermined the confidence of this House in its ability to rely on its long-established Standing Orders to govern its debates—long-established conventions that should not be impaired by the current view of a weak Leader of the Opposition and a divided party. I ask that Mr Speaker take the opportunity to reassure all right hon. and hon. Members that their Speaker—our Speaker—will not seek to undermine those rights in order to protect the interests of particular Members, and that future Opposition day debates will not be hijacked in this way. I say that for the benefit of all Members. [Interruption.]

The SNP’s Stephen Flynn asked on more than one occasion why Mr Speaker had not turned up for the end of the debate:

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. I am afraid that I will have to try for a third time. Can you please advise me on where Mr Speaker is? What mechanisms are available to bring him to the House? As we wait for the deliberation on that question, I move that you use the power that I trust you have to suspend this House until Mr Speaker is brought here. [Interruption.] You can do that.

A Conservative MP Dr Matthew Offord asked the same question. Dame Rosie replied:

I am afraid that the hon. Gentleman will have to make do with me, which I know is a great disappointment. Mr Speaker will be here in his place tomorrow.

Brendan O’Hara, another SNP MP, also asked where Mr Speaker was:

The House and its procedures have descended into absolute chaos, simply because of a decision taken by the Speaker earlier today. Is it too much to ask that the Speaker is asked to come to this House to explain exactly why he took those decisions, the consequences of those decisions and how he intends to get this House out of the mess it finds itself in? For what reason would you not suspend the House in order for the Speaker to come here to sort this mess out?

Only to be told:

I have said twice already that Mr Speaker set out this morning in detail why he had made his decision, and he will be in his place tomorrow.

In a rare, one-time-only event, the Conservatives and the SNP were closing ranks against Labour. Both emptied their respective benches to leave.

Then Dame Rosie put forward the Labour motion, which passed. Dame Rosie later said she heard no objections to it. It stands in Hansard as ‘Resolved’.

Then, what happened? Mr Speaker turned up:

I wish to respond to the point of order raised by the Leader of the House.

Today’s debate was exceptional in the intensity with which all parties wished to secure a vote on their own proposition. It took decisions that were intended to allow the House the widest range of propositions on which to express a view. I wanted to do the best, and it was my wish to do the best, by every Member of this House. I take very seriously—[Interruption.] No, the danger—that is why I wanted everybody to be able to express their views. I am very, very concerned about the security of all Members. [Interruption.] I was very concerned, I am still concerned, and that is why the meetings I have had today were about the security of Members, their families and the people involved.

I have to say that I regret how it has ended up. It was not my intention. I wanted to ensure that all could express their views and all sides of the House could vote. As it was, in particular, the SNP was ultimately unable to vote on its proposition. I regret with sadness that it has ended up in this position. It was never my intention for it to end up like this. I was absolutely convinced that the decision was made with the right intentions. I recognise the strength of feeling of Members on this issue. It is clear that today has not shown the House at its best. I will reflect on my part in that, and of course I recommit myself to ensuring that all Members of this House are treated fairly.

I did not want it to have ended like this. I want to say to the House that I will meet with all the key players of each party. I think it is right that I meet with each one. [Interruption.] To correct that, I have not met with Sue Gray—I did not bump into her today; I am offended by that comment, and I think the hon. Member for Eastleigh (Paul Holmes) would like to withdraw it. That is the danger; the House has ended up with speculation over what is not factual. I am honest to this House, I am true to this House, and I believe in all Members of this House. I have tried to do what I thought was the right thing for all sides of this House. It is regrettable, and I apologise for a decision that did not end up in the place that I wished.

I say now that I will meet all the—[Interruption.] Just be quiet, please. I will meet with the leaders and the Chief Whips. Let us have a discussion on what is the best way forward. I say again that I thought I was doing the right thing and the best thing, and I regret, and I apologise for, how it has ended up. I do take responsibility for my actions, and that is why I want to meet the key players who have been involved.

Penny Mordaunt was satisfied with Mr Speaker’s explanation.

Stephen Flynn felt that the SNP were hard done by, and Mr Speaker pledged to have a private meeting with him.

However, Conservative MP Kit Malthouse put the boot in:

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. There are two points in what Mr Speaker just said on which I seek your clarification. First, he implied that the proceedings of the House were manipulated by outside intimidation, with regard given to things said outside on social media and reacted to within the House. Quite an important Rubicon has been crossed, and it may have been crossed without the consent of Members. I would like to know where the processes of the House are likely to go, given the outside influences that may be brought to bear. I would be grateful for some clarification on that.

Secondly, as you know, Madam Deputy Speaker, I have the greatest respect for you, but, bluntly, you seem to have rammed through two decisions that were quite important to a lot of Members in which no individual vote will have been recorded. A number of us had thought quite carefully about how we were going to vote in those Divisions. Essentially, we were—forgive me—taken by surprise by those two decisions being rammed through. I wonder if it is possible to either void them or run them again.

Dame Rosie said:

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his point of order. The fact is, I put the Question and nobody called against it—[Interruption.] No.

This brought forth objections:

Not true.

Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg had more to say:

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. It was quite clear from the level of noise when the Question was put that the view of the Deputy Speaker was being challenged. I think it is absolutely extraordinary that that noise level was deemed to be “Aye”. It is inconceivable that anybody hearing it would have thought it was “Aye”. It is quite clear from all our Standing Orders and all our traditions that when the Speaker or Deputy’s decision is challenged, it should go to a Division.

Dame Rosie defended her actions and blamed the Conservatives:

I am extremely sorry. I took it on the voices. I was quite clear where we were. [Interruption.] The whole thing would have been considerably clearer if the Government had not withdrawn at that position.

Plaid Cymru’s Liz Saville Roberts registered her objection:

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. I wonder if the House has considered how this looks to people outside. It looks like chicanery. I rise to ask a question on behalf of the small parties. What precedent has been set today in the way this Opposition day has been handled? How can we ever have faith in the future that our voices and our votes will actually be heard, or will it always be about the two big parties here?

Rees-Mogg tried to make another point of order. Dame Rosie was having none of it.

More MPs raised objections to the way the vote was carried out but to no avail.

All it did show was the Labour were in the ascendant here and prepared to be able to say that their MPs could say they supported a ceasefire. As such, the pro-Palestinian cause could not take issue with them; they were doing the right thing.

It is the first time that MPs have bowed to capitulation of outside forces.

Conclusion

This is where we have a dark future ahead of us. The police turn a blind eye to guerilla warfare on one of our nation’s iconic monuments. The Labour Party try to safeguard their own by steering away from a group of shadowy outside forces meant to intimidate.

This is what happens when well-meaning Arabists take over.

What’s on Anglican priests’ minds: Church admits some migrant conversions could be bogus

February 2024’s newspapers and current affairs programmes featured quite a few articles and segments on English churches making a concerted effort to convert willing migrants in search of asylum.

Although the Church of England is top dog in that department, the Baptists are at it, too.

Chemical attacker a ‘Baptist’

On Tuesday, February 6, Britons were shocked to discover that the Newcastle man suspected of being responsible for the horrific and heartless chemical attack on a mother and two daughters in Clapham, South London, had become a Baptist beforehand. Neighbours and police also suffered chemical burns of varying degrees. The mother, still in hospital, is too unwell to speak with police.

It is thought that the man became acquainted with the woman online. She is also thought to be from a non-EU country.

The Telegraph carried the story, ‘Clapham attack suspect Abdul Ezedi “converted to Christianity” with Baptist Church’ (emphases mine):

The suspect in the Clapham chemical attack converted to Christianity with a Baptist church which “welcomes strangers”, The Telegraph understands.

Abdul Ezedi has been on the run for six days after allegedly dousing a 31-year-old woman and her two daughters, aged three and eight, with an alkaline substance and trying to run them over with a car before fleeing the scene in Clapham, south London.

Ezedi was convicted of sex offences in 2018 in Newcastle but was allowed to remain in the country because the sentence was not severe enough to reach the threshold for deportation.

It has emerged that Ezedi, 35, was twice refused asylum before being granted leave to remain in the UK after a priest vouched for his conversion, arguing that he was “wholly committed” to his new religion.

The Church of England and the Catholic Church in England and Wales both vehemently denied that Ezedi was converted to the faith via their denominations.

However, a spokesperson for Baptists Together, a movement of more than 1,800 local churches supported by regional associations, colleges, and national specialist teams, has now spoken out saying that it will “always adopt a posture of welcome and compassion to those fleeing war”.

Asked whether Ezedi was specifically converted via the Baptist denomination, a spokesperson declined to answer any further questions specifically referring to Ezedi “as it’s an ongoing police investigation”.

Their statement comes after the Daily Mail quoted a government source as saying that a reference from a Baptist chapel in the North East, where Ezedi was living, was crucial in persuading an immigration tribunal that he had converted from Islam to Christianity. This statement led to him being allowed to stay in Britain on the grounds of human rights.

The source said: “The one that really made a difference was from the Baptist church. One personal written submission talked of knowing Ezedi for four years, he had been attending church and they thought he was a genuine convert.”

It remains unknown which Baptist chapel helped Ezedi convert to Christianity. The Telegraph has contacted every Baptist church in Newcastle and every suburb that Ezedi was associated with, asking if they knew him and they either said that they did not, or did not respond.

The comment from Baptists Together comes after an evangelical church leader spoke out on Monday saying that priests must look for “red flags” when baptising asylum seekers because some are faking conversion …

In their statement in response to questions about Ezedi’s conversion, Baptists Together said: “We are fully aware of the questions being asked of our churches surrounding Abdul Shokoor Ezedi and broader queries around supporting asylum seekers.

“One of the most consistent and explicit teachings in the Bible is to ‘welcome the stranger’. In recognition of this, Baptist churches around the UK and across the world have always, and will always, adopt a posture of welcome and compassion to those fleeing war, persecution, famine and the consequences of climate change, irrespective of any intention to convert to Christianity.

“Listening to their stories, their experiences and their needs is a fundamental aspect of this welcome and, on occasion, as relationships develop between churches and refugees and asylum seekers, enquiries will be made to churches about issues of faith and belief.”

The statement was quite long; the article has the rest of it.

A pastor who is not a Baptist and who has taken part in migrant conversions sounded a bit of an alarm bell. I say ‘a bit’, because I have seen him on television news programmes, and he still seems committed to the project, by and large:

Pastor Graham Nicholls, the Director of Affinity, a network of 1,200 evangelical churches and ministries in the UK, said that church leaders “need discernment” to “test whether people are genuine in their beliefs”, adding that in some cases, some prospective converts are “faking it”.

He said “red flags” may consist of large numbers of people presenting as converts, an undue haste from people to receive some credible sign of being a Christian like baptism, a “rather mechanical assent to believing but without any obvious heart change”, and a general sense they might not be genuine.

He acknowledged that “these things are hard to judge” and that “we cannot see into people’s souls”, but added: “There seems to be a problem of asylum seekers claiming to have been converted to Christianity to support their applications.”

On February 9, it emerged that a Baptist minister was working with migrants being housed on the Bibby Stockholm barge, which once was used for oil industry workers. It is now docked at Portland on the south coast.

The Mail reported:

Dave Rees, an elder at Weymouth Baptist Church, defended its decision to carry out a mass conversion of residents of the Bibby Stockholm – with six already baptised and a further 36 to follow.

Speaking to BBC Radio 4 on Sunday, he said his church had a Farsi-speaking minister who knew the asylum seekers’ language and cultural practices.

‘Because we had this link we felt confident that the measures we put in place and the scrutiny we have, there’s no reason we would doubt these asylum seekers,’ Mr Rees said.

He said some of the men claimed they had been Christians in their home countries, while others had completed a 11-week Alpha [Anglican] course, which seeks to introduce possible converts to the basics of the Christian faith. 

‘Obviously, we need to make sure that they believe in Jesus, they believe in the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, they repent of their sins and also they want to start a new life in the church,’ he said.

‘And they have to give a public testimony at their baptism, which they did in a native language and was translated into English.’

On Wednesday, February 7, Conservative MP Tim Loughton raised a question about this to Rishi Sunak at Prime Minister’s Questions:

MPs have raised concerns that migrants from majority Muslim countries are converting to Christianity in order to claim they are at risk of persecution in their home nations due to their religious beliefs. 

Sussex MP Tim Loughton raised the issue in Parliament on Wednesday, asking Prime Minister Rishi Sunak: ‘The Archbishop of Canterbury has admitted that since taking office, the attendance at the Church of England has dropped by 15% and in the 10 years to Covid, the number of baptisms in the Church of England has fallen from 140,000-a-year to 87,000.

‘So Christianity in the UK seems to be on the wane unless apparently, you are from a Muslim country in the middle of an asylum claim. We’re now told one in seven occupants of the Bibby Stockholm have suddenly become practising Christians.

‘Can I ask the Prime Minister that given that the Church of England has now issued secret guidance for clergy supporting asylum applications for these Damascene conversions, who is the church accountable to and are taxpayers being scammed by the Archbishop?’

Mr Sunak replied that Mr Cleverly [Home Secretary James Cleverly] had requested more information on migrants converting to Christianity.

So far, this is what we know:

The Home Office has admitted it has no idea how many asylum seekers have been allowed to stay in the UK after converting to Christianity, as the hunt for Ezedi continues.

It is believed that Afghan sex offender Ezedi persuaded churches to support his claim, and was even given a written testimonial by a Baptist minister as well as additional backing from the Catholic church, sources told the Mail.

The findings of Mr Cleverly’s investigation are set to form part of an internal review that he commissioned following the attack in south London last week.

Home Office sources said that officials in the department have struggled to find data relating to how many asylum seekers have cited their apparent conversion to Christianity.

A source previously told the Mail that a reference from a Baptist chapel in the North East, where Ezedi was living, was crucial in persuading an immigration tribunal that he had converted from Islam to Christianity. This led to him being allowed to stay in Britain on the grounds of human rights.

‘The one that really made a difference was from the Baptist church,’ a government source said. ‘One personal written submission talked of knowing Ezedi for four years, he had been attending church and they thought he was a genuine convert.’

Further backing was provided by the Catholic Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle, the source claimed.

The Home Office has said caseworkers are trained to only grant protection to those in genuine need by assessing claims ‘in the round’ and not taking priests’ testimony as ‘determinative’. 

Archbishop of Canterbury strikes back

The Mail article says that the Archbishop of Canterbury issued a statement following Loughton’s question in Parliament:

Following Prime Minister’s Questions, the Archbishop of Canterbury issued a statement hitting out at the ‘mischaracterisation of the role of churches and faith groups in the asylum system’.

‘It is the job of the government to protect our borders and of the courts to judge asylum cases,’ he said. 

‘The church is called to love, mercy and do justice. 

‘I encourage everyone to avoid irresponsible and inaccurate comments – and let us not forget that at the heart of this conversation are vulnerable people whose lives are precious in the sight of God.’

The Church of England has recently come under fire for allegedly ‘facilitating industrial-scale bogus asylum claims‘, with former Home Secretaries Suella Braverman and Dame Priti Patel accusing church leaders of ‘political activism’. 

Regardless of what the Archbishop of Canterbury says, this is what many Britons are thinking:

Former Anglican vicar tells his story

On Thursday, February 8, The Telegraph‘s Allison Pearson posted a column on a former Anglican vicar who got in touch with her about his experience in Darlington, in the north of England, ‘”I refuse to be complicit in baptism dishonesty” says Free Church of England vicar’.

Firth, 41, left the Church of England in 2020 and now serves as a vicar for the Free Church of England, established in the 19th century.

It should be noted that the Free Church of England is separate from the Church of England. The Free Church of England is part of GAFCON (Global Anglican Future Conference), a group of Anglican churches that have broken away from Canterbury’s spiritual leadership.

The article has a photo of the Revd Matthew Firth wearing a dog collar and a rugby jersey. He seems affable.

He told Pearson his story about the time when he was still a Church of England priest in the Diocese of Durham:

In 2018, when the Reverend Matthew Firth took up his new post at St Cuthbert’s, the church which has been at the heart of the north-eastern market town of Darlington since the 12th century, he was eager to bring new souls to the faith he passionately believes in.

It didn’t take long, however, for Matthew to figure out that there was something suspicious about the large number of souls from the Middle East who were queuing up to be converted to Christianity.

“When I arrived, lots of adult baptisms were already booked in, which was highly unusual. The vast majority, if not all of them, were asylum seekers who had already failed in their initial application for asylum. Clearly, if you were rejected, the next step was to book in for baptism,” Matthew told me on Thursday on the phone from his home in York.

All of the candidates for baptism at St Cuthbert’s were men, mainly from Iran and Syria. The new vicar decided to allow some of the services to go ahead – “I felt I had to honour them, I wasn’t going to just cancel” – but, when they took place, he says the baptisms felt like a kind of performance.

The photographs taken afterwards confirmed his suspicions:

“I got the distinct impression that people were trying to put on a sense of emotion that their baptism had happened. So, when the photos are taken, it looks as though they’re absolutely overwhelmed with emotion. To create a situation where it looks as though this is totally above board and genuine.”

Usually, the relatives of the newly baptised take a few discreet photos. A vast number of pictures were taken at the baptisms of the asylum seekers. To the astonished reverend, it looked like a professional job. “All of a sudden, literally, a couple of hours later, you’d spot on Facebook that all of their Facebook banner pictures and profile pictures have been changed to the baptism photos. All of them, just flooded with baptism photos.

“And, again, it doesn’t take a genius to work out that this is to present a case. It’s to say, ‘Look at my Facebook profile! It’s full of Christian stuff. I’m a genuine Christian.’ But this was literally overhauling a Facebook profile to create a new brand [for themselves].”

The Cambridge astrophysics graduate discovered more while in post at St Cuthbert’s. According to him baptisms were turning into a racket there:

… he had stumbled upon “a conveyor belt, a veritable industry of asylum baptisms”. It was a blatant transaction.

As Matthew recalls, “There was one particular individual who was a Muslim who had gained permission to stay in England. He wasn’t seeking baptism himself, because he’d been granted asylum. And he was always around and he would bring cohorts of these people seeking asylum to the church. It would usually be after the service.

“So, I’d be at the back shaking hands with the regular congregation as they were leaving, and this Muslim guy would bring these people to me and he would immediately say, ‘These want baptism, these want baptism, these want baptism’.”

On occasions, Matthew claims he even saw money changing hands. “I observed things, you know, quietly slipping in the pocket, people slipping him money.”

Good grief. You mean actual physical cash? “Yeah, I saw that happening. Now, it’s obviously never as overt as, ‘Here you go, here’s the money, get me baptised.’ But you see people going away into corners and slipping money to the middleman who is bringing loads of them into the church.”

Then he discovered he was expected to give a written reference of sorts for these newly baptised migrants:

Once the asylum seekers had ticked baptism off their How to Win the Right to Stay in Britain list, approaches were made to Matthew to provide evidence for an immigration tribunal that their conversion to Christianity was genuine.

“I’d immediately get a letter. As soon as those baptisms happened, literally a couple of days later, I hear from their lawyer saying, ‘Right, can you tell me about this person’s faith and church involvement, their evangelistic work and what they do for the church’.”

The lawyers specialised in immigration law and Matthew got the impression that “a lot of it was on legal aid”. Was he under any pressure to provide a more convincing picture of these so-called Christian conversions?

“Yes, absolutely. So, when I sent emails to these lawyers saying all I can tell you is that such and such attends Sunday service, the reply came back, ‘Well, yes, but can you please say that our clients do evangelism? And please can you say that they help the adults around the church? Try to fill out a picture of them being really active Christians’.”

Matthew refused point blank. “Well, no, sorry, I’m not going to say that, because it’s not true. Or I don’t have any evidence of it.”

… he got the firm impression that immigration lawyers expect CofE vicars to be helpful and supportive to their clients …

The reverend put a brake on the asylum/baptism conveyor belt at St Cuthbert’s, although he never denied anyone the chance to be baptised. “What I did say is, ‘Well, great! Come to church for six months.’ And then they all just drifted away, because it’s not genuine.” He points out that a couple of the men who were granted asylum were never seen at church again.

He told Pearson that there were a few ‘progressive activists’ (his words) in his church who were working with refugees and objected to his approach:

He was subject to what he calls “low-level bullying” and interpersonal hostility.

Firth says that these frequent baptisms occur where asylum seekers are being lodged pending their claims’ outcome:

Actually, I’m aware of it going on in many parishes in England, I know of so many examples where it’s happening. It’s in the areas where the Government places people who are seeking asylum.

As for senior clergy, Firth said that whatever boosts baptism figures in a sluggish denomination pleases them:

It’s very encouraging for them to have lots of adult baptisms, he says, “Because it gives a sense that they’re being successful, that the faith or their ministry has been successful in winning converts”.

“It’s very good for their pride. And, of course, it is wonderful when you have lots of people who are adults who have come to faith. But, in their heart of hearts, I think they know that a lot of these people are not genuine.”

He cites Mohammad Eghtedarian, a former curate at Liverpool cathedral who fled Iran as a refugee and was a brave and genuine convert to Christianity. “He said to me that, in his experience at Liverpool cathedral, probably over half of the asylum seekers were not genuine in terms of their baptism requests.”

One of Liverpool cathedral’s asylum-seeker converts was Emad Al Swealmeen, who was taking a bomb in a taxi to a maternity hospital on Remembrance Sunday in 2021 when it detonated, killing him. Al Swealmeen had been refused asylum in 2014 and lost an appeal three years later before going through a Christianity course run for asylum seekers.

However, it was the Abdul Ezedi story that prompted Firth to contact Pearson:

That, and the disingenuous response from the Archbishop of Canterbury, which infuriates him. “I think the church is allowing itself to be used by people who do not have pure motives, in fact, people who have pretty terrible motives.

“It’s not a direct thing, but it’s a sense of naivety; turning a blind eye. Vicars are acting in a way that increases the likelihood of many people who don’t have strong claims actually getting over the line. And a certain proportion of those people will be here with a background of criminality. So while it’s not direct wrongdoing from the church, there is complicity, which is not right. You know, it’s simply not right.

“I’m not saying that all clergy that conduct these baptisms are doing that, but there is a significant element. And when Justin Welby says it’s not the church’s responsibility to judge asylum applications, that’s the Home Office, that’s not being truthful.”

Firth was also unhappy about Welby’s criticism of people who say the conversions should be conducted with more discernment:

It is insulting. There are a lot of Christians who are discerning and wise, and they can see what’s happening. And they are concerned about our culture and our society and the impact of huge, huge levels of illegal immigration on those things. They are rightly concerned about that.

And for Justin Welby to sort of tar them all with this brush of being unwelcoming and uncaring and so on is frankly unacceptable. He’s suggesting the clergy shouldn’t be discerning. Well, we should; we have to administer the baptism in a discerning way.

Pearson and Firth then discussed Church of England policies in general:

I mention a document called “Supporting Asylum Seekers – Guidance for Church of England Clergy”, which teaches vicars how to assist asylum seekers.

“Of course, again, they’ve been clever there. They’ll just say clergy are facing these situations and all we’re doing is producing a document to support those who asked us for advice. But there is an ideological support for the culture of mass immigration that we’re seeing.”

Matthew compares the situation with the Civil Service, where there is resistance to enacting Conservative policies like the Rwanda plan. “Actually, there’s an equivalent civil service at Church House, Westminster, which is producing all of this guidance.”

Firth then gave his views on asylum, excerpted below:

He speaks eloquently about the need to be hospitable to people who genuinely need asylum. “But I liken national hospitality to the home. You could welcome people into your home and show the sacrificial hospitality and that’s fine. But if the hospitality that you’re showing fundamentally undermines the functioning of the household, then actually we’re not called to that in the Church …

“So if people are receiving our national hospitality and then they commit crimes, or they go on huge marches or do something that undermines the values that our particular national home espouses, then the equivalent is somebody being welcomed into your private home and messing up the house. Or damaging our national home. And if that hospitality is being abused in various ways, then you have to look again and say, No, no, we can’t do this.”

As for the mass migration we are currently seeing, legal and illegal:

He adds: “Also, there’s a cultural aspect, when you have very large population movements in a short space of time which we have had since 1997, then that does undermine the culture of the host nation.”

Matthew asks me if that makes sense. It really does. In a bitter irony, the Church of England may hasten its own demise by carrying out hundreds, possibly thousands of fake baptisms of men who remain devout Muslims.

He laughs. “I don’t think the Church of England has really thought that through. The House of Bishops and the vast majority of clergy in the Church of England are aligned with Left-wing politics. And they are very comfortable with what we’re seeing in terms of the levels of immigration. And they would regard somebody like me as being Right-wing and unkind.

“But actually, all I’m doing is just not misusing a sacrament. And also choosing not to be complicit in dishonesty. And also choosing not to be undermining of culture that happens with mass immigration, you know, I think I care about the people who are already here, you know, as well as people who may be genuine asylum seekers” …

“I am going on the record here because there’s a national untruth being told,” he says. “The churches say, ‘There are no faults. No, we’re just trying to welcome people. Nothing to see here.’ Well, there is something to see here. And Justin Welby, I think he’s been untruthful in the way he’s presented things. ‘Our vicars are just getting on with being welcoming,’ he says.

“But, actually, the story is one of being used by bad men like Abdul Ezedi who hurt innocent people. The Church of England needs to be exposed for its shameful part in all this.”

That day, The Telegraph posted a rapid follow-up article, which Allison Pearson co-authored with Charles Hymas, ‘Church of England has become “conveyor belt for asylum seeker fake conversions”‘, in which the Diocese of Durham took exception to Firth’s criticisms. The diocese said he had not told them anything about his experience with regard to baptisms:

Mr Firth – a self-avowed traditional evangelical Christian – said the asylum seekers “drifted away” after he introduced the six month rule but alleged he was “cold shouldered” by the senior clergy, which culminated in his departure from his post and decision to join the Free Church of England …

A spokesman for the Diocese of Durham said: “We do not recognise the picture these allegations present and have not seen any evidence of such claims.

“Mr Firth no longer ministers in the Church of England, however at no point during his time in office did he raise any of these claims as a concern or an issue. Had he done so, we would have looked into the matter. We would query whether he has ever raised his concerns with the authorities.”

Regardless, I saw Allison Pearson on Patrick Christys Tonight (GB News) either that night or the next and she had nothing bad to say about the Revd Mr Firth.

On February 9, Telegraph readers had their say in ‘It’s not for the Church to act as immigration officials’, excerpted below, with each paragraph representing a different reader’s opinion:

It’s not called religious conversion, it’s called playing the system. You can’t blame them for trying. We can however blame the fools who are naive enough to let them.

Islam forbids Muslims from leaving their faith. Apostasy can mean a death sentence so it is very rare that they convert to another religion. This is just another ruse to remain in the country.

Surely churches have a duty of care to their own community which overrides specious asylum contrivances? Or so I would hope.

The Church should not be converting asylum seekers to Christianity until they are granted the right to stay here. This is all a scam promoted by immigration lawyers and asylum charities.

The reasoning behind the granting of asylum has been inverted and the safety of British citizens is of no account, it is only the welfare of fit, healthy, young men that pay £3,000 to cross illegally from a perfectly safe country that we should consider?

On Saturday, February 10, The Guardian had an article about the Diocese of Durham’s response to Firth’s comments in The Telegraph, ‘C of E refutes claims of “conveyor belt” of asylum seeker fake conversions’:

The Church of England has refuted a claim that it operated a “conveyor belt for asylum seeker fake conversions”, saying parish records disproved the eye-catching allegation …

Lee Anderson, the former Conservative party [deputy] chairman, said: “The Church of England is in my opinion encouraging people to lie about their faith in order to claim asylum.”

On Thursday, a former C of E priest claimed the church was complicit in a “conveyor belt and veritable industry of asylum baptisms”. Matthew Firth, who was a priest in the north of England, told the Telegraph that about 20 asylum seekers had sought baptisms at his church to support their applications, and he believed there were “probably” thousands of asylum baptisms in the C of E.

Paul Butler, the bishop of Durham, has said Firth’s claims were “imaginative” and “some distance from reality”.

In a statement, Butler said: “Mr Firth does not offer any evidence to support these claims, however a check of the parish records quickly reveals … a total of 15 people (13 adults, 2 infants) who may have been asylum seekers have been baptised over the past 10 years. Of these, seven were baptised by Mr Firth himself.

“As priest in charge, he will have been aware of his responsibility to check the authenticity of candidates. If there was any sign of anything amiss, Mr Firth should have reported this. Had he raised any concerns at any point with senior staff … they would of course have been taken seriously and investigated. He did not do so.”

I find the bishop’s baptism number from St Cuthbert’s interesting, unless Firth managed to stop the bogus baptisms quickly.

Misplaced concern: the wrong people are being accommodated

That day, the former Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey — Lord Carey — sided with Britons in his opinion piece for The Telegraph, ‘The Church must not turn a blind eye to the impact of mass migration on Britain’:

… the Church of England’s opposition to the Rwanda legislation for example has disturbed me by its ferocity and intensity. The Rwanda plan has been denounced from pulpits up and down the land. And in my increasingly long memory, I have never known the Peers Spiritual – the 26 bishops who sit by right in the House of Lords – lay down such an array of detailed amendments.

My disagreement with the Archbishop and bishops in the House, therefore, is not with their compassion and Christian care for others, but their blindness to what migration is doing to our country – our culture, our infrastructure and our common life.

We have been here before and we have failed to do anything about it. In 2010, I joined Parliamentarians including former Speaker, the late Baroness Boothroyd, and the great Labour MP, Frank Field, in signing the Balanced Migration Group’s Declaration. This called on the major parties to make manifesto pledges to prevent the UK’s population reaching 70 million in under 20 years, as it was forecast to at the time.

How wrong we were. Not, as it turns out, in making the declaration, but in trusting official projections. According to the Office for National Statistics, we will reach that 70 million figure at least four years early. By mid-2036, we are now projected to grow to 73.7 million.

So my concern and attention is also for those affected by a severe lack of housing and services, a situation which is reaching breaking point in poorer areas. The elites are well-protected, but Britain’s poorest have a different experience. An experiment in mass immigration has been foisted upon them without their consent, changing their lives and their communities.

I’ve been surprised therefore by the thin-skinned nature of the church’s response in this latest controversy. When you raise your head above the parapet you must expect to be criticised. I know I will be over this article. But the Church hierarchy seems to be denying that there is a problem at all, or anything questionable about its own actions and statements.

One result of this is that churches stand accused of boosting the credentials of asylum seekers and gullibly accepting insincere conversions. This is not in fact so, because it is the Home Office and the judiciary’s job to apply the asylum rules – not the Church.

But the Church of England’s guidance gives information to clergy on how to “mount a personal campaign” if an application is refused. It does not give much advice on how to discern whether these conversions are authentic, long-standing and life-changing. While it is true that most clergy are experienced enough to deal with these sorts of pastoral situations, the Church should do more to insist that baptism preparation is rigorous.

The truly depressing thing about this is that Christian converts in some countries are among the most persecuted minorities in the world. Genuine converts in countries where a considerable risk is taken by “apostasising” find themselves undermined by a handful of false cases where people are gaming the system.

In recent years, church leaders have been slow to come forward to join me in making representations to the Home Office and the UNHCR, to ensure that flows of refugees from Syria and Afghanistan have included persecuted Christians. I am Patron of Barnabas Aid, a charity founded in the UK, which has supported hundreds of persecuted Syrian and Afghan Christians in gaining asylum in countries like Australia and Brazil. But the UK government has never accepted a single one of these most persecuted Christian converts living in daily fear in hostile environments …

… Our politicians and church leaders should do much more to listen to the voices of those struggling communities which feel alienated and marginalised by unprecedented rates of immigration.

And those seeking asylum should only be given that honour on the strict understanding that they must leave behind the political and moral structures of their former societies that are incompatible with the open, democratic values of their new homes.

Well said!!

On Monday, February 12, Christian Today had an article about the Bishop of Chelmsford Guli Francis-Dehqani’s appearance on the BBC Sunday Programme. Francis-Dehqani is an Iranian refugee herself and has been vociferous in the House of Lords on the Safety of Rwanda Bill, which was still being debated there yesterday, the 14th. Debates will continue when the Lords reconvene.

Christian Today stated:

Bishop Guli Francis-Dehqani appeared on the BBC Sunday Programme to discuss claims that the Church of England has been complicit in asylum seekers gaming the system with fake conversions.

She said that “inevitably” there would be “a small number of cases” of people trying to “scam us”, but that preparation for baptism was “very rigorous” and that some people even abandon it because it takes too long.

“We take seriously our responsibilities, but we also know that as Christians, our primary responsibility is one of welcome and hospitality and support and teaching, but we need to do that in a way that is that is wise and, and is aware that occasionally there are people who might try and scam us,” she said.

The bishop, who came to Britain as a refugee from Iran, said she was open to a review of the Church of England’s current guidance for vicars around conversion, but added that there could never be complete certainty.

“It’s very difficult to look into the hearts of people ever and be 100 per cent. And that goes for whether that person is from Britain or an immigrant from elsewhere,” she said …

Later in the discussion she said that the onus was on clergy to “be as confident as they possibly can be” that a candidate for baptism is sincere and understands what it means.

“Preparation is in most cases very rigorous and that’s right and proper. I think, God forbid, you do take that seriously regardless of where people are coming from. It’s just that in the end, it’s impossible to prove 100 per cent,” she said.

… she said it was “wrong” that attention was being focused on “a very small number” of alleged abuses because “it’s diverting attention away from the systemic problems, which is that we have an immigration system that’s overwhelmed and inefficient”.

Seriously, I do not think that preparation for baptism in the Church of England is ‘in most cases very rigorous’. I don’t believe that for one second. It probably is in my church, but seeing how woke our clergy are, it probably isn’t elsewhere.

You can read more about Dr Guli Francis-Dehqani’s views in her Telegraph article of February 5.

Bogus conversions are key in avoiding deportation

The biggest showstopper came on Monday, February 12, with The Times‘s article, ‘Revealed: How judges let criminals use Christianity to escape deportation’:

Murderers, sex offenders and drug dealers are among migrants who have escaped deportation by claiming they have converted to Christianity, The Times has found …

In one case, a Bangladeshi man who had served 12 years in prison for murdering his wife successfully appealed against the Home Office’s attempts to deport him, saying he was a Christian convert and that he would be at risk in his predominantly Muslim community in Bangladesh.

A judge allowed him to stay in the UK based on rights enshrined in Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which prevents removal where there are substantial grounds for believing that an individual would face serious harm from torture or from inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment …

The findings come from a Times analysis of asylum judgments that lays bare the scale of the abuse of Britain’s immigration system by foreign criminals who claim they are Christian converts to escape deportation …

Analysis suggests that Iranians have been the most successful in avoiding deportation. In several cases, a claimant’s deportation was blocked even when the judge hearing their appeal concluded that their conversion was not genuine. Judges said that even the “perception” of being a Christian could result in lashes in Iran.

One case involved an Iranian who had been sentenced to 18 months in prison for assault in the UK and was scheduled for deportation by the Home Office. The man appealed and a judge ruled that he could not be deported, despite concluding that he was “not a Christian convert”, because he had covered his arms in tattoos “dominated by Christian imagery” and the Iranian authorities would believe he had converted.

In another case an Iranian man convicted of sexual assault and sentenced to seven and a half years in jail successfully appealed against deportation on the grounds that he had converted. He said that he had a tattoo of a cross, and would therefore be at risk in Iran. An Upper Tribunal judge ordered that his case be reheard after a Home Office appeal.

Appeals heard in the Upper Tribunal can add to an already severe backlog in the asylum system:

The Times has analysed thousands of Upper Tribunal cases heard since 2018 …

While many fail to convince judges that their conversion is genuine or that it would result in persecution, their appeals often delay their deportation by several months and in some cases years. They have also added to the long backlog of immigration cases, costing the taxpayer large sums in accommodation costs.

The Upper Tribunal covers only a fraction of the total number of asylum hearings and is the only stage at which judgments are published. Most individuals are granted anonymity.

Before reaching the Upper Tribunal court, cases are first heard by Home Office caseworkers and refusals can be appealed to the First-Tier Tribunal.

Since January 2023 there have been 28 cases heard at the Upper Tribunal in which a claimant cited conversion to Christianity as a reason to be granted asylum, about 1 per cent of cases heard in the period. Of those, seven appeals were approved, 13 dismissed and the judge ordered a new hearing in eight cases.

Five of the seven migrants granted the right to stay had been convicted of serious criminal offences.

Some judges are discerning, such as the one in this case:

One case involved a Pakistani man who arrived as a student but overstayed his visa and claimed asylum, claiming that his evangelical preaching in the UK would put him in danger because he would either engage in activities that would put him at risk or would have to refrain from doing so to avoid the risk.

The judge noted that a reverend had vouched for the man’s Christianity in oral evidence, despite the asylum seeker never attending his church. All the man did to evidence his newly found evangelism was to “hand out leaflets outside Tooting Tube station” with the reverend.

The judge also said that the man only discovered his evangelical calling after his first asylum claim was refused.

Now we come to comic relief as asylum seekers explain their understanding of Christianity:

There were several cases involving migrants claiming to have converted to Christianity who failed to answer the most basic questions about their apparent faith.

An Iranian woman claimed asylum on arrival at an airport in 2020, saying that she had converted to Christianity from Islam. Being returned to Iran would breach her rights under the ECHR because she would not be able to practise her faith, she claimed.

But the judge in her case concluded she was not a genuine Christian and believed she may have duped a church into granting her a baptism certificate. She failed a series of simple questions about Christianity, saying for example that Lent, which precedes Easter, was a “celebration four weeks before Christmas when you light a candle”.

An Iranian man who was sentenced to four years in jail for drug and driving offences and resisting arrest managed to get his deportation order overturned despite referring to “Black Friday” rather than “Good Friday” and getting the denomination of his church wrong.

One asylum seeker admitted that he attended a synagogue for more than a month without realising that he was not in a Christian church.

One tribunal judge doubted that a claimant was “attracted to Christianity because it fulfilled a deep spiritual need”, given that they had told the court that “being a Christian is freedom and you can drink alcohol and be with girls”.

Another asylum seeker was unable to tell an interviewing officer the story of Easter, said incorrectly that Jesus had ten disciples, and was unable to say what day Christmas fell on.

Churches reconsider rules

The Times says that, in light of recent revelations about bogus conversions, the Baptists and the Anglicans are reconsidering their guidance:

The Times can reveal that Baptist ministers will be told that they must “exercise wisdom before considering supporting asylum claims”, in an update to guidance on converting migrants to Christianity.

Steve Tinning, who works for the public issues team of the Baptist Union of Great Britain, said it did have some guidance for ministers in giving evidence in asylum cases, but that this dated to 2018.

“The landscape has changed somewhat and so it is being reviewed this week,” he said at an event on Thursday. “I also agree that we can never be 100 per cent certain of the authenticity of any conversion.”

At the same event, a Church of England bishop said for the first time that the church was willing to review its guidance for priests to see “if it can be enhanced” to guide clergy on dealing with asylum seekers who wish to be baptised.

Even the Bishop of Chelmsford has now admitted that the CofE should look at the matter again:

The bishop of Chelmsford, the Right Rev Guli Francis-Dehqani, who was born in Iran, said: “I don’t see why there would be any reason why we couldn’t look at that guidance again to see if it needs updating and refreshing, if it can be enhanced in any way. I think there would be openness to that.”

Conclusion

More work, rather than platitudes, needs do be done.

I hadn’t realised that so many of these claimants come from Iran. There must be an informal instruction there to claim asylum and go through a baptism while waiting to be processed.

St Paul must be rolling in his grave. He would not have approved of this at all.

Post Office Horizon scandal and politicians: spotlight on Lib Dem leader Sir Ed Davey

In my continuing series on the Post Office Horizon scandal (see here, here, here and here), I have been writing about UK government IT companies that have been too big to fail since the mid-1960s.

These began with ICL, envisaged to become a rival to IBM (hah!), which Fujitsu later bought. ICL Pathway evolved into Fujitsu UK’s Horizon software system in use at the Post Office. Hundreds of postmasters and postmistresses in the UK found themselves turned into criminals for shortfalls that can only be blamed on faulty software.

On Wednesday, January 10, 2024, Ian Hislop, the long-time editor of Private Eye magazine, appeared on Robert Peston’s ITV current affairs programme to discuss the scandal. Private Eye was one of the earliest publications to do a deep dive into what was happening. They began reporting on it regularly beginning in 2011, although it seemed much earlier. Computer Weekly began its reporting on the scandal in 2009.

In the introduction to the segment with Hislop, Anushka Asthana recaps the Horizon timeline, which began in 1999, when Tony Blair was Prime Minister. She says that Labour MP Harriet Harman, now Mother of the House of Commons for her lengthy tenure as MP, pointed out at the time that Horizon had serious flaws. Peston’s interview with Hislop follows. Hislop says that a lot of people have questions to answer. The two segments are just over five minutes long in total:

Anushka Asthana says that there were 17 Post Office ministers in place and 16 different trade ministers as the Horizon scandal unfolded. Strangely, Harriet Harman has stayed quiet on the issue. Her input would be invaluable.

Yet, little was done until 2019 when Conservative ministers began looking at it more closely. Their work continues today, although not to the satisfaction of everyone involved. In any event, an inquiry into the scandal continues.

Fujitsu UK’s former head is MP’s husband

Before I get to the Lib Dem leader Sir Ed Davey, here is a Conservative MP with a tie to Fujitsu UK.

Gillian Keegan, our current Education Secretary, is married to Michael Keegan, whom the Mail said, on January 4, headed the IT company at the height of the scandal (purple emphases mine):

Michael Keegan was the UK Chief Executive and Chairman of Fujitsu, the firm behind the botched computer system that caused the entire problem, when the cover-up was at its height.

A 2014 press release announcing his appointment hailed his 30 years of experience in the IT sector, telling readers that prior to joining the Japanese tech giant he’d held ‘senior roles at the Royal Mail Group/Post Office Limited’.

Times change, however, and these days Keegan, who is the husband of Rishi Sunak’s education secretary Gillian Keegan, runs a mile from any suggestion that he might bear any responsibility for the sub-postmaster scandal.

To that end, he’s publicly stressed that, during his time as CEO, he only made one decision related to Horizon, and that was to cancel a tender to provide a new version of the system to the Post Office.

Furthermore, Keegan has insisted he only ever had one conversation with Vennells, at which the affair was not discussed.

The ongoing inquiry into the scandal will tell us more about the role Fujitsu had to play and the culpability of its various executives. However, the Government has certainly taken Keegan at his word: in 2018, he was made a ‘Crown representative’ of the Cabinet Office, working primarily with the Ministry of Defence.

He also sits on the advisory board of the Prince’s Trust and is a non-executive director of an IT firm called Centerprise, which in May won a £1 million contract linked (controversially, given his wife’s job) to the schools rebuilding programme.

Amazing — and not in a good way.

The Mail is correct in saying that Michael Keegan is staying silent about this. Even his late father’s Wikipedia entry states:

In 2017 his son’s wife Gillian Keegan was elected Conservative MP for Chichester.^[13]

Gillian Keegan’s entry gives us his name at least, but notice how his Cabinet Office appointment overshadows his time at Fujitsu:

Michael Keegan is a former Head of Fujitsu UK and Ireland, appointed in 2014. He later had a role as a crown representative to the Cabinet Office, managing cross-government relationships with BAE Systems as a strategic supplier to the Government.^[41][42]

Sir Ed Davey

January’s big splashes about the scandal involved Sir Ed Davey, the current leader of the Liberal Democrats.

The Mail article says:

Sir Ed Davey’s journey to the leadership of Britain’s third party began in 2010, when he was appointed Minister for Postal Affairs in the coalition government. 

In May that year, a letter landed on his desk from Alan Bates, the wrongly-convicted postmaster at the centre of ITV’s new TV series.

‘Many people have been sent to prison, lost businesses and homes and faced financial ruin by an organisation that will stop at nothing to keep the true facts behind its failing IT system from being exposed,’ it read. ‘In writing to you on behalf of the group, I am asking for a meeting where we can present our case to you.’

Davey wrote back, primly informing Bates that this staggering miscarriage of justice was ‘an operational and contractual matter’ for the Post Office. The future Lib Dem leader concluded: ‘I do not believe a meeting would serve any useful purpose.’

Fast forward to 2017 and Bates led a group litigation against the Post Office. It responded by hiring attack-dog lawyers from City firm Herbert Smith Freehills to fight its corner. At this point, Davey makes a second ugly appearance in the scandal. For in June that year, he agreed to be taken on by Herbert Smith Freehills as a ‘consultant on political issues and policy analysis’, earning £5,000 a month, for six hours’ work — £833 an hour.

While Sir Ed never worked on the Horizon case, he continued to be paid by the law firm throughout the ill-fated proceedings, only relinquishing the role in 2022.

Asked about the affair this week, Davey said he regrets not doing more but claimed to have been ‘deeply misled’ by Post Office executives.

Here is the letter that Davey sent to Alan Bates:

Another Mail article that appeared on January 4, after ITV’s docudrama Mr Bates versus The Post Office ended, says that Conservative MPs and a Conservative peer dispute Davey’s explanation of events:

Lib Dem leader Ed Davey has been accused of ‘airbrushing’ his involvement in the fallout from the Post Office IT scandal …

… yesterday Tory MP Paul Scully, who had ministerial responsibility for postal affairs from 2020 to 2022, accused Sir Ed of failing to challenge the officials. He said: ‘He’s now airbrushing that he didn’t ask questions at the time. It doesn’t feel like he was asking robust enough questions.

‘He is trying to palm it off as something that happened ten years ago. He’s not a bit-part player in this.’

Former trade minister Sir John Redwood said Sir Ed was among those who ‘let subpostmasters down’. 

He added: ‘I just couldn’t believe that at the same time a new computer system came into use, post workers suddenly decided to all go rogue… and I and others told them to investigate. And where was Davey in all of this? Unfortunately, he just kept quiet.

‘Ministers are given information all the time, and they don’t have to accept it. But he did. He embarrassed himself, because he didn’t pursue it.’

The Horizon scandal saw more than 700 subpostmasters prosecuted between 1999 and 2015 for theft, fraud and false accounting after the faulty software made it appear that money had gone missing from their branches.

Some went to prison, while others lost their homes and life savings trying to repay the ‘lost’ money. At least four are believed to have taken their own lives …

Conservative peer Lord Arbuthnot, who led calls for a judge-led inquiry into Horizon, said: ‘The line Ed Davey took in 2010 in writing to Alan Bates was the same as the line the previous Government had taken in writing to me in 2009.

‘In my view it was quite wrong, because the Government owned the Post Office and had all the responsibilities of ownership.

‘That included the duty to ensure that its organisation, the Post Office, behaved in an ethical way.’

A Lib Dem spokesman said: ‘It’s disappointing to see Conservative MPs choosing to turn this issue into a political football instead of focusing on getting justice and compensation for the victims.’

Past history

My many bookmarks on Ed Davey are revealing.

For those unfamiliar with him, he is one of the House of Commons’ biggest moralists and finger-pointers.

Party leadership contest

Beginning with Guido Fawkes’s posts from 2020, we discover that, even though the Lib Dems’ official line was to oppose Chinese involvement in British technology, Davey seems to have taken a contribution from Huawei to further his party leadership campaign after the previous leader, Jo Swinson, lost her seat so spectacularly in December 2019’s general election. At this point, Davey was the Party’s Acting Leader.

Guido posted the following on July 8, 2020 with a screen grab of supporting documentation (red emphases his):

Since Guido’s Monday story on Ed Davey’s LibDem leadership fundraising hypocrisy, tens of thousands more leadership funds have been added to his register of members interests. One donation of £5,000 caught Guido’s eye – from Sir Michael Rake, who was appointed to the board of Huawei UK in April, and who’s served as an adviser to the Chinese-based company since January 2019.

The LibDems have long been an anti-Huawei party, with Daisy Cooper MP – who recently made the surprise announcement of backing Davey for leader – saying the Government’s decision to allow Huawei control over parts of the UK’s 5G network shows the Tories have “little regard for Huawei’s human rights record.” Huawei’s advisers don’t splash the cash because of their support for liberal democracy….

Two days later on July 10, he got a bit over-excited about winning the leadership contest:

He claimed that nearly 60% of members were backing him to be leader, actually that was the percentage of the nominations he got. Voting has yet to begin and his tweet was deleted minutes later. Is that nominations tally even that much of a strong performance?

On July 16, he had to apologise to talkRADIO’s Julia Hartley-Brewer after he accused her of being on the Downing Street payroll. (Whaaat?) Guido has the accompanying evidence — a tweet and a video:

Sir Ed Davey has privately apologised to Julia Hartley-Brewer after accusing her of being on the No. 10 payroll during a feisty TalkRadio interview this morning. Watch the bust-up above…

Julia now has informed her followers that following the shouting match over whether NHS England should take responsibility for some of the mistakes made throughout the pandemic, or whether No. 10 should ultimately be accountable, Sir Ed has privately texted her to apologise for the accusation.

On August 6, he was found guilty of a second data breach in his campaigning among Party members:

The LibDem returning officer has once again found Ed Davey’s campaign to have broken data rules in his run to become LibDem leader. Just a fortnight after the last…

This time, Ed’s campaign has been found guilty of instructing “canvassers not to disclose the identity of the campaign they were actually calling on behalf” of. The returning officer, after taking representations from the campaign, found that in doing so they “acted in a way that was likely to mislead members.” He has been forced to delete the data collected from those calls. To be caught out once may be regarded as a misfortune, twice looks like carelessness…

On August 27, Ed Davey won the leadership contest.

However, strangely enough, just a few days later on September 6, he was unable to offer any clear Lib Dem policies. On September 8, he could not say whether his party wanted to rejoin the EU.

2021: Earn, baby, earn

In August 2021, Davey did an about-face on the Lib Dems’ stance on Afghanistan.

On August 18, he reacted in the Commons to Joe Biden’s and the UK’s subsequent withdrawal from the country:

Ed Davey’s LibDems have been going in hard on Afghanistan, both calling for a greater number of refugees to be allowed into the UK and strongly condemning the US & UK military withdrawal, saying “our leaders should all hang their heads in shame” …

In the Commons this morning, Davey slammed the “frightening failure to achieve the aim of this whole mission, the aim of keeping British people safe from international terrorists trained in Taliban Afghanistan.” How times change…

Back at the LibDems’ 2009 conference, their future leader was instead calling for “tea with the Taliban”, and for Taliban fighters to be offered “a decent daily wage” to get them to defect. Now he criticises the withdrawal of troops …

But the real story for that year was how much he made from work outside of Parliament. He was raking it in.

On November 8, Guido told us that Davey made far more from work outside the Commons than the SNP’s then-Westminster leader Ian Blackford (£38,967) and Labour’s Sir Keir Starmer (£25,934.18):

All the recent publicity means you may be in the market to hire a politician for yourself. Don’t mess about with backbenchers, go to the top and rent a party leader by the hour. Guido has gone into the declarations of the leaders of the parties who are going to spend the afternoon attacking Tory sleaze. All are available to rent by the hour at competitive rates:

• • The biggest earning leader is the LibDem’s Ed Davey, who makes £78,000-a-year for 120 hours work from his side hustles …

And yet, all three chose to attack a then-Conservative MP, eventually turfed out for ‘sleaze’, for pursuing outside work:

Worth reflecting on how much they make from their own side hustles when they attack Owen Paterson later this afternoon…

Oh, the hypocrisy.

On November 29, Guido reported that Davey himself was investigated for his whopping £78,000 in extra earnings:

It now transpires Parliament’s Standards Commissioner is taking a second look at Davey’s earnings. It’s been spotted that last week he became the first MP since the sleaze scandal broke to be placed under investigation by Kathryn Stone for “Registration and declaration of an interest under the Guide to the Rules” …

2022: more hypocrisy

Chinese donations came back to haunt Davey on January 13, 2022:

The spy scandal enveloping Westminster this afternoon has already forced Barry Gardiner [Labour] and Alan Mak [Conservative] to put water between them and accused CCP informant Christine Lee. Guido, however, can reveal a further connection: LibDem leader Ed Davey. According to Sir Ed’s register of interests his local branch accepted a £5,000 donation from Lee in November 2013.

Putting the donation to Ed Davey, a spokesman told Guido the leader is shocked by the revelations, although today’s email from Mr Speaker was the “first time he has been given cause to be concerned about a donation to his local party association received in 2013” …

Coincidentally, in 2013 he was Secretary of State for Energy, in which role he went off to China to usher in their investment in Sizewell C; something subsequent governments have been trying to unwind. It’s not Ed’s only questionable Chinese-linked donation. As Guido revealed in 2020, he also pocketed £5,000 from Huawei’s chief advisor…

On January 19, then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson had a humorous go at Davey from the despatch box, in Mandarin no less:

That summer, on July 18, by which time Boris had recently resigned, more of Davey’s hypocrisy came to light from his time as Energy Minister during the Coalition years, this time on fracking:

Amongst the trials and tribulations of the Tory leadership contest, the minor parties have had to do more to reclaim some share of the media spotlight. It is in this context that the Liberal Democrats have tried to weigh in, with Ed Davey calling on all candidates to support a fracking ban. This looks like an attempt to stick up for the faux environmentalism of home county NIMBYs…

What Ed Davey has failed to mention in making his newly articulated tree-hugging pitch to Surrey SUV drivers is his own past enthusiasm for the very thing he’s opposing. While serving as Energy Secretary, the LibDem leader was amongst the biggest advocates of the fracking industry. Speaking in 2012 as a member of the coalition government, Ed proclaimed “There is an awful lot of nonsense talked about fracking… I love shale gas”. He also voted against plans to ban fracking. Clearly Davey is desperate to disavow his legacy in government to appease the climate critics, even if it means opposing measures to bring down fuel prices. It’s not exactly the first time the Liberal Democrats have switched positions when they think it suits them…

2023: even more hypocrisy

On March 27, 2023, the Lib Dems attempted to portray themselves as transparent via Davey’s tax returns. Guido has the report but remains unconvinced:

In the interest of “tax transparency“, LibDem Leader Ed Davey has quietly published a one-page summary of his tax returns for the past two years. Not that you’d know it: there’s been zero coverage and no mention on Davey’s – or the LibDems’ – social media profiles. The “tax transparency” page is currently impossible to find anywhere on the website, including “latest news”, unless you have the direct link…

The “summary” shows he paid £18,043 in income tax in 2020-21, and £18,011 in 2021-22, with employment earnings of just under £77,000 for both years …

This however doesn’t include any of the income paid to his personal services company, which according to his register of interests page, amounted to £78,000 a year for Davey’s work as an adviser to law firm and energy company between July 2017 and February 2022. That company, Energy Destinations Limited, filed for voluntary liquidation in June 2022 with £65,000 cash in the bank and total assets of £110,019. It also paid £20,000 in dividends in 2021, and £47,000 the year prior.

The dividends also appear to have been paid in a tax efficient way to his wife, E J Davey, who’s the sole director and secretary, and not to be confused with Sir E J Davey. Not that you’d know any of this from Davey’s “summary” today. Nonetheless, the LibDems told Guido “Transparency is really important and that is why Ed wanted to make his tax return public on our website”…

On July 14, Guido had a round-up of the freebies that MPs from all parties received, including Davey:

It’s festival season and our elected officials aren’t letting their parliamentary duties stop them from making the most of it. According to the latest register of interests, seven Labour MPs, including two Shadow Cabinet members, registered expenses-paid trips to Glastonbury – to the tune of £13,500 … Ed Davey also had a good month, in addition to getting two all-inclusive Glasto tickets worth £2,462, he also registered £36,500 in donations. Will that be made out to his personal services company?

At the Lib Dems’ conference that autumn, Davey thought he could be amusing by using the ‘c’ word against Conservatives. On September 26, Guido posted the offending video and this commentary:

Ed Davey has kicked off his conference speech with some kind of torturous stand-up routine. He tried warming up the crowd with an apology to the “clowning community“… and suggested he “used the wrong C word” when describing the Tories.

However, it seems that Guido missed this splash headline in the Mail on September 30 for an Andrew Pierce article, ‘How Lib Dem leader — and ex-Post Office minister — Ed Davey trousered £275,000 working for the legal firm that fought hundreds of innocent sub-postmasters accused of fraud’:

Will the Post Office Horizon scandal bring down Sir Ed Davey?

January 2024 must have hit Sir Ed Davey hard.

On January 7, The Times gave Alan Bates’s reaction to the dismissive letter he received from Davey in 2010, ‘How Ed Davey and ministers shrugged off warnings about Post Office scandal’:

In May 2010, hours after being appointed postal affairs minister, Ed Davey received a plea for help from Alan Bates. It was to be the first of many. Bates was a former sub-postmaster whose contract was terminated by the Post Office after he began asking too many questions about its flawed Horizon IT system …

He had been trying to raise concerns with the Labour government unsuccessfully until, in November 2009, he joined together with other victims to form the Justice For Sub-postmasters Alliance (JFSA) to prove their innocence.

When the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition was formed six months later, Bates hoped it would herald a change of approach and wasted no time in seeking a meeting with Davey, the minister for employment relations, consumer and postal affairs.

But the Lib Dem minister’s 121-word response, stating that a meeting would not serve “any useful purpose”, was to Bates not just “disappointing” but “offensive”.

It is part of a cache of correspondence he has passed to The Sunday Times, much of which has never been published before and which reveals his deep frustration with ministers from three successive administrations between 2010 and 2019.

Crucially, it sheds new light on the five years of the coalition — the pivotal period in which the Post Office attempted to cover up the biggest miscarriage of justice in British history — during which Davey and his fellow Lib Dem ministers Sir Vince Cable and Jo Swinson ran the business department, responsible for the Post Office’s oversight.

Davey would have been well placed to help, both professionally and politically. Computer Weekly published its first report during the tail end of the Labour government under Gordon Brown:

When Davey was appointed in 2010, he appeared to have the requisite experience; he previously spent four years working for Omega Partners, a consultancy, where he specialised in the postal services sector …

There had also been a number of high-profile prosecutions of sub-postmasters. On May 11, 2009, the magazine Computer Weekly published the first major piece on the scandal, revealing the plight of seven sub-postmasters — Bates included — and raising concerns about Horizon.

Although Bates found Davey’s initial reply offensive, he did not give up:

Taken aback, Bates wrote again to Davey on July 8, 2010, noting that his response to the “very serious issues I had raised was not only disappointing but I actually found your comments offensive”. While there were “new politicians in post”, Bates said that Davey’s letter was “little different to the one” sent by Stephen Timms, the former Labour minister with responsibility for postal affairs, “seven years ago” …

Urging Davey not to simply listen to “your civil servants” and to accept without question the Post Office’s claims that “Horizon is wonderful, that there has never been a problem”, he added: “You can meet with us and hear the real truth behind Horizon.”

Davey did meet with Bates a few months later, and the former postmaster sent a follow-up letter:

In a follow-up letter sent on October 14, 2010, Bates sought to elaborate on a number of issues they had discussed, including how clauses in the employment contracts of sub-postmasters had been “employed to try to stop me and others raising concerns over Horizon”.

He also raised concerns that individual terminals operated by sub-postmasters could be accessed remotely and that this “may be the cause of these major unexplained losses that suddenly occur in sub offices”. The issue of remote access would prove pivotal to JFSA’s successful legal challenge against the Post Office several years later, but at the time when Bates was writing to Davey, it was fiercely denied by the Post Office.

Bates concluded that there was a “genuine willingness at this time to work with you and your department to help resolve these problems if you are prepared to do so”.

Seven days later, on October 21, 2010, Bates wrote for a fourth time to notify Davey of “yet another victim”. Seema Misra, whose prosecution is now considered one of the most egregious of the Horizon scandal, had that day been convicted by a jury after she was accused by the Post Office of false accounting and stealing more than £70,000 from her West Byfleet branch. Misra had pleaded guilty to false accounting — like several other sub-postmasters — but as Bates told Davey, she had done so only “because of the way Horizon and the contract are set up”. One month later, while pregnant with her second child, she was sentenced to 15 months in prison. Her sentence would not be quashed until 2021. Bates also raised the court cases of two other sub-postmasters.

However, Davey backed off:

When Davey replied that December, he again sought to distance himself from the controversy.

While confirming that officials were following up Bates’s concerns with the Post Office, in the case of Misra and the other two sub-postmasters, Davey said “as I made clear at the meeting” neither he nor the department could intervene in cases currently before the courts or where a legal judgment had been reached.

On Horizon, he added: “POL continues to express full confidence in the integrity and robustness of the Horizon system and also categorically states that there is no remote access … which would allow accounting records to be manipulated in any way.”

… In his fifth and final letter to Davey, dated August 20, 2011, Bates said: “Needless to say that having nailed your colours to POL’s mast, from the JFSA standpoint there was little point in continuing a dialogue with you or your department at that point.”

Bates notified him that JFSA members had taken the first step in bringing legal action against the Post Office and warned that the eventual financial liability — for the taxpayer, should the Post Office lose — “has the potential of being astronomical”. He ended by stating that Davey’s decision to “ignore our offer to work with you and your department” had left the group with “no option other than to seek redress through the courts, which is now where the real truth behind Horizon will be exposed”.

On January 8, a petition was posted online, ‘Demand Sir Ed Davey Return His Knighthood Over Post Office Horizon Scandal’, which reads in part:

At the end of 2015, he accepted a Knighthood for ‘political and public service’ which was announced in which was announced in 2016. Presumably, most of this was his work as a Minister for the Post Office.

We believe that it is only right that he returns his knighthood as a sign of accepting accountability for these gross injustices.

On January 9, Allison Pearson wrote a moving column about the scandal for The Telegraph and pointed out Davey’s constant moralising in Parliament in calling for various Conservative MPs to resign:

Davey was … hired as a political consultant by top law firm Herbert Smith Freehills, which was acting for – guess who? – the Post Office! He was paid £833 per hour, amassing a grand total of £225,000. There’s a phrase for that kind of money, I believe. Perhaps Sir Ed Davey might like to call for the resignation of Sir Ed Davey?)

That same day, the Mail‘s Richard Littlejohn pointed out that Davey’s dismissiveness in 2010 was misplaced:

By the time Bates, founder of Justice For Sub-Postmasters, contacted Davey in 2010, there had already been a number of high-profile prosecutions and some had been sent to jail.

Littlejohn reminded us of Davey’s hypocrisy:

Sir Ed Davey liked to pose as a champion of the little man speaking truth to power. In 2003, he publicly took up the cudgels on behalf of a whistle-blowing constituent who had been sacked by the NHS for exposing statistical manipulation at a health care trust in Surrey.

He condemned the NHS bureaucrats responsible as ‘Stalinist’ and called for a full inquiry.

Surely, there were parallels here. In both cases, one man was attempting to expose a systemic cover-up by an over-mighty public monopoly. Not only that, but the Post Office scandal was on a far greater scale, ensnaring not just one, but 100 — and maybe far more.

But now, with his feet firmly under a ministerial desk and his ample backside being chauffeured around in an official limo, Davey wasn’t interested. Instead of posturing as a white knight on a charger, righting wrongs of behalf of powerless victims, he slammed the door in Bates’s face.

Ultimately:

Davey not only continued to distance himself from the scandal, he maintained his support for the Post Office line. In short, after gaining ministerial office, he’d gone native. The PO isn’t a proper private company. It’s a wholly owned subsidiary of the Government, which is the sole shareholder …

Davey’s job as an elected politician was to represent the interests of the public. Instead, he chose to act as an apologist for the out-of-control organisation he was paid to oversee. As Jo Hamilton, one of the main characters in the ITV drama, who was bankrupted and blackmailed into admitting false accounting, rightly says, Davey should have ‘done his job’.

Littlejohn condemned Davey’s excuses:

He was still at it yesterday. Rather than admit any culpability, he issued the usual weasel statement of ‘regret’ and blamed everything on his civil servants and the Post Office management, who had lied to him repeatedly on an industrial scale.

You don’t say. It was his responsibility to take Alan Bates seriously and subject the Post Office’s denials to rigorous, forensic investigation. He’s answerable to the British electorate, not the Post Office bureaucracy or the giant Japanese conglomerate Fujitsu, which supplied and operated the rogue Horizon computer system.

The persecuted sub-postmasters are precisely the kind of people the Lib Dems purport to represent, particularly in the far-flung rural constituencies the party frequently targets.

Davey isn’t the main villain of the piece here, though he isn’t the innocent bystander he pretends to be. Others abused their power and pursued prosecutions based on evidence they knew was false. Police are finally investigating cases involving perjury and perverting the course of justice. And not before time.

But he is pivotal. Had he taken Bates seriously, he could have stopped this scandal in its tracks and spared hundreds of innocent people years of debilitating heartache and hardship. He might even have saved some lives …

He was last seen posing in front of a van featuring a fatuous sign reading ‘Davey’s Tory Removal Service’ …

Davey certainly didn’t look like a man feeling even a scintilla of remorse over his role in the Horizon cover-up. And to be honest, he’d probably have got away scot free had it not been for ITV’s Mr Bates v The Post Office.

But, naturally, Davey doesn’t do shame. Someone else is always to blame. In recent years, he’s demanded the immediate resignations of public figures no fewer than 34 times — everyone from Boris Johnson to the head of Thames Water.

Then again, he is a complete and utter Lib Dem, a former Minister Without Responsibility. I don’t suppose he ever considered doing the decent thing and resigning over his failure to halt the spiteful, institutional persecution of hundreds of blameless sub-postmasters.

Why would he? Ever since, it’s been onwards and upwards …

If anyone deserves a knight- hood it’s the modest, heroic Alan Bates.

And if there’s anyone who serves ‘no useful purpose’ look no further than the Right Honourable Sir Edward Jonathan Davey FRSA, Member of Parliament for the Post Office and Fujitsu West.

This is the campaign poster to which Littlejohn referred:

Someone commenting on a Guido Fawkes post put this one up in reply:

One cannot say better than that.

More to follow on Ed Davey next week.

Conservatives’ Safety of Rwanda bill passes House of Commons

Because of an anonymous judge from the EU blocking the only flight so far to Rwanda in 2022 and because of a UK judge finding that Rwanda is not a ‘safe’ country for notional refugees, the British government came up with the Safety of Rwanda bill to counter both objections.

The full text of the new December 2023 treaty with Rwanda is here.

The objective of sending potential refugees to Rwanda for processing is to be a deterrent to the tens of thousands of young men travelling across the Channel on dinghies every year.

The legislation passed the House of Commons on Wednesday, January 17, 2024. A few Conservative MPs proposed amendments to the bill which would have greatly strengthened it, but MPs — including a majority of Conservatives — voted these down.

Lee Anderson and Brendan Clarke-Smith both resigned their positions as Deputy Chairmen of the Conservative Party earlier this week. However, Anderson, a former Labour Party member, could not bring himself to vote against the bill when the time came. Not surprisingly, he found the chuckles from Labour MPs off-putting. This is what he told his fellow GB News presenter Christopher Hope in Westminster Hall after the vote:

His abstention is a grudging way of voting ‘Yes’, in my opinion.

Only 11 Conservatives voted against the bill. Guido Fawkes tells us who they were: Suella Braverman (former Home Secretary), Simon Clarke, Bill Cash (who came up with some of the proposed amendments), Danny Kruger, Sarah Dines, James Duddridge, David Jones, Robert Jenrick (Immigration Minister who recently resigned and who also raised amendments), Andrea Jenkyns, Mark Francois and Miriam Cates.

Guido says (red emphases his):

Rebellious Tory MPs decided earlier this evening they would back the government to prevent the whole thing falling apart. All amendments have been voted off and the bill has passed at third reading 320 to 276. The government’s majority is 44. Déjà vu…

Jenrick’s amendment to ensure the government would ignore Rule 39 injunctions from Strasbourg got 65 votes with 61 Tory rebels. Last night’s rebellion carried over…

Overall, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak must be relieved the bill is now on its way to the Lords.

Immigration in a nutshell

Britain — England, in particular — has a tremendous immigration problem.

On November 23, 2023, Migration Watch provided the total figure of net migration from June 2022 to June 2023 (purple emphases mine):

New figures from the Office for National Statistics reveal that in the year ending June 2023, net migration to the UK was 672,000.

Most of that number is comprised of legal immigrants to the United Kingdom. What follows is a partial breakdown by country. The numbers for Indians and Nigerians are especially high because they bring the most dependents with them:

Migration Watch’s press release from that day states:

Commenting, Alp Mehmet, Chairman of Migration Watch UK, said:

These figures are truly shocking. They will result in intolerable pressure on our housing and public services. The government have abandoned their promises at the last election and have simply caved in to every pro-immigration pressure group. Indeed net migration is now at four or five times the level of three years ago.

If this is allowed to continue, Britain’s population could well soar to about 85 million by 2046. This would be equivalent to 18 new cities the size of Birmingham, and would place an intolerable strain on our land, housing, transportation, and public infrastructure.

Apart from the economic pressures brought by this eyewatering net migration figure, how on earth will we integrate the 1.2 million long term migrants arriving every year? It will only add massively to the problem of integrating the millions of migrants already here.

The British people have been utterly betrayed.

On Tuesday, January 16, 2024, The Telegraph‘s Allison Pearson gave us another startling statistic about the level of migration to the United Kingdom. It is higher than that to the United States:

The UK now has a higher proportion of foreign-born residents than the United States – more than 10 million people, which is 15 per cent of our population and roughly twice as many as it was 10 years ago.

People crossing the Channel

However, the Rwanda legislation is targeted at a much smaller although no less significant group: those crossing the Channel from France in small boats, often dinghies.

Britons, especially the English, wonder how this can happen. Once here, they are put up in three- and four-star hotels commandeered by third-party services companies working for the Government.

A commenter on Guido Fawkes’s post on the Rwanda bill explains what happens and how the migrants’ legal status changes when our own Border Force accompanied by the lifeboats charity, RNLI, escorts these vessels to the UK:

Under existing British law, it’s illegal to enter the country without a visa or special permission.

However, they are protected from prosecution if once they arrive they claim asylum.

Further, they have not entered the country illegally if they have been rescued at sea and brought here by the agency that rescued them.

After the Safety of Rwanda bill passed, No. 10 issued the following statement:

The passing of the Bill tonight marks a major step in our plan to stop the boats. This is the toughest legislation ever introduced in Parliament to tackle illegal migration and will make clear that if you come here illegally you will not be able to stay. It is this government and the Conservative party who have got boat crossings down by more than a third. We have a plan, we have made progress and this landmark legislation will ensure we get flights off to Rwanda, deter people from making perilous journeys across the channel and stop the boats.

However, all of that sounds suspiciously like the statement the Government issued when the first Rwanda bill was passed when Priti Patel was Home Secretary. Labour are not wrong when they say that more Home Secretaries have visited Rwanda than asylum seekers. The sum total of the latter group is precisely zero.

Anger at Conservatives

On the morning of Wednesday, January 17, the day of the final debate and vote on the Safety of Rwanda legislation, GB News broadcasted a confrontation between Reform Party Chairman Richard Tice and Conservative MP Richard Graham from Gloucester.

Tice’s views aligned with those of much of the British public, while Graham presented the real-life nuances in processing and transporting notional refugees. I couldn’t help but agree with both:

'Don't be absurd.'

Reform UK Leader, Richard Tice, clashes in a furious row with Conservative MP, Richard Graham, over immigration in the UK. pic.twitter.com/uEqivrFIHs

— GB News (@GBNEWS) January 17, 2024

The aforementioned column from The Telegraph‘s Allison Pearson encapsulates everything the British are angry about with regard to recent successive Conservative governments. I’ll just cover the immigration issue, for which she has a comparative graph:

It is hard to overstate the sense of betrayal and anger. Back in October, I said that the Tories would be lucky to retain 150 seats and that was before we heard the Oh-dear-God legal immigration figures.

To wilfully welcome a population the size of Birmingham when your own people are struggling to access healthcare, housing and safe maternity services, which they have paid for out of their taxes, goes beyond mere incompetence. It is plain rude.

A “kick in the teeth”, as Suella Braverman said. Oh, and massively disrespectful of your loyal supporters. Immigration at those levels undermines social cohesion and it stops social mobility in its tracks because too many of our young people, who know they will never own a home and must live in extortionate rented accommodation while they pay off their student loan (like my two, in fact), get despondent and give up …

Did any Conservative vote for that? Did they heck. But the people in whom we first placed our trust back in 2010, whose manifesto commitments we stupidly believed, went ahead and did it anyway. How did Tory MPs come to believe they were better judges of what the country needs than the British voter?

While many who came to this country as immigrants, and the children of those immigrants, are making a fantastic contribution and are every bit as British as any of us, we all know there are a horrifying number of idle ratbags sponging off the efforts of hardworking families, getting priority for social housing, university places and even hospital appointments.

A poisonous minority hates the West while living in the, er, West and enjoying its comforts and freedoms. We don’t want them here.

Record mass immigration “and under a Conservative government”. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve read or heard that incredulous rider. People say it all the time: The highest taxes for 70 years “and under a Conservative government”.

Over 40,000 migrants arriving illegally on our southern coast “and under a Conservative government” …

In November, the Home Office admitted that they do not know the whereabouts of 17,000 asylum seekers whose claims have been discontinued. In a functioning country, that scandalous admission would have seen public apologies and resignations. In Broken Britain, it was par for the course …

A poll in The Telegraph … showed that “in almost all constituencies in the country the preferred option is for quick detention and deportation (to Rwanda)”.

As Margaret Thatcher once said, ‘Weak, feeble’. What would she make of today’s Conservative ‘wets’, as she called them in her day? Ours are wetter than hers:

Blame Tony Blair for courts’ power

Remember how, in 1996 and during the general election campaign of 1997, Labour’s leader Tony Blair never spelled out any of his ideas for government?

I do. Now, looking back nearly 30 years, I see that he had plenty of ideas for governing and understand why he didn’t tell us what they were at the time. If he had, fewer people would have voted Labour in May 1997, even though the Party still would have won the election, just not by a landslide.

During his time as Prime Minister, Blair, a lawyer — his wife a human rights lawyer — nicely convinced voters that courts should reign supreme, something we are finding out to our peril in the second decade of the 21st century.

A November 16, 2023 article in UnHerd, ‘How the judges took back control’, explains what he did and how we are seeing it unfold in the context of the Rwanda treaty:

The Supreme Court’s ruling against the Government’s Rwanda plan may have been a foregone conclusion, but the broader political fall-out was not. Even though the Supreme Court struck down the migrant bill without relying on the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) or the Human Rights Act, the decision is nonetheless bound to reignite the discussion about the ECHR — which is what kickstarted the British courts’ judicial review of the bill in the first place …

… The influence of the ECHR is only one part of a much bigger story: the wider judicialisation of our political and democratic systems.

Over the past few decades, an unprecedented amount of power has been transferred from representative institutions to judiciaries, transforming national and supranational courts into full-blooded political and decision-making bodies — and giving rise to a new type of political regime altogether: what some have called juristocracy. As legal scholar Ran Hirschl wrote as far back as 2004, from matters of national security to macroeconomics, “courts have become crucial for dealing with the most fundamental questions a democratic polity can contemplate”. The view that “nothing falls beyond the purview of judicial review”, as Aharon Barak, the former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Israel, said, has become widely accepted.

As a result, it has become standard practice for core political decisions relating to the very essence of public life — such as immigration policy — to be taken by courts and judges. Questions that ought to be resolved through public deliberation in the political sphere are increasingly being settled behind closed doors by a self-selecting judiciary elite …

For the UK, this journey largely accelerated with its entry into the EU in 1972, which over time transformed EU law into something akin to a higher law. The second big push towards judicialisation came in the late Nineties and early 2000s under New Labour, with the creation of the Human Rights Act [1998] and then the Constitutional Reform Act of 2005, which paved the way to the creation of the Supreme Court in 2009.

Yet for Britain’s political elites, judicialisation still carried a risk — namely, that the courts would start producing judgments that no longer reflected the ideological preferences of those who handed authority over to the judiciary in the first place. Hence, the Conservative Party finds itself unable to enforce its Rwanda policy …

Fast forward to this week, Wednesday, January 18, and UnHerd had another article about Blair’s far-reaching transformation of our government in ‘How New Labour created the Rwanda stranglehold’:

The backlash that followed last year’s Supreme Court ruling — which found the Rwanda policy to be unlawful — is a direct product of New Labour and Lord Derry Irvine’s rights-based judicial reforms. Those reforms, firstly, ensured all policy and legislation-making centred around a culture of rights-compatibility. This was to be given priority over debates regarding the merits and necessity of an elected government’s policy preferences and assessment of the public interest. Secondly, it encouraged the perception of the judiciary as being unchallengeable and hierarchically superior to other branches of the state. The result, as we’re now seeing, is the constraint of an elected government that commands a majority in Parliament.

For New Labour, the aim was to ensure that domestic policy and legislation was subject to, and heavily shaped by, the European Convention (ECHR) rights found in the Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA), regardless of whether the domestic public interest or common good, according to a democratically elected majority government, required otherwise. As such, governments of all stripes would be forced into designing and arguing for policy that sits within the HRA’s framework and adhered to decisions made by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). Other pertinent questions about the need, validity, strengths, weaknesses and democratic support for these proposed measures would become secondary.

Lord Irvine was clear-eyed about the types of rights-based reforms he wanted to introduce. He unequivocally claimed that New Labour’s HRA sought to mould not only the content of law in a range of areas, but also the law-making process. As such, it was New Labour’s specific intention to ensure government policy and legislation was framed around individual rights. To this end, the requirement for ministers to make statements of compatibility when introducing a Bill into Parliament was vital; the “responsible minister” would have to justify their decision in the “full glare of parliamentary and public opinion”. Strikingly, “Sovereignty”, Lord Irvine wrote, “will in future have to be exercised within an environment highly sensitive to fundamental rights”.

Moreover, because the HRA ensures executive and public bodies carry out their work under the umbrella of rights compatibility, Lord Irvine claimed such bodies would be subject to “considerably more rigorous scrutiny” than before — and he conceded the “special arena of human rights” would entail high degrees of judicial intervention.

While Lord Irvine, and New Labour, maintained that parliamentary sovereignty would be preserved, and Parliament could continue to legislate as it wished, the intention was to reposition the terrain for legislating towards matters of compatibility and away from concerns about public interest. If Parliament sought to legislate against the HRA grain, the question would not be of sovereignty or public interest but of rights-compatibility. Further, the duty on domestic courts to read legislation in a HRA-compatible way has led to a wide range of British government policies being reduced to such debates. The results, as we have seen, include well-documented cases of IRA members claiming to suffer a breach of the right to life, and the blocked deportation of suspected terrorists. Even government policies concerning public ownership and late-night flights from London Heathrow airport have been subject to questions of compatibility …

To make matters even more tiresome for any current or future government, New Labour’s HRA created the perception that the judiciary, and their judgments, were hierarchically superior to the elected majority government in Parliament. In other words, a false impression was created that framed Parliament, and the majority government within, as being unable to question or legislate against judicial decisions … New Labour encouraged an Americanised feeling of judicial supremacy by, first, reframing the role of judges and, secondly, allowing them to enter more substantive discussions about the merits of any given policy or legislative measure.

I vaguely remember the way Labour mooted the Supreme Court on current affairs programmes: ‘Why don’t we have a Supreme Court?’ in the way someone might bandy around a random topic at a dinner party. No sooner said than done. Labour did away with the perfectly serviceable Law Lords and gave us a Supreme Court, because in Blair’s mind it was what every other advanced society had. Never mind that Britain, via the Magna Carta in 1215, was the first to enshrine human rights.

What a crafty move the Supreme Court was:

Despite New Labour arguing these reforms maintained the position of Parliament as the ultimate arbiter, Lord Irvine specifically claimed there would be great pressure to concede ground to any decision that the court has made …

Indeed, the political pressure created by a “Supreme” Court ruling against a government tends to be so enormous that, in practical terms, the court, not Parliament or the government within, is viewed as supreme. In effect, such a measure is tantamount to ordering the Government and Parliament itself to halt or change direction — something which, prior to 1998, was constitutionally improper.

Moreover, when ensuring the legislation or policy in question was compatible with the HRA, Lord Irvine claimed judges would also be able to conduct a more substantive review of human rights and policy. He argued that the domestic courts would be able to examine whether it was necessary to limit a right, and whether a proposed limitation was appropriate. Therefore a moral approach to judicial decision-making was created. The courts would now have to be satisfied that any interference with a protected right was justified in the public interest of a free democratic society. The result, Lord Irvine explained, would be judicial decisions based on the morality of government policy and legislation — not simply its compliance with the bare letter of the law.

Finally, although seemingly cosmetic, New Labour’s decision to disband the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords and create a new, relocated Supreme Court — via the Constitutional Reform Act 2005 — lent further weight to its aim of fostering feelings of judicial supremacy. Instead of adhering to the unique commixture of powers in the British constitution, the Department of Constitutional Affairs explained the intention was to redraw the relationship between the judiciary and other branches of the state — in addition to enhancing judicial independence. Overall, then, an image starts to emerge of New Labour and Lord Irvine’s responsibility for those in Britain who have spent the past two decades appealing to the paramountcy of the HRA and finality of judicial decisions. This can be clearly seen in the responses to the Rwanda policy from civil society, commentators in the media, and politicians.

This next bit about the Rwanda treaty is all too true. Criticism comes from Labour along the following lines all the time:

Following the Supreme Court judgment, for example, third-sector organisations unequivocally called for the Government to abandon and draw a line under the measure. Others have also criticised the Government’s response  for “disapplying” aspects of the HRA and “disabling the courts”, while reporters have framed the Government’s response as one which “brushes the historic role of our country’s courts aside”. Similarly, among politicians, legislating against the Supreme Court has been described as “an affront to democracy”, with MPs expressing concern about “the possibility that, by effectively reversing through statute a Supreme Court judgment on the facts, the Bill could undermine the constitutional role of the judiciary”.

The ECHR and ECtHR

Both the European Convention on Human Rights and the European Court on Human Rights have been seen as roadblocks to getting Rwanda flights going.

The question is, even though Winston Churchill helped to create them, does Britain stay or does it leave both?

Even Lord Sumption KC, who sat on the Supreme Court between 2012 and 2018, thinks the UK should leave. He had this to say in an October 2023 interview with Freddie Sayers of UnHerd:

I don’t think this is likely to happen, but it would be a good thing if it did. I am not against a rule-based system and I am not against human rights. I simply think that we need to decide what human rights we want and to what degree we want them. At the moment, the problem is not the Convention itself, which is a collection of principles, not a single one of which I would question in any way. What I oppose is the legislative process by which the Strasbourg court, the European Court of Human Rights, has emancipated itself from the only thing that the states party to the Convention ever agreed, which was the text of the Convention. I do not think that it is the function of judges to revise the laws to bring them up to date — that is a function of representative institutions, certainly in a democracy.

So I would favour withdrawing from the European Convention and substituting it for an identical text, but simply interpreting it responsibly in accordance with what it’s intended to mean, and not in accordance with a wider political agenda — which I’m afraid is the animating spirit currently of the Strasbourg Court. I had hoped before that the Strasbourg Court would learn from the occasions when, particularly in this country, we have jibed at what they’ve done. I had hoped that things would improve as a result of the Brighton declaration, and its statement in favour of what was called, rather pompously, “subsidiarity”. I no longer believe that the Strasbourg Court is capable of independent reform.

I think the point about rules is that they’re designed to bring some kind of order to human affairs. If you have a rule which depends on whatever a legislator in Strasbourg thinks it ought to be, the essential predictability which rules are designed to achieve is gone. I have no problem about the notion of a foreign tribunal deciding whether our observance of human rights is adequate provided that the tribunal in question follows the rules. What I object to is a situation in which they require everyone else to follow rules of their own devising, but recognise no rules governing their own decisions.

He also thinks that the 1951 Geneva Convention on Refugees requires updating:

I certainly think that the Geneva Convention was made for a different world: a world in which travel across national borders was a lot more difficult, and a lot more expensive … in the wake of the catastrophe involving millions of displaced persons at the end of the Second World War, there was a strictly temporary Refugee Convention designed to enable these people to be resettled. In 1951, that was changed so that it became a permanent institution, and not limited to the persons displaced by the Second World War.

I think the people who agreed to that at the time did not appreciate that, with the disappearance of the European colonial empires, a lot of the world would come into chaos; that people suffering persecution would become very numerous — millions and millions in many countries of the world; and that, simultaneously, the improvements and the easing of the actual logistical difficulties of travel over long distances would enable lots of them to make their way towards the remaining ordered parts of the world.

It isn’t fit for purpose, but whether one should depart from it is a different question. I confess that I’ve not studied this as carefully as I have studied the problems associated with the European Convention on Human Rights. I think it’s obvious that the Refugee Convention was made for a world that no longer exists. I am much less certain about what we should do about that.

The NGOs

Finally, we have the non-governmental organisations — NGOs — that are working hard for migrants crossing dangerous waters.

A January 17 article on EuroNews explains how the Italian government is trying to keep them in check, and yet, they seem to prevail:

Barely one day into the new year, on 1 January, the Ocean Viking – a migrant rescue boat chartered by the NGO SOS Méditerranée – was impounded by Italian authorities for breaking the government’s strict rules on charity groups operating such ships, proving that 2024 is shaping up to look a lot like the year before.

Giorgia Meloni’s right-wing government, which was installed in late October 2022, has introduced new regulations for migrant rescue ships in January 2023 which activists have condemned, as they say it intentionally makes their job much harder and puts migrants’ lives at risk.

According to the government’s decree, NGOs must notify Italian authorities immediately after a rescue operation and head to the port indicated by officials without delay, which is often far from the ship’s location. Ships cannot embark on more than one rescue operation at a time unless authorised to do so by Italian authorities.

If an NGO boat is found in violation of these rules, the vessel can be denied access to Italian ports or blocked for up to two months, while their captains face a fine between €10,000 and €50,000. If a ship is found in violation of the decree more than once, the vessel can be seized by Italian authorities …

Upon arrival in Bari, the Ocean Viking’s crew received a 20-day detention order for the ship and a €3,300 fine. The detention order expires on Friday, when the ship hopes to get back to sea.

“We know this is a tactic to try and stop our operation rather than something that is valid in some way,” Mary Finn, another Ocean Viking rescuer, said. “And I find it painful to feel that humanity’s not on our side or that the authorities aren’t on our side, because it’s so obvious when you do this work that what we’re doing is the right thing to be doing.”

Sara Kelany, the migration policy coordinator for Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party, agreed that saving lives is a priority. But she said the presence of charity-run ships in the Mediterranean must be limited and strictly regulated.

Kelany alleged that many of the groups that organise humanitarian missions in the Mediterranean also have a stated political objective of changing the European Union’s migration policies.

“In essence, they want to be political actors within the dynamics of immigration,” she said in an interview. “Immigration is a state’s national competence, and we cannot allow private organizations to influence our migration policies with their policies.”

Once in Italy, those crossing the Mediterranean start moving westwards to France. Ventimiglia, the Italian town on the border between the two countries, has become a hotspot. French police turn the migrants back, and this video from December 30, 2023, shows a local man and NGOs aiding the migrants. The man makes daily runs picking up migrants and ferrying them back to the railway station at Ventimiglia while the NGOs have offices there where they hand out food and clothing. This is subtitled in English and is a must-watch:

When migration puts the EU's external borders under pressure, what happens at Italy's western door to northern Europe? #EuronewsWitness went to Ventimiglia, at the French-Italian border, to investigate the situation along this migration route.https://t.co/of7WXisTuW pic.twitter.com/txo77p4jdt

— euronews (@euronews) December 30, 2023

Ventimiglia used to be the port of call for French day-trippers shopping for cheaper goods then settling down to a nice lunch before heading back in the late afternoon. I wonder if it still is so attractive these days.

Conclusion

When it comes to immigration, many European countries are hamstrung by courts.

It is unclear how things will turn out for the United Kingdom, where much of the public wonder why the Conservative Party, which has been in power for nearly 14 years, cannot manage to change the course of court rulings and overthrow Tony Blair’s questionable reforms.

Their best chance came with an 80-seat majority in 2019. Sadly, it has become crystal clear that many Conservative MPs just do not have the gumption for turning back the clock and restoring sovereignty to Parliament, where it rightly belongs.

Rwanda is but a small part of this picture, yet it will partially determine the Conservatives’ results at the general election later this year.

Mr Bates vs The Post Office: Christmas television that captured the British imagination

Hats off to ITV for another excellent television series.

ITV’s last major success was Downton Abbey and, albeit some years later, they succeeded again with Mr Bates vs The Post Office, which aired in four instalments over the 2023 Christmas season.

It is hard to imagine that it is based on a true story, given the events that came to light, yet subpostmasters — those who operate Post Office counters outside the Crown Post Offices in the UK — really did suffer financially, professionally and personally.

Subpostmasters are at the heart of their communities. They are viewed universally as being upstanding, honest citizens. As everyone uses the Post Office, subpostmasters are the most visible — and the most trusted — people in their towns and villages.

Much has happened already in the New Year as the Government is continuing action in favour of British subpostmasters the length and breadth of the country over costly mistakes involving the Post Office’s Horizon computer system.

Fortunately, a former subpostmaster by the name of Alan Bates took on the behemoth of the Post Office over 20 years ago and, doggedly, is winning the battle. He is still working on seeing justice done.

Television review

On New Year’s Day 2024, The Telegraph reviewed the programme, saying ‘you will be left seething’. Excerpts follow, purple emphases mine:

The Post Office Horizon scandal presents the dramatist with fiendish hurdles. The timescale is vast, the cast list of victims is innumerable, the legal landscape is as befogged as Jarndyce vs Jarndyce. Also, the villain is a computer terminal that clunks and blinks and never says a word.

And yet the story is also an open goal. Rarely in the legal history of blameless Davids going into battle with bullying Goliaths has a just cause come up against such a manifestly evil enemy. To load the dice even more, this Goliath simpers in a dog collar.

Mr Bates vs the Post Office (ITV1) establishes its moral position in the opening frames as Alan Bates (Toby Jones) and his other half, Suzanne (Julie Hesmondhalgh), are turfed out of their north Wales sub post office by big glowering men who arrive in a cruel fleet of black saloons that may as well be Panzer tanks.

The drama positions Bates as a caped crusader who, tirelessly over many years, simply refuses to let a corporate bully get away with insisting that its Horizon accounting system works and hundreds of sub-postmasters are therefore thieves. Jones, all cheer and steel, is simply perfect as the little man who proves undefeatable.

Two famous people are in it. One is the Conservative MP Nadhim Zahawi who plays himself. The other is the former Post Office CEO Paula Vennells, who also took Holy Orders in the Anglican Church during that time. The programme depicts her at work as well as in a church pulpit. Oh, my:

At a guess, the CEO, CBE and former priest will scarcely be able to show her face in public after this merciless pummelling. Even former Cabinet Minister Nadhim Zahawi convinces as himself, getting het up on a select committee.

The review concludes:

It’s never subtle. While illness and depression, self-harm and suicide, plus a violent robbery, afflict the sub-postmasters, the Post Office’s glassy head office is basically the Death Star. Bates fights the good fight from a white house in a north Wales valley that shimmers like Eden.

But fuelled by righteous rage and sheer incredulity at a corporate malfeasance that can never be fully explained, it’s undeniably powerful and finally redemptive. “We just cling to a notion, don’t we,” someone says, “that people can’t be that bad.” I’ve rarely felt more manipulated by a drama, and rarely resented it less.

Media coverage

Parliament was in recess until Monday, January 8. Meanwhile, the series and the scandal it portrayed received non-stop media coverage.

On Friday, January 5, the Mail reported:

The scandalous persecution of hundreds of innocent sub-postmasters, wrongly accused of theft, false accounting and fraud, and cruelly dragged through the courts, was brought to life in this week’s hit ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office.

It details the heartbreaking story of Britain’s biggest ever miscarriage of justice, which saw more than 700 innocent people convicted – of which 263 were imprisoned – and threw hundreds more into bankruptcy and financial ruin. At least four committed suicide.

The long struggle by victims seeking to show how a faulty computer system named Horizon – rather than dishonest sub-postmasters – was to blame for cash going missing from Post Office tills was endlessly frustrated by the organisation’s senior staff.

The drama forensically examines how the Post Office chose to fight tooth and nail to prevent the truth from coming out, giving misleading information to Parliament, the public and at least one High Court judge in the process.

Eventually it was ordered to pay nearly £60 million in compensation to 555 victims, while a public inquiry into the whole sorry business is now underway. 

But astronomical legal costs mean that hundreds of sub-postmasters remain out of pocket, while scores have died before receiving justice.

Yet while the sub-postmasters and their families’ lives were ruined, several prominent members of the Boss Class which ran the three institutions most responsible for the scandal — the Post Office, IT firm Fujitsu and Her Majesty’s Government – went on to bigger and better things. Here we look at how they’ve prospered…

Excerpts from the article continue below.

How it happened

This is how Horizon developed. Tony Blair, then Prime Minister, signed off the project in 1999.

Fujitsu, which took over Britain’s ICL, developed Horizon.

I’m going to borrow reader comments from a Guido Fawkes post to summarise in a nutshell how the project developed and progressed:

The software was a DHSS system designed around a Benefits Card which would be accepted at Post Offices. It was running late from the beginning, trials failed and neither the DHSS nor the PO wanted it. The problem was that a complete cancellation (lawyers for the Cabinet Office looked at ‘time of the essence’ clauses) would have led to a funding problem/going concern issues for ICL/Fujitsu UK as well as embarassment for Fujitsu Japan and Japan/UK relations. There were high level representations in Tokyo/London at Ambassador level. Ministers were split on what to do but Blair overruled in 1999 and cancelled the DHSS contract and rolled over some of the abortive cost onto the PO contract. Blair kept his ‘modernising’ New Labour look, Fujitsu was promised more work and Michio Naruto, Fujitsu top man, was to be given a[n honorary] CBE. The benefits system was saved from a potential disaster and the PO was thrown to the wolves, the PO management having been called “inept” by the Blair cabinet (at least they got that right). The Blair government knew … Horizon had big issues.

All this is sourced from a 600 page report “The Origins of a Disaster” by Eleanor Shaikh. There is also a 6 page summary. The report was lodged with the Inquiry and Eleanor, a solicitor who happened to strike up a conversation with her local Postmistress, is pushing for Tony Blair to answer questions at the Inquiry. The report uses government archived documents and FoIs. It is also on the JFSA website and is astonishing and a masterpierce.

Another comment describes how unreliable Horizon came to be:

The Horizon system was originally designed by Post Office counters staff and then it soon became clear that the Civil Servants wanted to make lots of changes and lots of bolt ons, for example, plastic swipe cards instead of pension books. They also made lots of changes to the nominal ledger tables, in the way it split out costs and in the end the coding became alphabet soup. A few people on the project at the Post Office who warned of issues were made redundant, and even when the Post Office had an independent report into the system, they did not like the outcome, so they got rid of the contractor. This is a big cover up for the civil servants who were allowed to make spec changes and pressure the contractors to come in on budget and on time despite the issues. The MOT system had all sorts of problems on a smaller scale when it was rolled out. Some of the PCs had been in store for 4 years and when they plugged them in, did not work, and the dial up system crashed on a regular basis.

Subpostmasters were told in their contracts that they were entirely liable for any shortfalls in their Post Office accounts.

The Post Office told the subpostmasters that no one from the Post Office had access to their systems. That was true.

What the Post Office neglected to say was that Fujitsu had remote access to the subpostmasters’ systems.

This is what transpired shortly after the Millennium once subpostmasters began using the Horizon system:

2000-2002: There are more than 100 prosecutions based on faulty Horizon data in three years. Six branch managers are convicted in 2000, while 41 subpostmasters are prosecuted in 2001 and another 64 in 2002.

May 2002: Shopkeeper Baljit Sethi contacts the Brentwood Gazette newspaper to raise concerns about Horizon errors at his Post Office in Brentwood, Essex, which showed a £17,000 shortfall. The Post Office refutes that the system is faulty.

2003: The Post Office terminates Alan Bates’s contract as a subpostmaster after he refused to accept liability for alleged losses at his branch. He and his wife lost the £65,000 they had invested in his branch.

January 2004: Alan Bates writes a letter to Computer Weekly magazine about his problems with the Horizon system. He writes: ‘We have lost our investment and livelihood by daring to raise questions over a computer system we had thrust upon us’.

January 2006: Subpostmaster Lee Castleton fights a civil case against the Post Office after it falsely accused him of stealing £35,000 from his branch in Bridlington, East Yorkshire.

Castleton represents himself as he is unable to afford a lawyer, and loses the case. Ordered to pay £321,000 in legal costs, he is forced to declare bankruptcy.

You could not make this up!

It was around 2005 or 2006 that Private Eye began reporting on the subpostmasters’ struggle with the Post Office over Horizon.

Computer Weekly did not pick up the story until 2009, which isn’t surprising, considering that Fujitsu would have sent in press releases or given interviews about their ongoing projects and probably placed job adverts in the back. By then, I was semi-retired and was no longer reading it.

However, I did read the Private Eye columns and was horrified at what they had uncovered.

Computer Weekly has a summarised timeline of what happened from 2009 to 2021:

• • May 2009: Bankruptcy, prosecution and disrupted livelihoods – postmasters tell their story.
  • September 2009: Postmasters form action group after accounts shortfall.
  • November 2009: Post Office theft case deferred over IT questions.
  • May 2010: A pilot of the new Horizon Online system at Royal Mail has been scaled back after connectivity problems and outages.
  • February 2011: Post Office faces legal action over alleged accounting system failures.
  • October 2011: 85 subpostmasters seek legal support in claims against Post Office computer system.
  • June 2012: Post Office launches external review of system at centre of legal disputes.
  • January 2013: Post Office admits Horizon system needs more investigation.
  • January 2013: Post Office announces amnesty for Horizon evidence.
  • January 2013: Post Office wants to get to bottom of IT system allegations.
  • June 2013: Investigation into Post Office accounting system to drill down on strongest cases.
  • July 2013: Post Office Horizon system investigation reveals concerns.
  • October 2013: End in sight for subpostmaster claims against Post Office’s Horizon accounting system.
  • October 2013: Former Lord Justice of Appeal Hooper joins Post Office Horizon investigation.
  • November 2013: 150 subpostmasters file claims over “faulty” Horizon accounting system.
  • September 2014: Fresh questions raised over Post Office IT system’s role in fraud cases.
  • December 2014: MPs blast Post Office over IT system investigation and remove backing.
  • December 2014: Why MPs lost faith in the Post Office’s IT investigation, but vowed to fight on.
  • December 2014: MPs to debate subpostmaster IT injustice claims.
  • December 2014: MP accuses Post Office of acting “duplicitously” in IT investigation.
  • January 2015: MPs force inquiry into Post Office subpostmaster mediation scheme.
  • January 2015: Post Office faces grilling by MPs over Horizon accounting system.
  • February 2015: Post Office CIO will talk to any subpostmaster about IT problems, promises CEO.
  • March 2015: Post Office ends working group for IT system investigation day before potentially damaging report.
  • March 2015: MPs seek reassurance over Post Office mediation scheme.
  • March 2015: Retiring MP aims to uncover truth of alleged Post Office computer system problems.
  • April 2015: Post Office failed to investigate account shortfalls before legal action, report claims.
  • April 2015: Criminal Courts Review Commission set to review subpostmasters’ claims of wrongful prosecution.
  • May 2015: IT system related to subpostmaster prosecutions under review by CCRC.
  • June 2015: Post Office looking to replace controversial Horizon system with IBM, says MP.
  • July 2015: Campaigners call for independent inquiry into Post Office Horizon IT system dispute.
  • October 2015: James Arbuthnot takes Post Office IT fight to House of Lords.
  • November 2015: The union that represents Post Office subpostmasters has warned of a problem with the Horizon accounting system.
  • November 2015: An email from Post Office IT support reveals a problem with the Horizon system and supporting processes that could lead to accounting errors.
  • November 2015: Group litigation against Post Office being prepared in Horizon dispute.
  • February 2016: Post Office faces group litigation over Horizon IT as subpostmasters fund class action.
  • June 2016: Post Office chairman Tim Parker says there would be “considerable risk” associated with changing its Horizon computer system.
  • November 2016: The legal team hired by a group of subpostmasters will take their case to the next stage.
  • January 2017: The group action against the Post Office that alleges subpostmasters have been wrongly punished for accounting errors gets green light from the High Court of Justice.
  • March 2017: 1,000 subpostmasters apply to join IT-related group litigation against Post Office.
  • April 2017: Investigation into claims of miscarriages of justice in relation to a Post Office accounting system has appointed a forensic accountant firm.
  • May 2017: Hundreds of subpostmasters have applied to join IT-related legal action since March.
  • July 2017: Post Office defence in computer system legal case due this week.
  • August 2017: Campaigners submit initial evidence in group litigation against Post Office over controversial Horizon IT system.
  • October 2017: Subpostmasters’ group action against the Post Office reaches an important milestone.
  • November 2017: An end is in sight for subpostmasters’ campaign against alleged wrongful prosecution, which they blame on a faulty computer system.
  • November 2017: The High Court judge managing the subpostmasters versus Post Office legal case over an allegedly faulty computer system tells legal teams to cooperate.
  • January 2018: Forensic investigation into Post Office IT system at centre of legal case nears completion.
  • April 2018: Criminal Cases Review Commission forensic examination of the IT system at the centre of a legal case against the Post Office has raised further questions.
  • May 2018: Post Office branches unable to connect to Horizon computer system for several hours after morning opening time.
  • October 2018: After over a decade of controversy, next week marks the beginning of a court battle between subpostmasters and the Post Office.
  • November 2018: Case against Post Office in relation to allegedly faulty computer system begins in High Court.
  • November 2018: High Court case in which subpostmasters are suing the Post Office has revealed a known problem with a computer system at the core of the dispute.
  • November 2018: A High Court trial, where subpostmasters are suing the Post Office for damages caused by an allegedly faulty IT system, ends second week.
  • November 2018: Post Office director admits to Horizon errors and not sharing details with subpostmaster network.
  • November 2018: The High Court trial in which subpostmasters are suing the Post Office has reached an important stage.
  • December 2018: CCRC may hold off subpostmaster decision until after Post Office Horizon trial.
  • December 2018: Court case where subpostmasters are suing the Post Office set to span at least four trials and extend into 2020.
  • January 2019: Subpostmasters’ campaign group attacks Post Office CEO Paula Vennells’ New Year honour amid ongoing court case.
  • January 2019: Thousands of known errors on controversial Post Office computer system to be revealed.
  • March 2019: Tech under spotlight at High Court in second subpostmasters versus Post Office trial.
  • March 2019: Post Office considered Horizon IT system “high-risk”, court told.
  • March 2019: CCRC watching Post Office Horizon trial closely.
  • March 2019: Judge rules that Post Office showed “oppressive behaviour” in response to claimants accused of accounting errors they blamed on Horizon IT system.
  • March 2019: Post Office “lacked humanity” in the treatment of subpostmasters, says peer.
  • March 2019: A High Court judge heard that the Post Office did not investigate a computer system error that could cause losses, despite being offered evidence.
  • March 2019: The Post Office legal team in the case brought by more than 500 subpostmasters has called for the judge to be recused after questioning his impartiality.
  • March 2019: A senior civil servant asked the Post Office to repay public money it had wrongly allocated to paying legal costs.
  • April 2019: Subpostmaster claimants’ legal team makes application for the Post Office to pay millions of pounds of costs associated with trial.
  • April 2019: Post Office to appeal judgment from first Horizon trial.
  • April 2019: The Post Office’s claim that the judge overseeing the case concerning its controversial Horizon IT system was biased has been dismissed.
  • April 2019: MP questions government over Post Office Horizon case.
  • April 2019: Government says no conflict of interest in trial despite Post Office chairman’s dual role.
  • May 2019: The Court of Appeal has refused the Post Office’s application to appeal a major decision in the Horizon IT trial.
  • May 2019: The Post Office has applied for permission to appeal judgments from the first trial in its IT-related legal battle with subpostmasters.
  • May 2019: The judge in the Post Office Horizon trial has ordered the organisation to pay the legal costs of its courtroom adversaries, and refused to give permission to appeal a major judgment.
  • June 2019: Post Office asks Court of Appeal for permission to appeal judgment in first Horizon trial.
  • July 2019: The Post Office has admitted that some subpostmasters are at risk of accounts not balancing due to an error it does not understand.
  • July 2019: Problem revealed during High Court trial left subpostmaster with £18,000 surplus after IT system failed to register full amount of cash scanned in.
  • August 2019: Subpostmasters suffering slow running and frozen terminals while Post Office searches for a fix to issues apparently caused by a software update.
  • August 2019: The Post Office has fixed the latest problems with its Horizon system, affecting hundreds of branches. 
  • October 2019: A High Court judgment for a trial that focused on the Post Office’s IT system at the centre of a multimillion-pound litigation will be announced early next month.
  • November 2019: The Court of Appeal has rejected a Post Office application to appeal judgments made in its multimillion-pound battle with subpostmasters over IT system failures.
  • November 2019: Peer calls for clear-out of Post Office board after Court of Appeal confirms major court defeat.
  • December 2019: The Post Office has settled its long-running legal dispute with subpostmasters, and will pay £57.75m in damages.
  • December 2019: Subpostmansters ended their legal battle with the Post Office at the optimal time, according to the lawyer that managed the High Court action.
  • December 2019: Subpostmansters proved right on IT system failures as calls for full public inquiry mount.
  • December 2019: Criminal Courts Review Commission to review Horizon judgment “swiftly”.
  • December 2019: National Federation of Subpostmasters cries foul after court ruling on controversial computer system.
  • December 2019: Former Post Office CEO apologises to subpostmasters over Horizon scandal.
  • December 2019: Call for former Post Office CEO to step down from public roles after IT court battle lost.
  • January 2020: Fujitsu must face scrutiny following Post Office Horizon trial judgment.
  • January 2020: Subpostmaster group calls for government to pay legal costs for Horizon trial.
  • January 2020: Why subpostmasters are calling on the government to pay Horizon trial costs.
  • January 2020: Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy says it did not make decisions in the Post Office’s recent court battle.
  • January 2020: Government should not be allowed to dismiss subpostmasters’ claims over Horizon IT scandal.
  • January 2020: Police sent information about potential Fujitsu staff perjury in subpostmaster prosecutions.
  • January 2020: Prosecutions are a significant step closer to being sent to the Court of Appeal as Criminal Courts Review Commission forms a group of commissioners to review them.
  • January 2020: Alan Bates: The “details man” the Post Office paid the price for ignoring.
  • February 2020: The government has refused to pay the huge legal costs subpostmasters incurred in their battle with the government-owned Post Office, which they won.
  • February 2020: Members of Parliament seeking a public inquiry into the Post Office Horizon scandal face huge challenges, but pressure and time could force justice.
  • February 2020: Calls for inquiry into Post Office IT scandal increase in Parliament, with cross-party support.
  • February 2020: Care Quality Commission to review concerns over Paula Vennells’ appointment after they were raised by a former NHS consultant psychiatrist.
  • February 2020: Government admits it was too passive managing Post Office as parliamentary pressure builds.
  • February 2020: Minister says Post Office IT experts misled the government when it asked questions about subpostmasters’ concerns over Horizon IT system.
  • March 2020: Boris Johnson commits to “getting to the bottom of” Post Office Horizon IT scandal.
  • March 2020: Boris Johnson’s commitment to inquiry into Post Office scandal in doubt.
  • March 2020: MPs call on PM to commit to full public inquiry into Post Office Horizon IT scandal.
  • March 2020: Those who did not play by the rules in Post Office Horizon scandal “should face prosecution”.
  • March 2020: MPs told to hold to account those responsible for Post Office Horizon IT scandal.
  • March 2020: The Post Office has sparked anger with secret settlements with subpostmasters outside the recent legal action against it.
  • March 2020: Labour MP Karl Turner tells Computer Weekly that the Post Office Horizon scandal is the most grotesque version of predatory capitalism he has ever seen.
  • March 2020: MP Kevan Jones has warned a government minister not to repeat the mistakes of predecessors in relation to the Post Office Horizon IT scandal.
  • March 2020: Criminal Cases Review Commission to use Microsoft Teams to ensure review of subpostmaster prosecutions is held on time.
  • March 2020: Post Office postpones subpostmaster compensation scheme amid Covid-19 crisis.
  • March 2020: Meeting reviewing subpostmaster applications to appeal criminal prosecutions moves into second day.
  • March 2020: Subpostmaster prosecutions to be considered by Court of Appeal for miscarriages of justice.
  • March 2020: How subpostmasters made legal history with biggest referral of potential miscarriages of justice.
  • April 2020: Met Police examines information about evidence given in court by Fujitsu staff on the Horizon IT system.
  • May 2020: Subpostmasters who had their lives ruined by the Post Office’s faulty IT system have received their damages after a High Court victory.
  • May 2020: A senior Post Office executive at the centre of an IT scandal, who tried to mislead a High Court judge in relation to it, has left the organisation without fanfare despite many years of service.
  • May 2020: Post Office re-examines hundreds of prosecutions that could have resulted from faults in Horizon IT system.
  • June 2020: A campaign group representing subpostmasters wrongly prosecuted for theft and false accounting by the Post Office is raising money to help clear the names of victims of the scandal.
  • June 2020: Subpostmasters to force scrutiny of government’s role in Post Office IT scandal.
  • June 2020: The Criminal Cases Review Commission sends 47 more subpostmaster cases to Court of Appeal and asks government to review private prosecution powers.
  • June 2020: Select committee chair writes to former Post Office CEO demanding answers over her role in IT scandal.
  • June 2020: The government has been accused of launching a review that fails in getting to the bottom of one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in UK history.
  • June 2020: Subpostmasters will not cooperate with government review into IT scandal.
  • June 2020: The government’s proposed review of the Post Office IT scandal has received a further setback as forensic accountants join subpostmasters in refusing to back it.
  • June 2020: Call for government review of Post Office Horizon scandal to have the power to force individuals to give evidence under oath.
  • June 2020: Subpostmasters seeking justice in the Post Office Horizon IT scandal are regaining momentum in Parliament.
  • June 2020: Healthcare regulator will be discussing concerns about former NHS boss chairing an NHS trust at an upcoming meeting.
  • June 2020: Second Sight is working with law firm in appeals by subpostmasters against criminal convictions in Horizon IT scandal.
  • June 2020: Post Office and Fujitsu blame each other for many of the failings in the Horizon IT scandal that wrecked lives.
  • June 2020: Parliamentary Justice Committee to hold short inquiry into the rules and regulations surrounding private organisations’ ability to initiate criminal proceedings.
  • July 2020: Victims of the Post Office Horizon IT scandal need to raise thousands of pounds in a week or those responsible for their suffering will avoid scrutiny.
  • July 2020: The government is set to face scrutiny over its involvement in the Post Office Horizon IT scandal, described as one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in modern UK history.
  • September 2020: The government repeats that it won’t pay victims’ legal costs and confirms review into the scandal will not have the power to call witnesses.
  • September 2020: Subpostmasters still not being told about all the known errors in the controversial Post Office branch accounting and retail system that they use.
  • October 2020: The Post Office has chosen not to contest 44 out of 47 appeals, meaning most are likely to have their names cleared, but others still face a Court of Appeal battle for justice.
  • October 2020: MPs are demanding the government holds a full statutory public inquiry into the Post Office IT scandal.
  • October 2020: NHS regulator continues enquiries about the appointment of former Post Office CEO at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust as more damning details emerge.
  • October 2020: Government minister met with former subpostmaster online in an attempt to get victims of the Post Office Horizon scandal involved in government review.
  • October 2020: The Post Office is focusing urgently on fixing an IT error suffered by a subpostmaster amid the ongoing IT scandal.
  • October 2020: Labour politicians are calling for the government to give the Post Office Horizon scandal inquiry the power to force witnesses to give evidence if they don’t cooperate.
  • October 2020: Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust has asked for external review of its process when appointing controversial executive.
  • November 2020: Government faces scrutiny of its handling of the Post Office IT scandal that destroyed subpostmasters’ lives and livelihoods.
  • November 2020: Post Office branches offline during busy business hours after suffering an IT error that the Post Office said related to IT from supplier Fujitsu.
  • November 2020: Fujitsu is refusing to explain what caused a national system outage in Post Office branches last week, despite the Post Office confirming the issue was the fault of the supplier.
  • November 2020: The Metropolitan Police opens criminal investigation into Fujitsu staff who gave evidence in trials of subpostmasters wrongly prosecuted and even imprisoned for financial crimes.
  • November 2020: Post Office criticised over vagueness of its explanation of the cause of a UK-wide IT failure that saw subpostmasters unable to do business.
  • November 2020: Post Office says planned firmware update caused the problem that left branches unable to do business for 90 minutes.
  • November 2020: Court documents reveal the names of the Fujitsu employees under investigation for potentially providing misleading information in criminal trials.
  • November 2020: The government allowed the Post Office to ‘run amok’ and destroy lives, says complaint to Parliamentary Ombudsman.
  • November 2020: Campaigning politician demands access to documents that could prove that the Post Office lied.
  • December 2020: Government denies responsibility for the abuse inflicted on subpostmasters by the Post Office over faulty IT system.
  • December 2020: CEO at the centre of the scandal that saw innocent people bankrupted and some sent to prison steps down from NHS role as pressure for her resignation grows.
  • December 2020: History made as subpostmasters wrongly prosecuted in Horizon IT scandal have convictions quashed.
  • December 2020: The appointment of a former Post Office executive, who tried to mislead a judge, in the Football Association of Wales has been questioned by an MP.
  • December 2020: Court of Appeal indicates subpostmasters can pursue appeal route that could do more damage to Post Office’s reputation.
  • January 2021: NHS trust defends its director appointment process following an external review of its recruitment of former Post Office CEO Paula Vennells.
  • January 2021: Lawyers call for changes to digital evidence rule that made it easier for the Post Office to ‘bamboozle courts’ and make subpostmasters pay a heavy price for its IT failings.
  • January 2021: The Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) has referred four more subpostmasters’ criminal convictions to appeal, as part of the biggest miscarriage of justice in modern UK history.
  • February 2021: A former senior developer who worked for Fujitsu on the Post Office IT system that led to subpostmasters being falsely accused of fraud, has claimed bosses knew of fundamental flaws before going live.
  • February 2021: Subpostmasters call for Boris Johnson to pause and reshape the government’s Horizon inquiry.
  • February 2021: Vote of no confidence in Football Association of Wales boss triggered by recruitment of former Post Office executive who tried to mislead a judge in IT trial.
  • March 2021: Government agrees to change private prosecution rules that were abused by the Post Office in its pursuit of subpostmasters wrongly accused of financial crimes.
  • March 2021: Subpostmaster victims who have spent millions bringing the Post Office IT scandal to light have received no reply to their concerns from Boris Johnson.
  • March 2021: MP condemns department’s ‘bizarre’ rejection of freedom of information request linked to Post Office IT scandal. 
  • March 2021: Football Association Wales boss steps down after losing confidence motion triggered by appointment of an executive involved in the Post Office IT scandal.
  • March 2021: The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) is reviewing five cases of potential miscarriage of justice in relation to subpostmaster prosecutions.
  • March 2021: Subpostmasters heading to Court of Appeal to clear their names in what is potentially the biggest miscarriage of justice in English legal history.
  • March 2021: The Post Office does not have enough money to pay compensation to the subpostmasters it wrongfully prosecuted.
  • March 2021: Angela van den Bogerd has left her role at the Football Association of Wales, following criticism of her part in Post Office IT scandal.
  • March 2021: Court of Appeal hearing reveals Post Office instructed employees to destroy documents that undermined an insistence that its Horizon computer system was robust.
  • March 2021: The Post Office was warned that a former Fujitsu employee had misled courts when giving evidence on its behalf.
  • March 2021: Boris Johnson agrees with MP that those responsible for the Post Office Horizon scandal should be brought to book.
  • March 2021: Former Post Office chief was paid over £400,000 when she left despite the organisation being involved in what would become the biggest miscarriage of justice in UK history.
  • April 2021: The UK government faces a potential judicial review over its Post Office Horizon IT scandal inquiry, after subpostmasters formally wrote to the government seeking one.
  • April 2021: The government is listening to calls for changes in how digital evidence is considered in court, as Post Office IT scandal spells out current rule’s inadequacy.
  • April 2021: The Post Office’s controversial contract with Fujitsu has been extended another year to help the organisation manage its exit.
  • April 2021: The Post Office is to move work done by Fujitsu in-house when its outsourcing contract ends, and is already recruiting IT experts.
  • April 2021: The Post Office has revealed the end to its controversial Horizon IT system which, through its errors and the Post Office’s denial of them, caused huge suffering.
  • April 2021: The UK government is the only block to fair compensation for subpostmasters who were wrongly punished for accounting shortfalls.
  • April 2021: The Court of Appeal has overturned the criminal convictions of 39 subpostmasters who were blamed and punished for accounting shortfalls caused by computer errors.
  • April 2021: Former Post Office CEO Paula Vennells has left roles in the church, Morrisons and Dunelm after postmasters’ convictions were overturned in the Court of Appeal.
  • April 2021: The biggest miscarriage of justice in UK history is set to get bigger as more subpostmasters take their cases to the Court of Appeal.
  • May 2021: Post Office IT scandal CEO has no excuse for her inaction in preventing the biggest miscarriage of justice in UK history, says Criminal Cases Review Commission chairperson.
  • May 2021: Subpostmasters, MPs and the public call for a full statutory judge-led public inquiry into the Post Office Horizon scandal, following another damning court judgment.
  • May 2021: Government says it wants to ensure a fair pay-out for the 555 subpostmasters who defeated the Post Office in a legal battle.
  • May 2021: The Post Office has contacted hundreds of people it might have wrongly prosecuted for financial crimes.
  • May 2021: The miscarriages of justice involving subpostmasters are the most disturbing element of the Post Office Horizon scandal – but it goes much deeper.
  • May 2021: The supplier at the centre of the Post Office Horizon scandal has so far escaped the ramifications of its role in the biggest miscarriage of justice in UK history.
  • May 2021: Another two former subpostmasters have had their convictions for financial crimes overturned, following a hearing in Southwark Crown Court.
  • May 2021: The government inquiry into the Post Office Horizon scandal is set to be made statutory with the power to compel witnesses and evidence.
  • May 2021: The government confirmed that the inquiry into the Post Office Horizon IT scandal will be given statutory status and wider scope.
  • May 2021: The Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance (JFSA) has agreed to meet the former judge heading up the inquiry into the Post Office scandal that ruined the lives of hundreds of subpostmasters.
  • May 2021: Criminal Cases Review Commission will not allow pressure on its resources to prevent subpostmasters seeking a review of their criminal convictions.
  • May 2021: Professional IT body wants changes to how computer evidence is used in court in the wake of the Post Office case.
  • June 2021: The Post Office Horizon scandal inquiry begins with subpostmaster campaign group waiting for full details before committing its support.
  • June 2021: Whatever the Post Office told government about its decision to sack investigators examining subpostmaster prosecutions for theft could identify if the government was part of a cover-up.
  • June 2021: The Post Office has so far compensated about 400 subpostmasters who suffered losses as a result of computer errors that they were wrongly blamed for.
  • July 2021: Another 10 subpostmasters are set to have their criminal convictions quashed as part of one of the biggest miscarriage of justice in British history.
  • July 2021: The government has made no contact with subpostmasters two months after it said it would work with them to ensure they get speedy and fair compensation.
  • July 2021: The cost of a scheme set up to compensate subpostmasters who were victims of the Horizon IT scandal will exceed £300m.
  • July 2021: The government will pay interim compensation within weeks to subpostmasters who were wrongly convicted of crimes due to computer errors.
  • August 2021: A further four subpostmasters are set to have their wrongful convictions overturned in the latest development in the Post Office Horizon scandal.
  • August 2021: The government has failed to provide fair compensation to the subpostmasters who exposed the full extent of the Horizon scandal to the world.
  • August 2021: Subpostmasters demand more clarity on Horizon public inquiry before committing their support.
  • September 2021: Six more subpostmaster convictions referred for appeal in Post Office IT scandal.
  • September 2021: Government minister holds secret meeting with Post Office Horizon scandal victims.
  • October 2021: The public inquiry into a scandal that saw subpostmasters imprisoned after being blamed for accounting shortfalls will hold its first public hearing early next month.
  • October 2021: A government minister investigating the controversial Horizon IT project in 2000 described the Post Office board of directors as ‘appalling, short-sighted and partisan’.

Paula Vennells CBE

A 2015 Computer Weekly article by Karl Flinders, ‘Post Office IT support email reveals known Horizon flaw’, says this about Paula Vennells:

In February 2015, Post Office CEO Paula Vennells and programme director for branch support Angela van den Bogerd were questioned at a parliamentary select committee investigating the Horizon dispute.

At the hearing Katy Clark, then MP for North Ayrshire and Arran, said: “One of the issues that has been put to me is that there is a lack of qualified people within the Post Office hierarchy with whom it is possible for a subpostmaster to have a discussion when there is a technical issue to do with the Horizon system. What are you doing to improve that, for example, and what other lessons have you learned?

Vennells replied: “I would say that that isn’t true. If subpostmasters have queries, they can escalate them as high as they need to. I get phone calls and emails, and I personally take them on a regular basis.”

Clark said: “But you are not an IT specialist?”

Vennells said: “If they have an IT query, I will immediately go to my CIO, and she [Lesley Sewell at the time, who has since left] is prepared to talk to any subpostmaster about it. The organisation wants to help subpostmasters to run Post Offices properly – of course we do – and we have put ourselves out as much as we possibly can. Where we have got it wrong, because human error happens, we have put in really significant changes in terms of the training and support that is available.”

She said a branch user forum was set up for subpostmasters, “who are very critical of us, which is why we did it – to learn the things that we can improve”.

MPs have accused the Post Office of having a culture of denial and not looking for possible causes for unexplained losses. In December 2014, Mike Wood, then MP for Batley and Spen, said there were too many cases in doubt for the Post Office to hold its stance that there were no problems with the Horizon system.

“Either the Post Office is awash with criminals who open sub-post offices for personal gain or something has gone terribly wrong. MPs are inclined to believe the latter and we are all shocked the Post Office seems to not want to get to the bottom of all this,” said Wood.

The aforementioned Mail article says:

As Chief Executive of the Post Office from 2012, Paula Vennells presided over the biggest miscarriage of justice in British history, resulting in countless ruined lives, not only Post Office staff but their families …

On her watch, the Post Office sought to bury the scandal, with Vennells not only obfuscating and giving misleading information to MPs, but also backing her organisation’s strategy of aggressively prosecuting innocent sub-postmasters using computer data it knew was flawed.

Vennells was, among other things, personally responsible for the sacking of Second Sight, a forensic accounting firm brought in to get to the bottom of the scandal, just days before it was due to publish its excoriating findings. She also sanctioned the combative legal strategy her organisation pursued against victims of the scandal who sought recompense.

For this, she was richly rewarded, earning £4.9 million including huge performance-related bonuses and a CBE to boot, during the seven years before she resigned in 2019. Months after she went, the High Court awarded £58 million in damages to 555 persecuted sub-postmasters.

That decision didn’t deter Vennells’s ambitions. Instead of retiring to her £2 million Grade II-listed farmhouse, she took up a string of lucrative high-status jobs. The NHS made her chair of a large trust. The Cabinet Office gave her an advisory role. Supermarket Morrisons gave her an £89,000-a-year non-executive directorship and home retailer Dunelm paid her £55,000 to join its board.

The Church of England, where Vennells served as a part-time priest, meanwhile decided to put her on the committee overseeing its ethical investments.

After the full extent of the scandal became public, she issued a series of grovelling apologies and quit the public roles. She’s still hanging on to that CBE, though.

The British public were incensed over Vennells’s CBE, the highest ranking Order of the British Empire awards. CBE stands for Commander of the Order of the British Empire. It is followed by the OBE, Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, then the MBE, Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.

On Tuesday, January 9, The Telegraph reported a little known fact about Vennells’s time as a clergywoman, a parenthetical insert to news that she had given up her CBE:

… Paula Vennells, the former Post Office chief executive who presided over the scandal, said she was handing back her CBE and said she was “truly sorry for the devastation” wreaked on sub-postmasters wrongly prosecuted and convicted. It also emerged that in 2017 she was considered for the role of Bishop of London.

Mrs Vennells said in a statement: “I have so far maintained my silence as I considered it inappropriate to comment publicly while the Inquiry remains ongoing and before I have provided my oral evidence.

“I am, however, aware of the calls from sub-postmasters and others to return my CBE. I have listened and I confirm that I return my CBE with immediate effect.”

However, Guido Fawkes rightly pointed out that only a monarch can remove a CBE:

As has been pointed out, only the King can actually remove titles. Until that point she remains Paula Vennells CBE.

The Telegraph‘s Allison Pearson expressed the nation’s displeasure in ‘The Post Office scandal has exposed Britain as a hotbed of cronyism and corruption’:

… Do I sound angry? Good. I am angry. Millions of us are bloody angry after watching Mr Bates vs the Post Office, a quietly devastating four-part ITV series about the Horizon scandal, including the role played by Vennells (a coldly impassive, morally inert characterisation by that great actress Lia Williams). Like Ken Loach’s 1966 Cathy Come Home (which highlighted the heartbreak of homelessness) and Alan Bleasdale’s Boys from the Blackstuff with its darkly uproarious account of mass unemployment (“Gissa job!”), this drama did what magazine articles, well-researched documentaries, podcasts, meetings with MPs, court proceedings and select committees all failed to do. It dramatised a human story so cruel, so unfair, the perpetrators so wicked, so all-powerful, so deaf to the pleas of ordinary decent people, that no one could watch it without being possessed by a sense of monstrous injustice. Some viewers cried, I certainly did; others were too enraged to go to sleep … 

Poor Mr Bates. After that dogged struggle of the underdog, a major honour for top dog Cruella de Vennells? It was intolerable. Unwelcome confirmation that the gilded, frictionless class to which Vennells belongs floats from one plum job to the next, never held to account for the destruction they leave behind while the little people try to salvage what remains of their lives among the ruins. No wonder that, in the immediate aftermath of the broadcast of Mr Bates Vs The Post Office, a petition calling for Vennells to be stripped of her CBE reached 1.2 million signatures. How right people were in their instinctive revulsion: her honour dishonoured honour itself. Even our Prime Minister, sensing which way public opinion was blowing, indicated he would not be displeased were the forfeiture committee to conduct an investigation that could lead to the title being removed. Vennells had no choice but to hand it back before pitchfork-waving viewers turned up at her door. (I am not a fan of mob justice in general, but it feels aptly poetic that Vennells should experience just a sliver of the fear and dread suffered by hundreds of sub-postmasters.)

“One day we will get the bastards,” Alan Bates promised all those years ago. The surrendering of Paula Vennells’ CBE removes a stinking trace of bastardry from this bad world, no doubt about that. But it’s no good if Vennells is made a sacrificial lamb while the whole pack of wolves gets off scot free. The Horizon case is so far-reaching, such a spider’s web of cronyism, corruption and perjury – from the highest levels of government to the judiciary, lawyers, investigators, the board of the Post Office, its previous chief executives and senior officials, the board of Fujitsu and the company’s systems analysts who lied when they said it wasn’t possible to access a sub-postmasters’ account – that the scandal has been called the British Watergate.

I’d say that it’s much greater than Watergate. The Horizon scandal involves hundreds of innocent men and women, some of whom are no longer alive to see justice.

To be continued next week