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Yesterday’s post discussed the first release of The Telegraph‘s Lockdown Files articles.
This was The Telegraph‘s front page on Wednesday, March 1, 2023:
The fallout was huge, as we can see from Metro‘s front page on Thursday, March 2:
Parliamentary debate
I left off yesterday mentioning the Urgent Question (UQ) in the House of Commons from Labour’s Liz Kendall about The Lockdown Files.
Lightweight Helen Whately, whom Hancock often lumbered with ministerial responsibility for questions he should have been answering during the pandemic, represented the Government. She was Hancock’s Social Care Minister, which she resumed under Rishi Sunak’s premiership.
The Telegraph‘s Madeline Grant wrote an excellent parliamentary sketch of the UQ debate. Excerpts follow, emphases mine:
Given the subject matter, Kendall might have at least concealed her glee a teensy bit … “And above all”, she said, glowering across the despatch box, “we need answers”. There was just one problem – the man in question was nowhere to be seen.
Instead, carrying the can was Whately, who professed herself “shocked and disappointed” by Kendall’s tone …
Whately stuck to the same talking points, delivered in a tone of reedy indecision; speaking of the “practicalities of implementation” and arguing again and again that the official Covid inquiry would prove a better forum for a “reasoned” discussion. Frazzled, waif-like, the Social Care Minister resembled a Victorian mudlark …
Soon the heckling began. “People died… unnecessarily!”, “You were warned at the time!” screeched Wes Streeting [Labour].
A few Tory backbenchers hit back. The Rt Hon Sir Oliver Heald KC complained of “trial by media and party politics”. (In Westminster? Sacre bleu!)
“Shameless politicking,” cried Dr Kieran Mullan of Crewe and Nantwich. Mullan demanded an apology from every Labour MP who’d accused Britain of having the worst death toll in Europe. He had a point – the opposition had flitted from years of clamouring for lockdown to launching a fleet of Captain Hindsights in very short order. At the same time, complaining about “politicking” in the Commons was a bit “no fighting in the war room”.
I wondered if, at some point, Helen Whately might crack, and begin a well-deserved rant: “I hate Matt Hancock! Why am I up here defending him? He ignored my care home warnings and scuttled off to do I’m A Celebrity, but not before handing over all his incriminating messages to a journalist!” Instead, she simply reminded the House once again of the importance of waiting for the public inquiry.
Who knows how long the public inquiry will take? We could experience more pandemics by the time it’s over.
GB News’s Tom Harwood says there is no end date:
Hancock lashes out at Isabel Oakeshott
Many of us are eternally grateful to Isabel Oakeshott, co-author of Matt Hancock’s Pandemic Diaries, who released 100,000 WhatsApp messages to The Telegraph.
Hancock is decidedly less so.
Oakeshott’s column for Thursday’s edition was ‘Matt Hancock can threaten me all he wants, our nation’s children must never suffer this way again’, which opened with this:
Of all the travesties and tragedies of the pandemic, the treatment of children is arguably the most egregious. Almost three years after the blind panic over the virus triggered the first ill-fated decision to shut schools, the casualness with which a generation of little ones were sacrificed so that politicians could continue to insist they were doing everything possible to “save lives” should still exercise every one of us. More than anything else, it is the appalling disregard for the wellbeing of young people – which should have been paramount– that has driven me to release these WhatsApp messages: even in the face of a threatening message from Mr Hancock at 1.20am on Wednesday – hours after the Telegraph published.
A Telegraph article about her appeared that day, ‘Isabel Oakeshott defends WhatsApp leak: “Anyone who thinks I did this for money must be utterly insane”‘.
She appeared on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme to answer questions from presenter Nick Robinson.
She told Robinson she was not going to get into a public spat with Hancock:
“Do you know what I’m not going to do, because it wouldn’t be pretty, is get involved in a slanging match with Matt Hancock.
“He can threaten me all he likes. There are plenty of things I can say about his behaviour, by the way, that I’m not going to do – at least not at this stage – because this is not about Matt Hancock. It is so much bigger than that.”
Pressed on the claim, which Mr Hancock denies, that he sent a threatening or menacing message to her, Ms Oakeshott declined to withdraw the claim.
“I’m saying that he sent me a message at 1.20am in the morning. It wasn’t a pleasant message.”
Hancock, as usual, had much more to say:
Matt Hancock has said he is “hugely disappointed” by what he said was a “massive betrayal and breach of trust by Isabel Oakeshott”.
In a statement, Matt Hancock added: “There is absolutely no public interest case for this huge breach. All the materials for the book have already been made available to the Inquiry, which is the right, and only, place for everything to be considered properly and the right lessons to be learned.
“As we have seen, releasing them in this way gives a partial, biased account to suit an anti-lockdown agenda.”
“Isabel and I had worked closely together for more than a year on my book, based on legal confidentiality and a process approved by the Cabinet Office. Isabel repeatedly reiterated the importance of trust throughout, and then broke that trust.”
Mr Hancock continued: “Last night, I was accused of sending menacing messages to Isabel. This is also wrong. When I heard confused rumours of a publication late on Tuesday night, I called and messaged Isabel to ask her if she had ‘any clues’ about it, and got no response.
“When I then saw what she’d done, I messaged to say it was ‘a big mistake’. Nothing more.
“I will not be commenting further on any other stories or false allegations that Isabel will make. I will respond to the substance in the appropriate place, at the inquiry, so that we can properly learn all the lessons based on a full and objective understanding of what happened in the pandemic, and why.”
Oakeshott’s interview on Radio 4 clears up two other issues of speculation on Wednesday — payment from The Telegraph and breaking a non-disclosure agreement:
Ms Oakeshott denied any suggestion she was paid by The Telegraph for the messages …
“They did not pay me for the messages, I’ve been helping the Daily Telegraph with the investigation, you’ll see that I’ve been writing stories for the Daily Telegraph” …
“You broke a written legal agreement, a non-disclosure agreement,” Mr Robinson said.
Ms Oakeshott said it was a matter of “public record” that she had signed an NDA, and that the “public interest is far more important”.
She is not wrong.
The inquiry is supposed to start this month — March 2023 — but there is no indication as to when.
Hancock determined to close schools
Thursday’s articles from The Lockdown Files concerned education:
Gavin Williamson, former Conservative Chief Whip, was the Education Secretary at the time.
Although there is clear water between him and Hancock right now, they did agree at the time on one thing — teachers’ unions.
‘Teachers looking for “excuse” not to work during pandemic, said Gavin Williamson’ says:
Sir Gavin Williamson criticised both school staff and unions for their response to coronavirus, saying that the latter “really do just hate work”.
Sir Gavin made the comments in a discussion with Matt Hancock as school staff prepared for the re-opening of classes in May 2020.
Surely ‘October 2020’ (see below):
By this point, schools had been effectively shut for two months with only vulnerable children and those whose parents were key workers allowed to attend in person. Ministers and teachers were planning for lessons to begin returning in June.
At the time there was a shortage of personal protective equipment and Sir Gavin said he had originally been told by officials that they could get this through the local resilience forums, composed of representatives from local public services, including the emergency services, and local authorities, but that the Department of Health had backtracked.
He contacted Mr Hancock to ask him to help unblock the request as it “will be very small demand as most schools will already have it and it is only aimed at the situation if a child is clearly ill”.
Mr Hancock agreed to help, noting that it was a “tiny amount” and it would only be needed when there were “no alternatives” …
The National Education Union (NEU) was a vocal critic of the Government’s handling of schools and had attacked ministers for a string of U-turns …
By the autumn, unions had made a number of demands including additional teachers, smaller classes and better access to tests for staff and students. Some were calling for exams to be cancelled for the second year running.
On the evening of Oct 1, the Telegraph released a front page confirming that Sir Gavin was planning to delay A-level exams for a few weeks.
At almost 10pm Mr Hancock got in touch with his Cabinet colleague, writing: “Cracking announcement today. What a bunch of absolute arses the teaching unions are”
Sir Gavin responded: “I know they really really do just hate work” …
Of course, in Parliament and to the media, Government ministers and Boris Johnson praised teachers.
However, Hancock had to prevail over his peers heading other departments, including Education.
‘Matt Hancock staged “rearguard” action to close schools’ tells us:
Matt Hancock mounted a “rearguard action” to close schools despite Sir Gavin Williamson battling “tooth and nail” to keep classrooms open, leaked WhatsApp messages reveal.
Exchanges seen by The Telegraph reveal that the then health secretary battled the education secretary in late December 2020 and suggested it was “mad” that Sir Gavin was attempting to keep schools open.
Mr Hancock initially lost a Cabinet argument during which he tried to persuade the Prime Minister to close schools ahead of their return in January 2021.
After Boris Johnson sided with Sir Gavin, Mr Hancock told an aide: “The next U-turn is born” and added: “I want to find a way, Gavin having won the day, of actually preventing a policy car crash when the kids spread the disease in January. And for that we must now fight a rearguard action.”
Messages show that Mr Hancock immediately contacted Dan Rosenfield, Mr Johnson’s chief of staff, and began an attempt to have schools closed before children returned. He then provided his private email address.
As the planned reopening became increasingly chaotic over the following week, with U-turns on dates and testing requirements for secondary schools, Mr Hancock and his team said Sir Gavin was having to eat “humble pie”.
On Jan 4, after many younger children had returned to classes for a single day, Mr Johnson announced that schools would close and exams would be cancelled amid a national lockdown. After the closures on Jan 4, schools did not reopen until March 8, depriving nine million children of another two months of education …
December 2020 ramped up the tension between Hancock and Williamson:
Despite ministers including Matt Hancock saying that they were doing all they could to keep schools open, behind the scenes the then health secretary was running a “rearguard action” to keep pupils at home. WhatsApp messages reveal that while he was offering to help Sir Gavin to his face, behind his back Mr Hancock and his advisers were mocking him for “freaking out” and joking that he was having to eat “humble pie”.
The article includes several WhatsApp screenshots.
Interestingly, there is no trace of Hancock’s exchanges with Dan Rosenfield, at least for now:
His conversations with Mr Rosenfield do not appear in the conversations that have been leaked to the Telegraph. Mr Hancock instead provided his personal email address after the PM’s chief of staff agreed to discuss the issue with him.
It is unclear whether conversations on private email will be handed over to the forthcoming Covid inquiry, although Hugo Keith KC, the chief counsel for the inquiry, said on Wednesday that witnesses have been encouraged to disclose “any informal or private communications”.
Tens of thousands of children in the UK never returned to schools once they reopened. They are known as ‘ghost children’. No one knows what happened to them:
The Lockdown Files show that Mr Hancock’s push to shut schools was just one of a number of repeated instances where the interests of children were apparently disregarded in favour of restrictions. Many of the measures went against the counsel of scientific advisers.
The decisions made around children’s education were among the most controversial of the pandemic. Studies have shown that keeping children away from the classroom led to a rise in mental health problems and a decline in development. Some children lost more than 100 days of schooling because of closures alone.
The Telegraph allowed Gavin Williamson to have his say, ‘Maybe I should have resigned when my plea to put children first was ignored’. I’m not fond of the man, but I do have empathy for him here:
What was most upsetting about closing down schools for a second time in January 2021 was that I felt it wasn’t done for the right reasons.
When the first lockdown happened, no one really knew what Covid was. It was such a new disease and the prevailing medical advice was that schools should close, so we obeyed it. There didn’t seem to be any choice about that at all. We had taken the view that we should follow the science.
But data from November 2020 told us that only 0.1 per cent were absent from school due to confirmed cases of coronavirus. So in my mind, the evidence pointed to keeping schools open.
Despite the fact we’d dispatched close to a million laptops, it was children from disadvantaged backgrounds that would be impacted most significantly if schools closed again. That’s what I worried most about.
I totally understood the need to protect the NHS but I also felt it was right to do everything we could to protect the futures of our young people.
The weekend before schools were due to go back after the Christmas holidays, we were being told it was absolutely okay for schools to return. That morning, you had Boris saying schools must stay open – only for that advice to completely change in a four hour period. By lunchtime, he was having to say that schools must close.
The data that they’d received over the weekend indicated a surge, and suddenly the Government was having to perform a U-turn. It was absolutely crushing. It was one of the worst moments of the entire pandemic.
You understand you’re the one who has to carry the can for it, but it is devastating to be put in that position.
Looking back now, I wonder whether I should have resigned at that point. I certainly thought long and deeply over whether I should have gone then. I just felt so personally upset about it. Ultimately, if the medical experts were saying that’s what needed to be done then you’re torn even if – in your heart of hearts – you know the best place for children was in school.
I’ve always been a team player, but you often found that different departments had different priorities and you sometimes felt that what was said one day was very rapidly changing the next day.
… I felt the situation in January was different to that earlier on in the previous year, and I felt that the prioritisation of children should mean protecting their right to go to school.
… I will never stop believing that arguing for schools to stay open in January 2021 was the right thing to do.
At all stages of the pandemic, we saw teachers, teaching assistants and support staff doing so much, caring for children, putting them first. Amazing work was being done in schools up and down the country.
I think all those who are passionate about education knew that children were best in the classroom – and I stand by this argument, as I hope others do too.
GB News panellists react
Dan Wootton is on a fortnight’s holiday with his relatives.
Patrick Christys was guest host on Wednesday, and, as ever, was a triumph.
The full video is here:
Highlights follow, beginning with Christys’s opening editorial, accompanied by an article in the second tweet:
The channel’s detractors say that GB News promoted the Government line during the pandemic. GB News did not start broadcasting until the June 13, 2021. Furthermore, it has always had an abundance of Covid sceptics, then and now. Tonia Buxton was and is one of them:
A columnist from Conservative Home said that Hancock should not face a criminal investigation and advised us to wait for the results of the inquiry. Christys and the two panellists, one representing care home patients and the other schoolchildren, disagreed with him:
Barrister Francis Hoar, another Covid sceptic, appeared later to say that the Government failed ‘to protect the most vulnerable’:
A member of the public, Tony Stowell, whose mother died in a care home during the pandemic, described his creepy encounter with Matt Hancock. Chilling:
At the end of the show, Laura Dodsworth, yet another Covid sceptic, was named Greatest Briton for that day and Matt Hancock the Union Jackass:
Well worth watching.
Why The Lockdown Files are crucial
Everyone has been commenting on The Lockdown Files, and rightly so.
The paper has a round-up of media personalities from both sides of the political spectrum giving their opinion, ‘Famous names react to The Telegraph’s Lockdown Files revelations’. All are positive.
Their columnist Allister Heath explained the importance of the revelations in ‘Untruth after untruth was peddled to justify the great lockdown disaster’:
Let’s face it: Whitehall has learned almost nothing from the fiasco of 2020-22. There has been no proper cost-benefit analysis of lockdown. We haven’t engaged in a genuine inquest, our institutions haven’t been reformed, and the official inquiry will take too long and risks being captured by an establishment desperate to defend its legacy. Sir Keir Starmer, favourite to be our next prime minister, was at one with the Government and Matt Hancock on lockdowns – his only criticism was that he wanted more of the same, faster.
This is why The Telegraph’s Lockdown Files are so important, and so clearly in the public interest. Given officialdom’s glacial progress, the free press has a duty to release information, accelerate debate and hold power to account.
One question in particular that should trouble all of us is why so many of the claims made during the pandemic turned out not to be true …
Or take the origins of the virus. Those who sought to explore whether it might have originated in a Chinese laboratory in Wuhan were demonised, ridiculed or cancelled. Now, the director of the FBI has concluded that this is the most likely explanation. This begs a crucial question: would we have followed China’s methods – lockdown and extreme social control – had we imagined the Beijing authorities were covering up a Chernobyl-style disaster? Might we not have gone for a more voluntarist, Swedish style approach? Where are the profuse apologies from all those who tarred supporters of the lab leak hypothesis as “racist”, “Trumpites” or “conspiracy theorists”? …
Covid saw endless politicians, bureaucrats, public health officials, scientists, professional journal editors, Twitter activists, Left-wing broadcasters and especially big tech firms transmogrify into authoritarian censors. They thought that “following the science” meant that their role was to amplify whatever the public health establishment’s most risk-averse current consensus was, rather than to pursue the truth independently. They convinced themselves that dissidents were heartless, paranoid freaks. They went on a terrifying power and ego trip.
The lesson is clear. Even in a crisis, free speech and open inquiry must be nurtured: elite groupthink is too often wrong, and must at all times be scrutinised. Long live the free press.
I could not agree more.
The official inquiry will find The Telegraph‘s revelations difficult to ignore. Heads should roll — in time. I would also like to see prison sentences dished out to the greatest offenders.
On February 4, 2023, Liz Truss wrote an exclusive 4,000 word article for The Telegraph: ‘I assumed upon entering Downing Street my mandate would be respected. How wrong I was’.
The date matters as it had been around 100 days since she left office as Prime Minister.
Excerpts follow, emphases mine.
She reflected on where she was at this point in 2022. February 24, the date of this post, is the first anniversary of the Russia-Ukraine conflict:
One year ago this week, I went to Moscow as foreign secretary to warn my Russian counterpart of the grave consequences that would result from any invasion of Ukraine. Had anyone told me then that, 12 months later, I would be a backbench MP following a 49-day term as prime minister, I would not have believed it.
Since my departure from Downing Street just over 100 days ago, I’ve spent many hours reflecting on what happened during my time there, what went wrong and what I might have done differently. This soul-searching has not been easy.
Now I want to set out, from my perspective, what happened and what I have learned.
Urgency
When Boris stood down as Conservative Party leader on July 7, Truss was in Bali at a G20 meeting of foreign ministers:
I watched his speech live in my hotel room. It struck me as crazy to be deposing a leader who had secured an 80-seat Commons majority for the Conservative Party less than three years ago.
I had always assumed that Boris would fight the next general election in 2024. Standing for the leadership myself was a faraway prospect and, as a result, I didn’t have any kind of infrastructure in place for the contest on which the starting gun had just been fired.
All I had in that hotel room, nearly 8,000 miles from Westminster, was a series of messages urging me to return to London – including one from a fellow foreign minister that simply read: “Get back home woman and start hustling.”
That’s what I felt compelled to do.
She thought that boldness was the way forward:
I feared the consequences of high energy prices, high taxes and a slowing global economy without bold action. What we really needed was a change in policy direction and mindset in order to kick-start a return to sustainable economic growth.
As it was, the Government’s economic policy platform included raising National Insurance (imposing the so-called Health and Social Care Levy) and increasing corporation tax to the same level as France – positions which I had vigorously challenged around the Cabinet table. Meanwhile, I sensed increasing resistance within the Government to the essential proposals to diverge from EU rules.
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it, under Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt? No wonder she had to go.
She felt a sense of urgency:
As I started piecing together my nascent leadership campaign, I was struck – not for the last time – with a sense that there was a vast amount to do and very little time in which to do it …
My party agreed that we needed to stop drifting in the direction of a higher-tax, higher-spend economy being choked by ever more regulation, which was causing sluggish growth, low productivity and a dampening of enterprise and innovation. My plan to get Britain back on the right trajectory was popular.
Her husband warned her about throwing her hat into the ring:
… my husband warned me that it would be awful – I could not duck the challenge. I knew that if I didn’t step up, I would regret it …
The leadership campaign turned out to be as brutal as my husband had feared. I was called everything from immoral to insane – and that was just some of the “friendly fire” I encountered.
As Prime Minister:
Instinctively, I was determined to act with maximum speed. I knew this risked mistakes being made, but the normal pace of the Whitehall machine would be nowhere near sufficient to tackle the immediate emergencies we were facing, let alone to attempt to get the British economy onto a path to growth with barely two years left until the next election.
As a matter of urgency, I dealt with the issue of energy bills, which were projected to rise as high as an annual £6,000 for British families as a consequence of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Designing a targeted scheme was impossible given the urgency of the situation, so it had to be universal. Families and businesses would not be able to cope for much longer without assistance. I was also working on ways of mitigating the costs, in particular by signing up to longer-term energy supply agreements as well as through enabling more North Sea production, fracking and renewable energy. We urgently needed to move away from the short-termist approach that had left the UK dependent on global energy prices and vulnerable to the actions of a hostile state with strategic energy interests.
The benefits to the economy of the package were clear: it was set to reduce peak inflation by five per cent and contribute to our primary economic objective of boosting trend growth to 2.5 per cent. It’s no exaggeration to say that there are firms which remain in business today only because of the action we took. This intervention prevented a major economic crisis. The markets welcomed my intervention, reducing the sky-high levels of uncertainty and anxiety.
The mini-Budget
The Queen’s death and the consequent suspension of Parliament for two weeks did not help Truss’s time in Downing Street.
Still, she had to press on, regardless:
… because of the expected size of the energy package (albeit dwarfed by the money spent on Covid-19 pandemic measures), it was going to be necessary for us to make a fiscal statement very soon.
The date of what inevitably became known as the mini-Budget was set for Sept 23. In hindsight, perhaps we could have delayed it for a few days. However, much longer than that would have meant not sticking to our commitments.
There were concerns in some quarters that the announcement would not be accompanied by forecasts from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR). However, the OBR’s core purpose is to produce twice-yearly forecasts on whether the Government is on track to meet its fiscal targets. Commissioning a report at that juncture would not have been appropriate, given that the forecast would have been unable to take into consideration the future spending decisions we planned to outline in the Medium Term Fiscal Plan a few weeks later.
It’s also worth recalling that no OBR forecast has accompanied many other fiscal announcements, not least the Covid-19 furlough scheme, which cost £70 billion.
As I had spelled out during the leadership campaign, I wanted to go for growth by reversing the proposed rises to corporation tax and National Insurance and implementing a programme of economic reform in order to prevent recession and stagnation and put the UK on a positive path.
Treasury opposition
She described how the civil servants at the Treasury think:
I saw first-hand during my two years as chief secretary to the Treasury that pessimism and scepticism about the growth potential of the British economy are sadly endemic at the Treasury: serious planning reform was dismissed as not politically deliverable; discussing monetary policy was a taboo; deregulation of financial services and other industries was viewed as undermining the prospects of a deal with the EU; and Brexit was seen as a damage-limitation exercise rather than a once-in-a-generation opportunity.
Instead, the focus from the Treasury was on micro, top-down tinkering such as productivity initiatives trying to encourage firms to become more efficient, along with government intervention.
Favourable reception
Truss called our attention to the favourable reception of the mini-Budget:
Following the announcement on Sept 23, the National Institute of Economic and Social Research came out and forecast that our energy support guarantee, coupled with the tax cuts announced, would lead to positive GDP growth in the fourth quarter of 2022, shortening the recession and raising annual GDP growth to around two per cent over 2023-24.
There were positive reactions from many quarters. Kitty Ussher, a Treasury minister in Gordon Brown’s government and now chief economist at the Institute of Directors, declared it “a good news day for British business”, adding that “in a time of low confidence and economic uncertainty, the new chancellor’s emphasis on going for growth will be very welcome to firms of all sizes across the UK”.
Tony Danker, director-general of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), hailed it as “a turning point for our economy” and “day one of a new UK growth approach”, recognising that “a simpler, smarter approach to tax can pay dividends”.
There were some concerns about the abolition of the 45p tax rate, a small measure and virtually the only one I had not trailed during the leadership campaign. We were simply returning to the top rate that was in place for the vast majority of the 1997-2010 Labour government, although clearly the political sands had shifted.
Nonetheless, as the chancellor and I travelled to Kent to visit a factory that afternoon, we were positive that we had done the right thing for the country and felt optimistic about the future.
Pensions debacle a surprise
Truss explained why she was unaware of the effect of the mini-Budget on pension funds:
At no point during any of the preparations for the mini-Budget had any concerns about liability-driven investments (LDIs) and the risk they posed to bond markets been mentioned at all to me, the chancellor or any of our teams by officials at the Treasury. But then, late on the Sunday night, came the jitters from the Asian markets as they opened. I was alerted to this on the Monday morning, at which point the Bank of England governor was wanting to make a statement on LDIs.
Readers will not be surprised that, given their impact on events, since leaving office I have spent some time looking into LDIs. I was shocked by what I discovered.
In the early 2000s, pension funds were heavily underfunded. To increase their returns, they used LDIs – which use bond derivatives – freeing up cash for the pension funds to invest in other assets. This works when markets are calm but becomes problematic when the price of government bonds falls within a short timeframe. As LDIs entered the financial mainstream, with The Pensions Regulator seemingly encouraging their uptake, warnings started to be issued on the risks they could pose to financial markets – all unbeknownst to me at the time.
Astonishingly, it turns out that the value of total assets in LDI strategies is equivalent to around 60 per cent of the UK’s GDP.
The day before the mini-Budget, the Bank of England raised interest rates by 0.5 per cent, whereas the US Federal Reserve had just announced a third successive rate rise of 0.75 per cent. In addition, the Bank simultaneously confirmed plans for a bond-selling programme. Bond prices fell sharply, putting pension funds under pressure.
Dramatic movements in the bond market had already begun, meaning the mini-Budget faced a very difficult environment. Only now can I appreciate what a delicate tinderbox we were dealing with in respect of the LDIs.
Admitting mistakes
In retrospect, Truss admitted that she made mistakes:
Regrettably, the Government became a useful scapegoat for problems that had been brewing over a number of months. Interest rates had been rising internationally and mortgage costs had been forecast to go up for some time.
I fully admit that our communication could have been better. As I said during the leadership campaign, I am not the slickest communicator. In addition, we did not have a system that was enthusiastic about communicating messages contrary to its orthodoxy and, so early in my premiership, I had not established the infrastructure inside No 10 to best explain all that we were doing.
In hindsight, maybe I should not have headed to New York after the late Queen’s funeral to attend the UN General Assembly and instead supervised the final preparation of our announcements more closely.
Knowing what I know now, undoubtedly I would have handled things differently. I underestimated the extent to which the market was on edge and, like many others, was not aware of how fragile our system had become.
But, frankly, we were also pushing water uphill. Large parts of the media and the wider public sphere had become unfamiliar with key arguments about tax and economic policy and over time sentiment had shifted Left-wards. This is partly because we Conservatives had failed to make these arguments enough since 2010 – instead triangulating with Labour policy. It was also clear that, internal disagreements within my own party aside, there was a broader consensus in favour of raising taxes.
How the system operates
Truss explained how the system operates and how it fails long-term economic vision:
The process operates at arms-length, based on models which rely on a wide range of assumptions, including on the delivery of policies. In my view, this static modelling tends to undervalue the benefits of low taxes and supply-side reforms for economic growth, and overvalue the benefits of public spending. This inevitably puts pressure on a higher-tax and higher-spend outcome – hence the inexorable tax rises we are now seeing.
In the medium term, I believed my policies would have increased growth and therefore reduced debt.
Five-year forecasts are treated as accurate predictions and therefore filling the “gap” becomes the imperative of government policy. This leads to policies being adjusted to fit those forecasts, only for those forecasts to be revised with each new iteration of the figures, forcing further policy change down the line.
As a result, the Government is forced to make economically detrimental decisions, such as raising corporation tax, based on uncertain forecasts that may not come to fruition. For example, in September the energy package was set to cost £60 billion and by November it was forecast to be £43 billion, yet the latest projections are considerably lower.
Global opposition
With Truss at the helm, the UK was out of step with the rest of the Western nations. Conservative Party members might have liked her policies, but TPTB clearly did not:
We were also swimming against the international tide. There was a concerted effort by international actors to challenge our Plan for Growth. The IMF commented on distributional aspects rather than market stability which it is hard to conclude was anything but politically motivated.
Then there was the intervention from President Biden, who publicly voiced his disagreement with our economic policy, stating: “I wasn’t the only one that thought it was a mistake.”
These interventions were, sadly, in tune with growing efforts on the world stage to limit competition between G7 economies, as evidenced by the proposed global minimum tax rates.
Facing the headwinds we did, I could not allow the markets – backed by this economic consensus – to keep betting against the UK. Before long, I was given the starkest of warnings by senior officials that further market turmoil could leave the UK unable to fund its own debt. This is why I reluctantly concluded I had no option but to remove the chancellor and change the policy.
I was deeply disturbed by having to do this. Kwasi Kwarteng had put together a brave package that was genuinely transformative – he is an original thinker and a great advocate for Conservative ideas. But at this point, it was clear that the policy agenda could not survive and my priority had to be avoiding a serious meltdown for the UK. I still believe that seeking to deliver the original policy prescription on which I had fought the leadership election was the right thing to do, but the forces against it were too great.
I am very pleased that elements of it did survive – the reversal of the National Insurance rise and the cuts to stamp duty – and those measures have eased the burden a little on hard-working families and those buying their own home. But it was obviously going to be difficult to remain as prime minister after abandoning the thrust of the platform on which I had been elected, and it was already clear that elements of the parliamentary party were not prepared to allow me to stay.
I am not claiming to be blameless in what happened, but fundamentally I was not given a realistic chance to enact my policies by a very powerful economic establishment, coupled with a lack of political support.
Party opposition
Both Truss and Conservative Party members learned something about their MPs:
I underestimated the resistance inside the Conservative parliamentary party to move to a lower-tax, less-regulated economy. The furore over the reduction of the top rate of income tax was testament to this. In the overall package of measures, it was – in fiscal terms – little more than a rounding error, equivalent to 0.2 per cent of government spending. Even though the measure was economically sound, I underestimated the political backlash I would face, which focused almost entirely on the “optics” …
As a result:
We have ended up in a situation as a country where fiscal policy is in a straitjacket. Moreover, there is a worrying economic consensus – both at a national and, increasingly, international level – that is preventing economic dynamism and growth.
Median incomes here in the UK are now well below those in the US, Switzerland or Norway and the average in developed countries. If we are to succeed in putting our country on a path to high growth, rising wages and becoming internationally more competitive, things need to change.
We have not done enough over the past decade to make the arguments for a lower-tax, more deregulated economy, which meant that the groundwork had not been laid for what I sought to do …
And while I saw the power of “the blob of vested interests” within many a Whitehall department during my more than 10 years in ministerial office, I seriously underestimated the strength of the economic orthodoxy and its influence on the market.
Nonetheless, the average Joe and Jane are on Truss’s side:
I have lost track of how many people have written to me or approached me since leaving Downing Street to say that they believe my diagnosis of the problems causing our country’s economic lethargy was correct and that they shared my enthusiasm for the solutions I was proposing.
Ultimately, she still has hope that the UK can turn itself around. Millions of us hope so.
Pundits’ views
On February 6, The Telegraph‘s Tim Stanley concluded that ‘undemocratic forces prevailed’.
He says that she was not given a chance, whereas Theresa May was:
Theresa May nearly lost an election and bungled Brexit, yet the Tories stuck with her for three years. In 2023, by contrast, we got through three PMs in one year.
Was this really the reason May survived and Truss did not?
That’s because our economy and society were upended by a pandemic that stoked demands for more government while injecting wild anxiety into our political culture.
Perhaps it was.
The most pathological thing is that the IMF is now advocating Trussonomics:
… last week the IMF said British recovery would be limited by its tax rises. And that, you silly people, was Truss’s entire point.
CapX‘s Jon Moynihan says that the Bank of England was at least partly responsible for Truss’s fall. He notes that no one has bothered to investigate their role in what happened in late September 2022 (green emphases his):
The Bank of England’s Governor, Andrew Bailey, offered a classic of the ‘not me guv’ genre of explanations, telling the Treasury Committee that the movement in gilt rates had been ‘outside historical experience’. But this was no bolt from the blue: the movement was a self-feeding one, caused by the leverage that regulators had permitted. Moreover, there are plenty of ‘historical experiences’ of industries with risky financial structures provoking market chaos. Remarkably, Bailey also claimed the Bank’s later bond sales didn’t move the markets. That’s an odd claim, given that their promise to purchase £65bn of bonds was responsible for stopping the gilts rout: both claims can’t be correct.
Of course, it suits the Bank to blame politicians for its own failings, particularly when the relationship between Bailey and Truss was never a particularly warm one to begin with. But there’s a much broader failure here of the regulatory system to do anything about LDI funds – one that cannot plausibly be laid at Truss or Kwarteng’s door.
Equally striking, however, is how little political scrutiny we’ve had of the whole affair. The consensus view that ‘the mini budget blew up the bond market’ seems to have been swallowed whole. But Parliament, via the Treasury and Work and Pensions committees, should be asking a long list of questions about why this situation was allowed to develop, what regulators did and didn’t know, why there seemed to be such pervasive ignorance of LDIs and how the Bank misjudged its calls on interest rates and the jump to QT immediately before the mini budget.
This is not just about identifying the mistakes of the past, however. There are still huge questions about the state of the UK’s pensions funds that we need to get to the bottom of. At the very least, we should be told the state of the funds that have not recovered from September’s rout and how big the overall hole is (Bailey told the Treasury Committee he didn’t know the answer to that question). There is also the question of which players in the market aggressively sold this high-risk strategy to pension funds, and whether they deserve sanction.
There is a separate but important set of questions about the Bank’s management of its own £5bn pension pot, which until June was 100% invested in a single Blackrock LDI fund (it was subsequently reduced to 82%).
Given the reports that this Blackrock fund took a hammering last September, we ought to know what the status of the Bank’s own pension scheme now is. The Blackrock fund was reportedly under unsustainable pressure during the bond rout, and at one point was alleged to have lost an amount in the high tens of billions of pounds, threatening complete collapse. The Bank’s Pension Fund’s share of that loss was, some claim, around £1.5bn (out of its original £5bn).
If so, all of the bank’s employees, from Andrew Bailey down, were under threat of losing much of the value of their gold-plated pensions. And imagine if the loss had not been recovered, it would have meant the Bank either reneging on its vast pension obligations to its employees, or finding £1.5bn from elsewhere, most likely you and me, the taxpayers. All of which suggests a serious potential conflict of interest concerning the Bank’s interventions in the bond markets and of its own employees’ pensions.
Yet so far we’ve had no real investigation of what the position of the Bank’s fund is, whether the money has been recovered or how much is needed to return its members to fully funded status. Likewise, there has been no discussion of whether members of the Bank’s Employee Pension Board (some on the Court of the Bank) are going to receive any criticism, sanction or blame for having acceded to what now appears an extremely naïve and dangerous investment strategy. (Indeed, today the FT reports that pension schemes are being told to sell their holdings in LDI funds, particularly Blackrock).
Former Brexit Party MEP and property developer Ben Habib blames the Bank of England — as well as Conservative MPs and the Treasury. On February 6, The Express reported their interview with him:
“Tory socialists, Michael Gove leading the charge, immediately moved to bring her down. The Treasury openly undermined her thesis. And even the Bank of England briefed and acted against her.”
The day before former Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng’s now-infamous mini-budget, the BoE had forecast a recession, Mr Habib said.
He added: “It had been selling government bonds already putting pressure on their value. As values fell, pension funds, which had overleveraged themselves buying this rubbish were forced to dump it in order to remain solvent.
“The markets smelt a collapse and capitalised on the opportunity. Sterling was shorted. Having set-off these collapses, the Bank of England and all those who feast on state largesse laid the blame at Truss’s door.”
Within days Ms Truss had been ousted and replaced with Mr Sunak, “someone it could trust not to unsettle the status quo”, Mr Habib argued.
He continued: “Sunak (supported fully by the Bank of England) is the man responsible for increasing national debt by a whopping £500 billion, or 33 percent in just two years.
“He has borrowed more money than any Chancellor in history but the establishment saw fit to give him the keys to the country.
“The new Prime Minister is not short of self-confidence. He believes he knows best how to spend our money. To him, those of us who think otherwise are idiots.
“Liz Truss offered the nation an opportunity to reverse our managed decline. Instead, failed orthodoxy prevailed.”
Political commentator Tom Harwood also blames the Bank of England and says that Trussonomics was never tried:
In reality Truss implemented virtually none of her pro-agenda. In fact she had barely announced any of it before the men in grey suits came knocking.
But didn’t she cost us £65 billion? So say reputable sources like the Have I Got News For You twitter account, French TV’s ‘Mr Europe’, and Afghan dog rescue enthusiast Dominic Dyer. In reality, however £65 billion was not lost due to the mini budget. That was the amount that the Bank of England said it was willing to commit to stabilise the gilt market. As the independent economist Julian Jessop notes, in reality about £19 billion was spent by the bank, which – crucially – ended up delivering a profit of about £4 billion. But again, this was all before anyone had even got to the real point of Trussism.
The framework of what could have been is found throughout a document that the Rishi Sunak promptly ripped to shreds upon entering number ten. And no, it’s not all about tax cuts. In fact, the most important parts – the most interesting bits too – are the other areas of supply side reform. Cheap or free to do, and potentially transformational. It was all laid out, albeit not in full detail, in The Growth Plan.
Harwood contends that the IMF was criticising Truss’s blanket energy support plan, not the rest of her economic policy (green emphasis his):
It might be useful to explore what the IMF actually said in its press statement, the primary focus of which regarded the UK’s “aims at helping families and businesses deal with the energy shock”, going on to say that “we do not recommend large and untargeted fiscal packages at this juncture”. It’s talking about the energy price freeze. The least controversial part of the mini budget, pushed for by Labour – that free market think tanks like the Institute of Economic Affairs heavily criticised.
The IMF rightly points out that the energy price freeze would increase inequality – the plan devised by Labour and implemented by the Tories subsidises those who use more energy more than those who use less. Millionaires heating their swimming pools receive more taxpayer support than low income families in small houses or flats. And yet there was almost absolute political consensus on this enormous untargeted intervention.
Indeed, reading the IMF’s press statement in full, before any mention of tax cuts, the primary concern is clearly the energy package. A package that could have cost up to £200 billion. As the numerate will recognise, hundreds of billions of pounds is a larger amount than £8 billion. Perhaps it makes sense that this is what the IMF’s statement focussed on, ahead of new tax cuts.
Ultimately, Truss implemented a Labour plan for energy bills:
The biggest problem with the mini budget – other than a perceived disrespect for institutions like the Office for Budget Responsibility in delaying its report until months after the mini-budget – was the extra and uncertain spending the government committed to. The energy price guarantee was estimated to cost anywhere between 100bn and 200bn, although these estimates were in and of themselves guesses, as the guarantee committed the state to cover the cost of energy above a guaranteed unit price, however high it got. This was a functionally limitless commitment, made at a time of uncertainty in the international energy market. A decision clearly far more dangerous than the reversal of a handful of recent tax rises.
It was bad policy, and it was in no way free market. This element of government’s plan – pushed for by all opposition parties – was the opposite of a libertarian experiment. It was socialist.
If Conservative MPs should be angry about the Truss administration for anything, it was its capitulation to the Labour Party’s policy team and their ill thought through, indiscriminate, untargeted intervention that cost far more than the entirity of furlough.
Even the Labourite magazine The New Statesman said that Truss was not to blame for ‘crashing the economy’, something the Party’s MPs still repeat with nauseating regularity:
Too much anger about Truss’s time at No 10 has focused on the “unhappy” rather than the “brief”. There are reasonably hard limits as to what even a determined wrecker of civilisation can achieve in 49 days, particularly in an economy as large and complex as the UK’s.
To do truly lasting damage you need more time – perhaps a decade, which is roughly how long we were subjected to the fiscal insanity of austerity. The social consequences of this are too obvious to ignore: the queues at the food banks, the rough sleepers, the crumbling schools, the collapsing National Health Service. Average life expectancy, for the first time since 1900, has stalled.
But the economic impacts have been more subtle, and too little discussed. By draining demand out of the economy, spending cuts depressed growth. By slashing government investment, they undermined future productivity. The combination of both together is the primary cause of the UK’s economic malaise – more so than Brexit, and far more so than Truss.
… it wasn’t ideologues such as Truss or Kwasi Kwarteng that condemned the UK to this fate. It was dead-eyed Sensibles like George Osborne who calmly shredded our prosperity, and affable former bureaucrats who justified those decisions. As a BBC review found last week, we suffer from a corps of political journalists who lack an understanding of “basic economics”, relying instead on a limited selection of assumed authorities who, in turn, never deviate far from the Treasury view. The result was what the Confederation of British Industry head Tony Danker has called a “doom loop”: as austerity failed, its failures justified more austerity to deal with the failures. Jeremy Hunt’s response to Truss’s implosion was to insist on a new round of spending cuts, was another crank of the handle.
Did Truss cause harm while she was in office? Yes, of course. The combination of radicalism and ineptitude in the mini-Budget led to a spike in government borrowing costs, triggering unexploded bombs in our pension funds, and rising mortgage rates. But the removal of Kwarteng as chancellor and then the prime minister herself rapidly (if not quite entirely) unwound that financial damage, leaving us much as we would have been without Truss – that is to say, in dire economic straits …
Truss is a sideshow. The more we focus on her, the less attention we are paying to the primary causes of our unmistakable economic decline – which means, above all, the austerity programme of the 2010s. Britain’s economic woes have not been caused by its messiahs, but by its managers. The problem isn’t the [libertarian] Institute of Economic Affairs. It’s the Institute for Fiscal Studies.
There are several other commentators along with Conservative MPs who think that Trussonomics is not quite yet dead.
More on them next week.
Yesterday’s post introduced the sad saga of Prime Minister Liz Truss and her first Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng over their fateful fiscal event of Friday, September 23, 2022.
My post ended with the market turmoil and negativity up to Friday, September 30.
Many of us hoped that his plan would work. After all, the market turmoil is global, for different reasons in different Western countries.
What motivates Kwarteng
On Wednesday, September 28, Rachel Sylvester wrote an interesting profile of Kwarteng for The Times, complete with photos of him and Truss from their earlier days as MPs. One from 2013 shows them together at a book awards event and another from 2018 has them enjoying a picnic at that year’s Hay literary festival.
Excerpts follow, emphases mine.
Kwarteng was pleased with his fiscal event and believed the market’s jitters were temporary:
So sure was he of his plan that he smiled as he announced that he was abolishing the cap on bankers’ bonuses introduced by David Cameron in 2014.
Within hours the pound had tanked, but Kwarteng doubled down, promising that he had “more to come”. As the markets reacted to the UK’s biggest tax cuts in 50 years, the pound fell to a record low against the dollar. One senior figure in the City described the fiscal statement to me as “economically reckless”. Yet the chancellor did not blink, with an ally suggesting that this was just “the City boys playing fast and loose with the economy” and insisting, “It will settle.”
Although it is unclear what Kwarteng thinks today, he and Truss were allies dating back at least a decade:
At 47, Kwarteng is the same age as Liz Truss and is one of her closest political allies. Earlier this year, he moved into a house just down the road from her in Greenwich and now they are neighbours in Downing Street. His appointment as chancellor was one of the first decisions she made when it became clear that she was likely to win the Tory leadership contest. Truss and Kwarteng have been working for weeks on their “shock and awe” shake-up of taxes, including changes to stamp duty and the abolition of the top 45p rate of income tax. The blueprint has been in their dreams for years …
His allies say his politics have also evolved. In 2012 the chancellor was one of a group of free marketeers – including Truss – who published a pamphlet called Britannia Unchained, which described British workers as “among the worst idlers in the world” and railed against a “bloated state, high taxes and excessive regulation”. He has since distanced himself from the controversial text.
His parents arrived in England from Ghana. Both received a first-class education and had top-flight careers:
An only child, Akwasi Addo Alfred Kwarteng was born in Waltham Forest, northeast London, in 1975. His parents had come to Britain as students in the Sixties. His father, Alfred, an economist for the Commonwealth Secretariat, was educated in Ghana at an Anglican school with a Winchester-educated English headmaster. His mother, Charlotte, a successful barrister, was an admirer of Margaret Thatcher. “It was a self-reliance thing,” Kwarteng once explained. She instilled in her son a ferocious work ethic and education was of fundamental importance to the family.
When his father was posted to Switzerland, Kwasi was sent at the age of eight to board at the fee-paying Colet Court – now St Paul’s Juniors – in southwest London. He admits it was probably too young to be separated from his parents but he not only survived, he thrived. He won a scholarship to Eton where friends recall a “lanky malcoordinated” but hard-working teenager who was determined to make the most of the opportunity he had been given.
Like Boris Johnson, Kwarteng played the wall game – a brutal mixture of football and rugby. “He’s so tall that he was a great addition to any team,” one fellow pupil recalls.
Kwarteng is not attracted to identity politics:
Kwarteng never expressed his desire to be “world king” in the way that Johnson did. “I was slightly surprised when he went into politics,” says a contemporary from Eton and Cambridge. “He wasn’t in a political activist circle at university. People sometimes think one Etonian is just like another, but Boris and Kwasi are very different. Boris wants to rule the world; Kwasi wants to solve problems, rather than just being in power for the sake of it. He’s not going to go out there to break rules. Kwasi does listen to people and wants to discuss ideas” …
Kwarteng’s 2011 book Ghosts of Empire is a far more nuanced analysis than the rose-tinted version of British history favoured by Tory traditionalists. He rejects the “sterile debate” over whether “empire was a good or bad thing” and concludes, “Much of the instability in the world is a product of its legacy of individualism and haphazard policymaking.” According to those who know him well, the chancellor is uncomfortable with “culture war” politics and describes his own philosophy as “relentless pragmatism”. One aide insists, “He is sometimes lazily pigeonholed as a ruthless, black and white free market ideologue. It is true that he is a low-tax Conservative. He’s a free marketeer, but there are occasions when the state does need to intervene.” In 2019, the chancellor told a Tory party conference event: “There’s nothing [better] to convert someone from being a radical free marketeer to seeing the virtues of government action than making them an energy minister.”
He focused on his studies at Trinity College, Cambridge:
“As a student he was charismatic and a bit chaotic,” says a friend from that time. “He was scholarly. The everyday run of things didn’t worry him. He would be immersed in his books.”
He began meeting the great and the good in the Conservative Party:
… the future chancellor was spotted by Dr John Casey, an English fellow and legendary figure among Conservative thinkers, who invited him to his dining club, the Michael Oakeshott Society. There Kwarteng met Tory politicians and journalists such as Norman Lamont, Geoffrey Howe, Norman Tebbit and Charles Moore. Casey insists it was never a political society: “It is devoted to intelligent conversation and strong views don’t go with that.
“He has a first-rate mind and a first-rate personality,” Casey continues. “He is intellectually and personally equipped to be chancellor. He’s a cultured man, an intellectual – there are very few in politics. He’s not like anybody else; he’s himself.”
After Cambridge, Kwarteng won a Kennedy scholarship to Harvard. When he finished his time there, he returned to Cambridge to earn a doctorate in economic history, after which the City of London beckoned:
He then worked as a fund manager at the bank JP Morgan and at Odey Asset Management, run by the Brexit-backing investor Crispin Odey, as well as chairing the Bow Group, a conservative think tank.
His political career began afterwards:
In 2005 he stood as the Conservative candidate for Brent East, coming third, before being elected as MP for the safe Tory seat of Spelthorne in Surrey in 2010, the same year as Truss entered politics. He spent several years on the back benches after criticising coalition policies including the help-to-buy scheme. “He’s genuinely clever, with a very strong academic, scholarly mind,” one old friend says. “But that academic, scholarly mind meant he was happy to speak out against David Cameron and George Osborne and didn’t really worry about the consequences.”
Kwarteng understands the importance of a Prime Minister and Chancellor working closely together:
For now, Kwarteng and Truss are united on economic policy. The chancellor tells colleagues that his role is to support the PM, explaining: “I will facilitate; I won’t emasculate.” One ally says, “Kwasi was completely disillusioned with the battles between No 10 and No 11 under Rishi and Boris. When No 10 and No 11 are at war, nothing works. Kwasi will deliver what the prime minister wants. She is the first lord of the treasury, Kwasi is the second lord of the treasury. That will change the entire mood and approach of government. The institutions will try to break No 10 and No 11 apart, but they underestimate the strength of the relationship between Kwasi and Liz.”
Hmm. Interesting.
British public gaslit
The last week of September was one of news about unfunded tax cuts, the Bank of England stepping in to calm the UK markets, how Kwarteng and Truss didn’t bother to communicate their economic plan and how awful everything was.
On Friday, September 30, Tom Harwood, GB News’s political correspondent and Guido Fawkes alum, put things into perspective, rightly saying that the media were gaslighting Britons:
That day, The Telegraph‘s Matthew Lynn wrote, ‘There’s no such thing as unfunded tax cuts — it’s our money’:
It is hard to imagine that three simple words could be quite so lethal. But over the last few days “unfunded tax cuts” have been held responsible for the potential destruction of the British economy, and, come to think of it, the global financial system as well.
We are told that the Government’s £45bn package of cuts announced last week have crashed the currency markets, sent mortgage rates soaring, and left the stock market to keel over and die. Any government crazy enough to even attempt unfunded tax cuts can expect to be evicted from office within days if not hours.
Tosh. Although the phrase has become ubiquitous, we should be a lot more cautious about how we use it. In reality, tax cuts don’t need to be funded, for the same reason that staying home instead of going out to dinner doesn’t need to be ‘funded’, and nor does opting to spend Christmas with your parents rather than flying off to Mauritius need to be ‘funded’ either.
It isn’t spending. It is simply taking less of your citizen’s money. It is state spending that needs to be ‘funded’, and not its opposite – and until we get that straight, and change the language we use, we will never be able to have a grown-up debate about how to manage our economy.
If Kwasi Kwarteng had a grand for every time our broadcasters, newspapers, a think tank, or indeed a growing legion of City analysts, used the term “unfunded tax cuts”, or UTCs as we should probably call them, he’d have enough money to wade into the markets and send sterling back over the two dollar mark. The phrase probably has its own emoji by now, just to make it easier to discuss on WhatsApp (some sort of variant of the scowling face, I’d imagine).
Ever since the pound started falling modestly against the dollar on Monday – because after all “crashing” seems a slightly extreme term for a downwards correction of less than 10pc – the phrase has dominated the headlines.
According to just about every think tank, constant broadcasts from the BBC, dozens of newspaper analysts, the IMF, and just about every major City bank, not to mention a small army of retired central bankers, it was the Chancellor’s decision to cut a few taxes without announcing accompanying decisions on reducing spending that led immediately to a dramatic sell-off in sterling and a rise in bond yields that could only be controlled by emergency intervention by the Bank of England.
A quick Google search yields 28,000 mentions of the phrase, and that is without even counting social media. According to the credit ratings agency Moody’s “large unfunded tax cuts are credit negative” while according to the former Bank Governor Mark Carney “the message of financial markets is that there is a limit to unfunded spending and unfunded tax cuts in this environment.”
And yet, in reality, we should be a lot more careful about the language we use. We can leave aside the point that the “unfunded” parts of last Friday’s fiscal package amount to no more than a few billion pounds, a trivial sum give the size of state spending, and that by far the largest part of it was made up of the energy support package that all sides of the political spectrum had been calling for. The more important point is this: we shouldn’t ever describe tax cuts as “unfunded”.
By definition a tax cut is not spending any money. It is simply a decision to take less from a particular group of people in one particular way …
Next, the term ignores the possibility that tax cuts might pay for themselves …
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it concedes the argument before it has even begun. “Unfunded” is a boo word, and even more so when you put the inevitable “reckless” in front of it. The language deliberately skews opinion against a reform of the tax system. Even worse, it is used by banks and broadcasters who pretend they are staying neutral – when in reality they are anything but.
… fundamentally it is only state spending that needs to be funded – not leaving more money in the pockets of long-suffering taxpayers. If we could be a little clearer about that we might be able to have a slightly more sane debate about how much tax the government should be raising and how – instead of hysterical catastrophizing about UTCs.
On Saturday, October 1, The Sun rightly defended the Truss-Kwarteng plan, citing other Western economies’ woes:
On Sunday, October 2, GB News’s and The Telegraph‘s Liam Halligan, formerly of Channel 4 News, was on the money when he said that the market meltdown was the fault of quantitative easing (QE):
… This week of financial turmoil has left millions frightened and angry.
While Kwarteng’s statement sparked last week’s alarming debt repricing, it was by no means the underlying cause. There are far bigger forces at play …
… what we saw last week was just the beginning of a long-term shift away from over a decade of ultra-low interest rates and quantitative easing. We’ve indulged in ultra-loose monetary policy since the 2008/09 financial crisis – a necessary emergency measure, which ossified into a lifestyle choice.
And now, the obvious excesses, dangers – and crass stupidity – of this policy, are coming home to roost.
Since that financial crisis, the Bank of England has created hundreds of billions of pounds of QE money, as have similarly aligned central banks, which have blown huge asset price bubbles in stocks, bonds and property.
QE has helped governments borrow cheaply, while making the rich even richer – which is why, having begun as a £50 billion temporary measure to inject liquidity into bombed-out banks, it has morphed, thirteen years on, into an £895 billion monster.
The early tranches of QE stayed largely within the financial system – so didn’t cause serious inflation. But the Covid-era variant, funding furlough and an avalanche of business support loans, has fed directly into the real economy – helping to explain today’s inflation predicament.
This is an inconvenient truth that no-one wants to admit – certainly not the likes of the International Monetary Fund and central bankers who oversaw QE. Better to blame an incoming Tory government – one led by a politically vulnerable Prime Minister, with only lukewarm support from her own MPs.
… the idea that this “unfunded cut crashed the pound” is preposterous. Yet that is now the accepted political narrative – that a greed-driven Tory policy collapsed sterling and sent 10-year gilt yield surging as fears swirled of government insolvency, sending higher borrowing costs rippling across the economy, damaging hard-working families and firms.
What I suspect happened is that global currency traders, understanding the top tax cut was politically tin-eared, could see ministers were in for a kicking. With the Government introducing a potentially expensive energy price cap, the moment seemed right to start shorting – that is, betting against – the pound, knowing the media would pile in.
When that happened on Asian markets on Monday, and we woke to a plunging currency, I was astonished that ministers fell silent – given the strength of the arguments on their side …
For now, the Bank of England’s intervention on Wednesday – buying gilts to rein in borrowing costs – seems to have worked. By Friday, the pound was back where it was pre-statement, the 10-year yield having retreated from over 4.5pc to around 4.0pc.
But the City and Wall Street moneymen, having loaded pension schemes with billions of pounds of debt, yet again have the upper hand – effectively forcing the UK authorities to restart the QE asset-boosting machine. This cannot end well.
“Tory tax cuts”. It’s such an easy and convenient scapegoat. The truth is we’re in for a sustained period of painful adjustment – one which our political and media class must urgently start to explain.
The Times‘s Robert Colvile pointed out the global aspects of market turmoil, driven in part by the United States:
The markets were already primed to punish the UK, he [Albert Edwards of Société Générale] argues, because of the Bank of England’s decision the previous day to raise rates at a slower rate than the US and to keep trying to dispose of the assets accumulated under quantitative easing. So Kwasi Kwarteng’s decision to throw in a few more tax cuts just gave an extra push to a boulder that was already rolling …
Admittedly, the attempts of some in government to blame last week’s rout in the markets entirely on global factors strained credulity. But they did have the core of a point. A year ago the Bank of England believed interest rates would stay below 1 per cent. A month ago they were set to top out at 3 per cent. By the time Kwarteng got to his feet, the expected peak had risen to 5 per cent — soaring over 6 per cent at the height of last week’s panic.
Now, some of that rise in September was probably due to anxieties about the new government. But it was also driven, yes, by global factors — in particular decisions made in Washington. Even if Kwarteng had replaced his planned statement with a lusty rendition of the Marseillaise, mortgage-holders would still be facing eye-popping jumps in interest rates. For example, at that 6 per cent rate a typical UK mortgage would, according to the Resolution Foundation, cost an excruciating £4,800 a year extra — but £3,800 of that was already on the way before Friday’s speech. The age of cheap money is over not just for Britain but for everyone.
Over the past three years, a number of conservatives must have wondered why Boris Johnson never delved deeper into economic policy. A letter to The Telegraph gives a possible explanation — global forces at work:
SIR – It takes great strength of character and conviction to stand up and face a baying mob, especially a political one. Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng have my admiration.
I always wondered why Boris Johnson did not attempt to enact some of his early policies after Brexit, for which he had great public support. Perhaps he understood how the pro-EU and socialist contingents in Parliament and the wider political world would react, and was fully aware of the force that would be against him.
I wish Ms Truss and Mr Kwarteng good luck. They have shown enough courage in their beliefs to see this challenge through.
Conservative Party Conference
The Conservative Party Conference opened on Sunday, October 3, in Birmingham.
That day, The Times reported that Kwarteng had requested Cabinet ministers to cut expenditure in their respective departments:
Kwasi Kwarteng has told ministers to make cuts in their departments and warned them “we have a duty to live within our means”.
The chancellor has asked cabinet ministers to send him their “proposals to support growth” by the end of the month.
He is also launching a reprioritisation, efficiency and productivity review across the public sector, which will re-examine “existing spending commitments” and repurpose budgets to deliver the government’s “core priorities”, including growth.
I wrote about the conference, including Truss’s and Kwarteng’s U-turn on abolishing the 45% tax rate, the prominent Conservative MPs in disarray, the rebels and Truss’s closing speech.
On Monday, October 3, the duo pulled out of a fringe event, which cost £3,000 a ticket:
Nigel Farage, looking on from the outside, predicted a Labour rout in the next general election:
Meanwhile, Guido Fawkes kept us apprised of market movements, which weren’t nearly as alarming as expected that week:
He rightly criticised Labour’s shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves for stirring the pot unnecessarily:
On Wednesday, October 5, as the conference closed, Guido wrote (emphases his):
The Bank of England has been easing off its interventions in the gilt market, leaving Rachel Reeves’s hyperbolic attack lines exposed for their inaccuracies. Julian Jessop points out the fact the Bank did not have to buy any gilts again today, leaving total purchases stable at £3.66 billion. A tad short of the £65 billion she repeatedly claims. This is a further sign market jitters have been effectively mitigated, far from Labour’s claims of an “economic crash”. As a trained economist and former Bank of England employee, Rachel really must know better. Her sums were out by a factor of 17…
At the weekend, while anti-Conservative pundits were still banging on about the 45% tax rate, which Truss and Kwarteng did a U-turn on …
… The Telegraph‘s Ambrose Evans-Pritchard pointed out that gas prices were already falling, indicating that ‘Liz Truss may be winning her gamble on the energy price cap after all’:
Plummeting global gas prices have slashed the cost of the UK’s energy price cap and may ultimately reduce the monthly subsidy to zero, greatly alleviating the strain on Government borrowing.
NatWest Markets estimates that the price guarantee would cost approximately £30bn over the first six months based on current futures contracts, half the £60bn figure assumed by the Treasury and the rating agencies …
While NatWest remains wary of gilts after the mini-budget and the bond shock last month, it said pessimism over the UK’s public finances may have gone too far. Gilts may no longer be a one-way bet for traders …
Goldman Sachs thinks European wholesale prices may fall a further 40pc by late winter. Average energy bills in the UK would in that case fall to £2,000 or less.
The Government could put its cheque book back in the drawer.
Douglas McWilliams, from the Centre of Economics and Business Research, says that the public finances are in better shape than widely-supposed.
An odd week that began well
By Monday, October 10, things appeared to be looking up for Truss and Kwarteng.
Mel Stride MP, chairman of the Treasury Select Committee and not one of their best friends, was satisfied that the then-Chancellor agreed to review his economic plan on Halloween rather than in November:
Tuesday, October 11, was a red-letter day.
The head of JP Morgan said that Truss deserved a chance:
Guido wrote:
… Speaking last night from London with US broadcaster CNBC, Dimon backed Liz’s tax plans and hammered home the need for laser-like focus on growth – adding he’d “love to hear that out of their mouth every time a president or prime minister speaks”…
It’ll take time to execute the policies and kind of drive growth and what’s important … [but] there’s a lot of things the UK has going for it and proper strategies to get it growing faster … then it can accomplish some of the other objectives it wants to accomplish too […] I would like to see the new Prime Minister, the new Chancellor, be successful […] I think every government should be focusing on growth. I would love to hear that out of their mouth every time a president or prime minister speaks.
Another proud member of the Pro-Growth Coalition. Although he did warn the US will likely tip into recession in about 6 months…
The IMF did an about-face, as The Telegraph reported:
Kwasi Kwarteng’s tax cutting mini-Budget will help Britain to be the fastest growing major economy this year at the cost of higher long-term inflation, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has said.
Strong momentum at the end of 2021 means UK economic growth will outpace the rest of the G7 this year. Tax cuts announced in the mini-Budget are expected to lift it even higher than the IMF’s current forecast of 3.6pc, which was published on Tuesday but finalised before the Chancellor announced his plans …
The paper‘s Ambrose Evans-Pritchard wrote, ‘Rejoice: we may be very close to Fed capitulation’:
Not only is the Fed rushing through jumbo rises of 75 points each meeting, it is also draining global dollar liquidity with $95bn a month of quantitative tightening (QT). It has never done the two together before. And it does not understand how QE/QT actually works, as admitted cheerfully by one Ben Bernanke, Nobel Prize laureate as of yesterday …
Ben Bernanke flagged the dangers of a strong dollar and the capital exodus from emerging markets yesterday. Without naming the British gilt market, he said financial stress in the international system was building up and posed a threat. “We really have to pay close attention,” he said.
On Wednesday, October 12, it was noted that a Federal Reserve hike in interest rates took place before Kwarteng’s economic statement:
Furthermore, the US was also experiencing an unusual increase in mortgage rates, meaning that the UK was not the only country with that problem:
On Thursday, October 13, Truss had her weekly meeting with King Charles, who greeted her with ‘Dear, oh dear’ while the press were there:
What did he know?
He would have heard Foreign Secretary James Cleverly defend Truss and Kwarteng on that day’s news round. The poor man.
The Telegraph has a running diary of what went on that morning. This is the summary:
James Cleverly has warned it would be a “disastrously bad idea” to replace Liz Truss as Prime Minister.
Ms Truss is under intense pressure from some of her own MPs to abandon her economic plan following a market backlash to the measures set out in the mini-Budget.
The Prime Minister’s leadership is being questioned after little more than a month in the job, with some Tory MPs already considering who could replace her.
ConservativeHome‘s editor Paul Goodman was also on the airwaves. He told BBC Radio 4 that some Conservative MPs had suggestions for Truss’s and Kwarteng’s replacement:
The former Tory MP told BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme: “All sorts of different people are talking about all sorts of different things because the Conservative backbenchers are casting around for a possible replacement for Kwasi Kwarteng, even for a possible replacement for Liz Truss.
“All sorts of names are being thrown about, Rishi Sunak, even Boris Johnson, Kit Malthouse, Sajid Javid.
“But one idea doing the rounds is that Penny Mordaunt and Rishi Sunak, who, after all, between them got pretty much two-thirds of the votes of MPs, come to some kind of arrangement and essentially take over.”
The King probably also knew that Truss and Kwarteng were going to do a U-turn on corporation tax, which they planned to lower to 19%, as it is in Ireland:
On Wednesday, at PMQs, Truss stood by the cut:
What we are doing is simply NOT putting up corporation tax. It’s not a tax cut, we’re just not raising corporation tax. And I feel that it would be wrong, in a time when we are trying to attract investment into our country, at a time of global economic slowdown, to be raising taxes. Because it will bring less revenue in. And the way that we are going to get the money to fund our National Health Service… is by having a strong economy with companies investing and creating jobs.
On Thursday, October 13, Guido wrote:
What a difference 24 hours makes: this lunchtime The Sun broke the news that Truss “is considering raising Corporation Tax next year in spectacular mini-Budget U-turn”. A source tells Harry Cole that while the U-turn is being seriously considered, it wouldn’t be back up to the 25% proposed by Rishi before leaving the Treasury.
An unpleasant surprise for Kwarteng
Meanwhile, Kwarteng was in Washington at the annual IMF meeting.
Guido’s post had an update:
Channel 4 doorstepped him on his way in, where he said “I’ll be coming out with a statement on 31st October and I’m not going to pre-empt that.” As The Speccie’s James Forsyth points out, if the markets are now pricing in a U-turn, and the government decides against one, they’ll likely be in a worse position than they were 24 hours ago…
On Friday, October 14, we woke up to the news that Kwarteng was summoned back to London, under the guise that emergency budget negotiations had to take place. The IMF meeting was to last into the weekend:
This could mean only one thing — that his time as Chancellor was over.
Guido reported that Mel Stride was happy that Kwarteng’s economic package was about to be shot to bits:
… one source quoted in the Financial Times claims “Almost everything in the Budget is now up for grabs” …
For those who enjoyed the excitement of tracking Priti Patel’s flight back to the UK ahead of her sacking by Theresa May, you can follow Kwasi’s flight in real time here …
Mel Stride, Chair of the Treasury Select Committee, spoke on the Today Programme and welcomed a U-Turn. He called it a “powerful” signal to markets and added the government’s “fiscal credibility is now firmly back on the table”. He added the Conservative party should give the government “more time” and space to “rest”. How generous…
Sterling and bond markets had rallied following the first reports of a U-turn, which only adds on the pressure for more reversals. Elsewhere in the markets, today is the final day of the Bank of England’s gilt operations. Although gilt markets appeared steady this morning, the real test will come on Monday…
A Downing Street source tried to downplay Kwarteng’s return:
Kwarteng had scrambled to take the last commercial flight from Dulles Airport to Heathrow:
The next bit of news was that Truss was going to hold a press conference that afternoon.
Guido wrote:
Liz is set to U-turn on the corporation tax freeze at 2pm this afternoon. It’s rumoured she’ll whack it all the way up to 25% in the spring. Kwasi won’t be appearing alongside her…
Speculation began on who the new Chancellor would be. The Sun‘s political editor Harry Cole tweeted the following in the hours before the press conference, indicating Jeremy Hunt:
Cabinet members were correct about Jeremy Hunt:
King Charles approved the following appointments from Truss:
Nigel Farage was rightly furious about a Remainer assuming the post of Chancellor:
Harry Cole got a copy of Truss’s letter to Kwarteng, thanking him for his hard work:
The nation now had a new dream team. This seconds-long video is a must-see. The UK is doomed:
I’ll go into Truss’s press conference tomorrow.
In short, it was absolutely dire and lasted only eight minutes, which included four questions, one of which was from Harry Cole. His face is a picture:
I’ll have more tomorrow on how shocked Kwarteng must have been as well as what this means for Truss’s premiership.
This has not been the best Conservative Party Conference, and here’s why:
1/ Bombastic Boris is no longer Prime Minister;
2/ Liz Truss is still finding her feet as his successor;
3/ A train strike is taking place on the final day, so a lot of people left before Liz spoke on Wednesday.
On Wednesday morning, October 5, GB News’s Darren McCaffrey, a veteran of many party conferences, said that the mood in Birmingham was very low this year, as if, after 12 years, the Conservatives think that their time in Government could be up.
It doesn’t help that Labour’s Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves has been spreading lies about Kwasi Kwarteng’s fiscal event, either:
Meanwhile, the people in Boris Johnson’s constituency of Uxbridge in west London miss him dearly:
https://twitter.com/Mark28538836/status/1577531305159708672
Anyone who missed the controversies of the Conservative Party Conference can catch up here and here.
On Tuesday night, former Conservative adviser Amanda Platell, who writes for the Daily Mail, said she is praying that Liz Truss can actually govern without opposition from her own MPs. Platell described Michael Gove as ‘a jackal’. Platell added that the Leader of the Commons, Penny Mordaunt, wasn’t a very good employee when she worked for her several years ago:
After Amanda Platell spoke in that clip, it was time for Stanley Johnson, Boris’s father, to give his impressions of this year’s conference.
He said that he must have been to a different one, because everyone he saw was upbeat and the conference hall was full for Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng’s speech. Stanley Johnson blames the negativity on an ongoing media narrative:
I didn’t see this gloom and doom meeting at all.
When Dan Wootton asked Stanley about Michael Gove, the former Prime Minister’s father replied:
I’m not going to talk about wildlife of any kind … I’m going to sing Michael Gove’s praises because he has been a really good Secretary of State for the Environment.
Wootton countered:
He stabbed your son in the back.
Stanley said:
I’m not going to talk about it … I’m speaking as an environmentalist.
In another part of the show, Stanley said that he is ‘100% certain’ that Boris will not be back as Conservative Party leader, i.e. Prime Minister.
Robert Buckland’s advice to rebels: ‘Shut up’
On Tuesday afternoon while listening to GB News, one of the presenters said that the Secretary of State for Wales, the mild mannered Robert Buckland, told Michael Gove to ‘shut up’.
Hoping it was true, I searched Wednesday’s headlines but saw only that Buckland had issued his advice indirectly, via Global Radio’s News Agents podcast, featuring ex-BBC broadcasters Emily Maitlis, Jon Sopel and Lewis Goodall.
Buckland was mild mannered throughout:
The i paper confirms that no direct confrontation took place:
Welsh Secretary Robert Buckland appealed to recently sacked ministers to “shut up” but indicated he wants to see benefits rise in line with inflation, telling Times Radio he believes in supporting “those who genuinely cannot share … In growth and prosperity”.
One can only hope that Gove and his Sunak-backing allies got the message.
On Tuesday night, The Telegraph urged MPs to rally behind their new Prime Minister: ‘Tories owe Liz Truss their full support’ (emphases in purple mine):
Ms Truss has an ambitious set of policies that she set out in the leadership campaign, yet there is now a danger that she will be thwarted at every turn by a fresh coalition of opponents in her own party.
MPs should remember that the Prime Minister won fairly and squarely under the rules after they removed a leader who had delivered an 80-seat majority just three years ago. She did not engineer a coup and, indeed, stayed loyal to Boris Johnson until the end.
Senior backbenchers and former ministers such as Michael Gove and Grant Shapps, who have been in the vanguard of recent criticism, should consider the damage they are doing to the party’s re-election prospects. The only beneficiaries are their political opponents.
Conservative values championing a small state, low taxes and deregulation are being replaced by social democratic nostrums that brook no spending cuts and take the same attitude to wealth creators as the Left. The pandemic lockdowns did not help matters by fostering a widespread sense that the state will always step in to help in difficult times, as it has done again with energy bills.
As we have argued consistently, the UK needs a growth strategy, and Ms Truss is at least providing one. The alternative is to manage the nation’s decline into a high-tax, low-productivity economy. She needs the full support of the parliamentary party in her endeavour, starting now.
Left-wing lies persist over economic measures
Last week, the Bank of England had to take action to counter what appeared to be an immediate effect of the Chancellor’s fiscal event of Friday, September 23.
However, Guido Fawkes cited a report from the Financial Times which said that the economic hiccup originated with the pensions industry.
Note the exposed deception in this Twitter thread:
https://twitter.com/dejohnkimble/status/1577246101601923072
Yes, I can well imagine that it was Mark Carney’s fault. He was Andrew Bailey’s predecessor at the Bank of England. Both are worthless, yet the media deifies Carney as some sort of miracle worker.
The left-wing narrative, spun by Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves and the media, persists that the taxpayer is being hung out to dry.
Guido wants to correct that narrative, noting that the BBC’s Nick Robinson has already apologised for getting it wrong:
Guido’s post from Tuesday, October 4, — which includes audio — says (emphases his):
Since the Bank of England announced market operations to purchase gilts last Wednesday, Westminster politicos have been struggling to get their heads round the intricacies of gilt markets. It therefore comes as no surprise to Guido that Nick Robinson was forced into a correction today, after incorrectly repeating the widely tweeted claim that the Bank of England has spent “£65 billion to prop up the markets” …
The claim is somewhat misleading. The Bank of England pledged to buy gilts to the tune of a maximum of £5 billion a day, over two weeks, to assure markets. This means the maximum possible spend was £65 billion, though the actual number will be far smaller. In reality the bank has purchased around £3.66 billion so far, with yesterday’s purchases coming in at just £22 million. The smaller purchase signals the Bank is comfortable with the current state of gilt markets as its credible commitment appears to have paid off. Guido appreciates that the BBC this time took the effort to get the facts right…
Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves, who should know better as an ex-Bank of England employee, repeated the same line: “The fact the Bank of England had to step in with a £65 billion bailout with taxpayers money is deeply shameful.” It is not a fact.
Firstly, the market operation will be nowhere near £65 billion. Secondly, it is not money from taxpayers … with the purchases even having the potential to make a profit* on resale. So her “taxpayers’ money” claim is also incorrect. Robbo we can excuse, he only has a PPE degree from Oxford. The Shadow Chancellor, a trained economist, is deliberately and wilfully misrepresenting the facts for political advantage…
*A market source says that marked-to-market the Treasury is currently in profit on the trade.
In the comments, one of Guido’s readers clarified what happens with the Asset Purchase Facility — APF — in this case:
It’s not from Treasury reserves. Treasury has no reserves. It’s not money from taxpayers either. Neither the bank nor Treasury has any taxpayer money.
The Bank has extended a loan to the APF, and credited the APF’s account in the Banking Department with an advance. That is then used to pay whoever is selling the Gilts to the APF, which result in a transfer from the APF’s account in the Banking Department to a commercial bank’s settlement account in the Banking department.
The end result is Gilt assets in the APF balanced by a liability to the Banking department of the Bank of England. The Bank of England has a loan asset to the APF balanced by a liability to the commercial bank.
It’s just good old bank lending. As happens a bazillion times every day across the banking system.
Another reader called out the media for lazy journalism:
All MSM are as bad, Sky and ITV actively promote their left-wing Labour bias too, especially activists like Ed Conway and Peston, respectively, are rarely challenged, and the public generally don`t realise they are being lied to and manipulated. Creating hysteria and headlines are more important now than the truth and lazy groupthink “journalists” just follow the herd. Where is the giant good news headline that the £ is now trading higher than before the mini-budget and the euro is below parity with the dollar, no, they prefer reporting negative UK news to deliberately topple this government.
Kwarteng’s U-Turn U-turn
Thankfully, Kwarteng has recovered from the shock of having to make an economic U-turn on the 45% rate of tax and, although that is still off the table for now, he is reneging on bringing forward a vote on a more detailed plan on November 23.
On Tuesday evening, The Telegraph reported that he has postponed this to next year:
Crunch votes to implement last week’s mini-Budget will not take place until next spring, The Telegraph understands, putting off potential rebellions until 2023.
Many of the tax-cutting measures which Kwasi Kwarteng, the Chancellor, announced last month will not need to be passed in the House of Commons until next March.
That includes bringing forward the 1p cut in the basic rate of income tax and scrapping a planned rise in corporation tax, two of the most costly moves in the package.
It means that Tory rebels hoping to attach amendments to the Finance Bill may have to wait almost six months, potentially buying Liz Truss some political breathing room …
There was confusion on Tuesday as Mr Kwarteng appeared to row back on Downing Street indications on Monday night that he would reveal his new fiscal plan earlier than planned.
Mr Kwarteng said that the so-called “medium-term fiscal plan”, which will spell out his approach to bringing down debt and restraining spending, was coming on November 23.
But that appeared to contradict word from his allies 24 hours earlier suggesting the announcement and the Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) forecast would actually come sooner.
The OBR forecast is another part of the ongoing anti-Truss narrative. Since its inception by then-Chancellor George Osborne over a decade ago, its forecasts have rarely been accurate. Guido regularly posts on how the economy does much better in reality, putting the OBR to shame.
Yet, the OBR is considered as an oracle:
The failure to produce an OBR forecast alongside the mini-Budget was jumped on by economists and critics to partly explain the reaction from the markets.
It is, in fact, useless.
On Tuesday, Kwarteng gave his reasons for the rushed fiscal event. Contrary to what the lefty narrative says, he was not blaming the Queen, just reminding people of the timeline:
Mr Kwarteng on Tuesday also appeared to cast some blame on the “pressure” of the Queen’s death for mistakes in his tax-cutting fiscal statement.
He said: “We had a nation in mourning and then, literally, four days after the funeral we had the mini-budget.
“It was a high speed, high-pressure environment and we could, as David Cameron used to say, have prepared the pitch a bit better.”
Kwarteng was rightly disappointed that the Government was not given credit for helping out the nation with their winter fuel bills. This is another part of the false lefty narrative that needs exposure:
Speaking at a fringe event at the Conservative conference on Tuesday night, Mr Kwarteng complained that his energy price freeze was getting too little attention because of the 45p tax row.
The Chancellor said: “If you look at the energy intervention, I mean, nobody’s talking about the energy intervention.
“That was a huge use of the balance sheet to help people. People were facing bills of potentially £6,000 next year, and we’ve intervened.
“There’s gonna be a limit of £2,500. That’s a huge intervention.”
Agreed. He did what people bayed for.
He criticised Rishi Sunak’s handling of taxpayer’s money, turning the former Chancellor’s cries of morality back on him:
Mr Kwarteng has also said the Treasury he inherited from Rishi Sunak and Boris Johnson was “unsustainable”.
He said: “We were spending billions and billions and billions and raising the money in tax.”
“How can that be sustainable, when we have a very, very high tax burden and very low growth? We had to come off that trajectory.”
He called himself a “compassionate Conservative” inspired by his mother …
He added: “It’s the people’s money – we raise it through tax. And if we do that we have a moral obligation to look after it.”
Benefits increases
In line with Kwarteng, Liz Truss wants to be careful about taxpayer’s money.
Benefits will have to be raised, but the question is by how much.
One tranche of Conservative MPs says that it must be in line with inflation. Another group says it should be in line with salaries.
Early on Tuesday, The Sun reported:
She is under pressure to hike benefits for the poorest after repeatedly refusing to confirm they will go up in line with inflation.
Speaking at the party conference in Birmingham, the PM said: “We face massive challenges as a country and we need to get through this economic crisis and this energy crisis.
“And we need Britain to come out stronger on the other side, and I want to win over hearts and minds in the country, but also amongst my parliamentary colleagues, to make sure that we are able to deliver for the people of Britain” …
Emboldened rebel MPs are now pushing for further changes having forced her to ditch one flagship measure — with efforts now focusing against a real terms cut to Britain’s benefits bill.
Even her own Cabinet Ministers are ratcheting up the pressure for Ms Truss to commit to raising benefits with inflation and not wages.
Penny Mordaunt told the Times it “makes sense” to uprate benefits with prices.
The Commons leader said: “I have always supported, whether it’s pensions, whether it’s our welfare system, keeping pace with inflation.”
But Ms Truss insisted no decision had been made, yet reiterated her promise to keep the pensioners’ triple lock.
She admitted the reaction to her Growth Plan had not been “absolutely perfect” but insisted it – and the energy – package will help struggling families braced for a gruelling winter.
It includes cutting stamp duty, income tax and capping the price of energy so the typical household will pay no more than £2,500.
Here’s The Spectator‘s list of the benefits rebels hoping for an increase with inflation rather than wages.
Penny Mordaunt was one of Truss’s rivals in the leadership contest and the other five — led by Michael Gove — were staunch Sunak supporters:
Penny Mordaunt
Michael Gove
Damian Green
Esther McVey
John Glen
Mel Stride
Who can forget the day MPs eliminated Mordaunt from the leadership contest, leaving Truss and Sunak as the last two standing?
On July 20, Guido wrote about Mordaunt’s last ditch appeal:
It turns out Penny Mordaunt’s effort to run a “clean” campaign that puts an end to “toxic politics” lasted as long as she thought she had a chance of winning. Now that Liz Truss is the bookies’ favourite, and Kemi Badenoch’s voters are up for grabs, the Mordaunt camp has other ideas. This morning, Mordaunt tweeted an Allison Pearson Telegraph article headlined “Tory MPs – vote for Rishi Sunak or Liz Truss today and you’ll murder the party you love”, which went down like a bucket of cold sick with just about everybody. Don’t bother trying to find the tweet – she’s since deleted it…
Truss wisely made Mordaunt Leader of the House, probably the safest place for her.
The benefits row is likely to erupt after Parliament reconvenes next week. Gove is pictured with Truss:
On Tuesday morning, Guido posted an audio clip of Mordaunt speaking to Times Radio about increasing benefits in line with inflation:
… on Times Radio … Leader of the Commons Penny Mordaunt was busy once again going characteristically off-script, claiming “it makes sense” to commit to the uplift come rain or shine. Michael Gove is – predictably – saying the same. Even DWP Secretary Chloe Smith has been going around saying “protecting the most vulnerable is a big priority for me”, which surely signals the way the wind is blowing…
However, as The Spectator‘s editor Fraser Nelson points out, Liz Truss is not being stingy in wanting to increase benefits with salaries rather than inflation:
Difficult decisions lie ahead for Liz Truss as she thinks of ways to constrain spending. One option is to increase benefits in line with average salaries (6.2 per cent), rather than CPI inflation (9.9 per cent): why, it might be argued, should someone on welfare see their income rise faster than someone in work? And with public sector wages rising at just 2 per cent, can government really give a near-10 per cent rise to those out of work? …
So she is considering, at very least, uprating benefits by earnings rather than inflation. But if she’s ready for a fight, then so are her Tory opponents. Intriguingly, Penny Mordaunt now seems to be among them.
… Truss may struggle to get a lean settlement through the House of Commons. That’s why it matters that Mordaunt, the leader of the House of Commons, has declared in favour of increasing welfare by inflation. Such open lobbying by a cabinet member is rare and indicates a collapse in discipline …
Uprating benefits to inflation would be hugely expensive due to the staggering number currently on out-of-work benefits: 5.3 million in total. This figure has yet to be acknowledged by the government (which prefers a more narrow definition of unemployment) and can only be produced by drilling into its website. There’s a six-month lag, such is the lack of attention to this figure. But it amounts to 13 per cent of the UK working-age population, rising to 20 per cent in Manchester and Birmingham and 25 per cent in Blackpool. Here’s the breakdown, which we keep updated on The Spectator data hub …
Nelson has included The Spectator‘s graph in the article. It’s rather shocking.
He says it is time to get the nation back to work but realises that could be a hard sell for Truss to make:
As I’ve argued, the real scandal here is the waste of human potential, more than the waste of money. We have a near-record number of vacancies in the UK – about 1.1 million (hence a lot of the pressure to relax immigration rules), and to combine this with near-record levels on welfare is quite a feat. But it’s also a very expensive situation and a problem that will not be helped by decreasing the factor by which people would be better-off in work.
This is a complex and difficult argument to make – and one distinguishing feature of Liz Truss’s government is that it struggles to have such discussions even with the Tory party, let alone the country …
… this is a pre-rebellion from Mordaunt: she is describing a situation she’d like, not one that exists. By declaring the restoration of cabinet government, are cabinet members taking back control?
I have written this before Liz Truss gives her speech on Wednesday morning, closing the conference.
The question remains as to whether she can stamp her authority on the Cabinet and Conservative rebels. A tired Tom Harwood, who was also at Labour’s conference last week, explains the situation on GB News:
I will feature brighter aspects of the conference in tomorrow’s post.
Before I get into Thursday’s voting results in the Conservative Party leadership contest, readers should note that Labour are no longer afraid of losing the next election.
Please, someone, bring back Boris:
The only candidate who could put the frighteners on Labour is Kemi Badenoch, who is excellent at the despatch box when facing the Opposition.
Thursday’s vote result
Sir Graham Brady, chairman of the 1922 Committee of backbench Conservative MPs, announced yesterday’s result promptly at 3 p.m.
Unfortunately, Suella Braverman had the lowest votes and had to drop out of the race. She had only 27 MPs backing her.
Going into the weekend, we have the following five candidates:
Guido Fawkes has a summary of Thursday’s activity, excerpted below.
Rishi Sunak has received over 100 votes, but overall, he is not doing as well as candidates in past leadership elections:
Rishi is one of the weakest first-place candidates in recent Tory leadership elections, comparing leads in the second round of MP ballots:* … *Hat-tip: Tom Harwood
Penny Mordaunt’s work ethic was slammed on Thursday. I covered Lord Frost’s damning comments in yesterday’s post.
Mordaunt also ran into trouble over past statements she has made on gender identity:
-
- Ran into problems and heightened scrutiny over her trans stance, not least with a blow from newly-eliminated Suella Braverman, who accused her of not standing up for women when pushing for gender-neutral language in the ministerial maternity leave bill
- Accused of lying about her trans stance by Team Truss
Kemi Badenoch is, happily, still in the race and is ahead of Tom Tugendhat, who is likely to be the next to be dropped when voting resumes on Monday.
Badenoch received 49 votes and Tugendhat 32, a decrease of five votes for him.
Early news on Friday
Much happened overnight, which I will review in recent campaign activity below.
Suella Braverman is now supporting Liz Truss.
There is likely to be increasing pressure put on Kemi Badenoch to bow out of the race. If anything, pressure should be brought to bear on Tom Tugendhat, who is in last place.
Guido calls our attention to three debates this weekend. One will be online and two will be televised (red emphases his, those in purple mine):
Today things get really interesting: it’s debate time. So far candidates have taken lumps out of each other from their respective trenches, today they finally have to go over the top – a special metaphor just for Penny and Tom. Things kick off at ConservativeHome at 1pm, and continue over to Channel 4 at 19.30, where all candidates have confirmed their attendance. Followed by ITV on Sunday and Sky on Monday.
Debates can make or break candidates at this stage, especially when there are a decent number of votes up for grabs and no one knows who’s going to win. In 2019, one debate made Rory Stewart – securing his place in the next round – and the subsequent debate 24 hours later broke him, as he decided to get undressed live on air. In a sign of how febrile things are, even Rishi’s agreed to join tonight’s Channel 4 debate, an unedifying challenge the frontrunners are sometimes able to duck out of. Will some MPs finally have to recognise that their candidate makes Theresa May’s public speaking look relaxed and charismatic? Guido looks forward to finding out…
Let’s see what is going on with the various candidates.
Suella Braverman
Suella Braverman, Attorney General for England and Wales, is a committed Conservative, especially when it comes to social issues.
In 2019, along with Northern Ireland’s DUP MPs and several other Conservative MPs, she voted to keep abortion illegal in Northern Ireland. However, the Government has since legalised abortion there.
Last Sunday, Danny Kruger, a thoughtful MP and Prue Leith‘s son, gave his reasons for backing Braverman:
Two days later, on July 12, a Conservative Home poll showed that Rishi Sunak would lose were Braverman the second remaining candidate on the ballot going to Party members:
Were Braverman up against Liz Truss, the vote would have been tied.
This was Braverman’s platform — lower taxes, border control, no identity politics and commitment to the Conservatives’ 2019 election manifesto:
What’s not to like?
She also would have taken us out of the ECHR (European Convention on Human Rights), which is preventing us from deporting faux refugees and serious foreign criminals:
She refused to engage in ‘blue on blue’ sniping. Here she is with Kemi Badenoch, my other favourite:
Braverman was gracious in defeat:
She swiftly began a media round on Thursday afternoon.
Speaking to Tom Harwood of GB News, she expressed her gratitude for being able to run in the leadership contest, saying it was a real privilege. I agree that she would make an excellent Home Secretary:
https://twitter.com/Chickpea200/status/1547624353893740544
She said that she sees both Rishi Sunak and Penny Mordaunt as being on the left. So true:
She criticised Penny Mordaunt’s stance on gender identity and accused her of being a ‘false Brexiteer’:
In an interview with BBC Radio 4, Braverman pointed out that Hansard has a record of what Mordaunt has said in past debates on the Maternity Bill:
She told TalkTV’s Tom Newton Dunn why she has decided to support Liz Truss:
I hope that whoever wins will retain Braverman in their Cabinet. She is a true asset to the Conservatives.
Rishi Sunak
Could the wheels be about to fall off for Rishi Sunak, our erstwhile Chancellor?
On Friday, July 15, news emerged that the Chinese government hopes Rishi will be our next Prime Minister:
Guido reported:
This morning Rishi Sunak has successfully won the leadership endorsement none of the candidates wanted: from the Chinese Government’s propaganda outfit. Global Times has published an article entitled “China-UK ties ‘might improve’ with arrival of new PM”; subheading, “Most candidates are tough on Beijing, but ‘pragmatic’ one wins first round”. In the piece, Beijing’s mouthpiece notes concern that, despite Rishi winning among MPs, party members might vote for a rival candidate because of tax policy…
Former chancellor of the exchequer (finance minister) Rishi Sunak, the one candidate with a pragmatic view of developing balanced ties with China, has won the first round of voting by MPs.
When Sunak was the finance minister in July 2021, he used his annual Mansion House speech to insist that Britain should beef up its trading relationship with China
Apart from Sunak, almost all of the other candidates hold a very tough stance on China
As I write, mid-day, Guido is awaiting comment from Rishi’s team.
In other news, Rishi is losing traction with the bookmakers. He’s now in third place:
Guido tells us:
Rishi has fallen from hot favourite to his chances being third rated, with Penny as favourite and an overnight re-evaluation by punters seeing Liz move into the second favourite spot.
Allow me to repeat myself with the aforementioned Conservative Home poll from July 12. According to their readership, likely all Conservative Party members, Rishi could only beat Sajid Javid, who is no longer in the running and Tom Tugendhat, who is currently in last place:
Tom Tugendhat
I do not think that Tom Tugendhat’s candidacy will last beyond Monday’s vote.
I formed my opinion of him through his participation in House of Commons debates.
He is chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee.
Last August, he spoke about Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, where he served with the Army. His contribution gained him a round of applause, which is normally forbidden in Parliament:
https://twitter.com/SebastianEPayne/status/1427948626328834059
America’s back – back home.
In 2020, he wrote an editorial on terrorism for the Mail, calling for a return of treason laws, which Tony Blair got rid of:
In 2020, he was critical of China’s lockdown policy:
https://twitter.com/TomTugendhat/status/1243659839680757769
Last year, when there was a suspicion that vaccine passports could be turned into digital identity cards, Tugendhat rightly opposed such a development. talkRADIO’s Julia Hartley-Brewer interviewed him on the subject:
Tugendhat announced his candidacy for Conservative leadership on July 7, via an editorial for The Telegraph:
https://twitter.com/Etienne_allen/status/1545140739633455104
It seems to me that he makes more of his military career than perhaps he should. In one recent interview, he made himself out to be a general (H/T to my reader dearieme):
‘What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?’
‘Invaded two countries.’
Guido thinks so, too:
He has the relevant clip:
Anyway, his campaign, increasingly weak, calls for ‘a clean start’:
https://twitter.com/TomTugendhat/status/1545010782362025984
A clean start:
On July 8, the Sun featured a profile of him, including his French connection:
Tugendhat is married to Anissia Tugendhat (née Morel).
She is a French judge and civil servant and Tugendhat holds dual citizenship for France and Britain.
According to a tweet from journalist Richard Eden, the pair got engaged in 2013.
Together they have two children, a boy and a girl.
Tugendhat’s mother Blandine de Loisne is also French.
Anissia comes from a family of diplomats and her brother has worked in the Foreign Ministry and the French embassy.
We did not know that before, did we? At least Tobias Ellwood told Parliament that he has dual US/UK nationality.
That’s probably why he voted Remain in the 2016 Brexit referendum.
He would not be drawn on the subject of whether he regretted his vote. Probably not, then:
The public are suspicious. As he is currently in last place, MPs must be, too:
He launched his campaign on July 12. To calm his nerves, he had a crafty ciggie on the tiny balcony outside his office, forbidden on the parliamentary estate. This, in my opinion, is the only decent thing about him:
I hope he was smoking a Gauloise …
At his launch, he took only two questions from the media:
Perhaps he feared questions about his Frenchness, such as this one:
Candidates, including those running for a position as MP, should declare their nationality or nationalities:
https://twitter.com/DatabaseSponge/status/1546811141934010368
———————————————————————————
I will have more on the leadership contest next week.
For now, I am looking forward to the debates. It will be interesting to see how Rishi and Tugendhat, both of whom are short, look next to Penny Mordaunt, much taller than either of them. Optics are important.
Sometimes things are not as they appear.
Badgering Boris Johnson to resign over the Downing Street parties during lockdown is an attempt to overturn Brexit.
It is also a sign of envy on the part of the journalists, most of whom are Remainers, attacking him verbally. What journalist — and Boris was one of them for many years — doesn’t have an ‘If I ruled the world’ fantasy? Boris has achieved that dream. They have not.
Here is former Conservative MP Michael Heseltine, a prominent Remainer, saying that Boris’s departure could reopen the possibility of re-entering the European Union:
It’s misleading the house, it’s misleading the people and it’s misleading the whole country in a general election because if it were to be established that the PM has been lying then that is going to open a can of worms because very large numbers of people – now the majority of people – believe that the Brexit case was actually a pack of lies… now if he proves to be a liar – to the public, to parliament – what does that do for the very large numbers of people who think it is a catastrophic misjudgement to have severed our good relationships with our European neighbours.
Meanwhile, the general public doesn’t care about the parties, especially his birthday party:
Police investigation
The eminent civil servant Sue Gray had been preparing a report on the Downing Street parties.
Then, the Metropolitan Police stepped in. On Tuesday, January 25, 2022, Commissioner Dame Cressida Dick told the London Assembly, headed by Mayor Sadiq Khan of the news. As such, the Met informed Sue Gray to issue only a summary report so as not to interfere with their own investigation.
GB News has a summary of the social events. Most but not all of them took place at Downing Street, nor did Boris attend all of them (emphases mine):
The Metropolitan Police will investigate a “number of events” alleged to have taken place in Downing Street, Commissioner Dame Cressida Dick has said.
Dame Cressida declined to say which alleged parties are being investigated, nor would she put a timeline on when officers could detail their findings.
The gatherings were already under investigation by senior official Sue Gray, and the Cabinet Office said her work continues.
Here is a list of the alleged gatherings, which in several cases have been admitted to.
– May 15 2020: Downing Street garden party …
– May 20 2020: BYOB garden party …
– June 19 2020: Birthday party for Boris Johnson …
– November 13 2020: Leaving party for senior aide …
– November 13 2020: Johnsons’ flat party …
– November 25 2020: Treasury drinks …
– November 27 2020: Second staff leaving do …
– December 10 2020: Department for Education party …
– December 11 2020: Wine fridge delivered to Downing Street for staff’s ‘wine-time Fridays’ …
Mr Johnson was said to have attended a “handful” of these gatherings.
– December 14 2020: Party featuring Tory London mayoral candidate Shaun Bailey and staff …
– December 15 2020: Downing Street quiz …
– December 16 2020: Department for Transport party …
– December 17 2020: Cabinet Office “Christmas party” …
– December 17 2020: Leaving drinks for former Covid Taskforce head …
– December 18 2020: Christmas party at Downing Street …
Mr Johnson’s spokeswoman, Allegra Stratton, quit after being filmed joking about it with fellow aides at a mock press conference.
– Run-up to Christmas 2020 …
– April 16 2021: Drinks and dancing the night before the Duke of Edinburgh’s funeral …
The Telegraph quoted a No 10 spokesman as saying Mr Johnson was not in Downing Street that day and is said to have been at Chequers.
Strangely, at the time, no one cared:
Now everyone does.
Downing Street has not helped. They are now denying there was a cake:
On January 25, the Paymaster General, Michael Ellis MP, drew the short straw and had to answer an Urgent Question (UQ) from Labour’s deputy leader Angela Rayner (pictured in the top left photo):
This was the UQ:
To ask the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster to make a statement on the status of the investigation into Downing Street parties following the statement from the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.
I felt very sorry for Ellis, who had to reply for the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, absent from the chamber. The transcript makes for grim reading.
Sir Edward Leigh, one of the first MPs to speak, tried to put things into perspective but to no avail:
When Europe stands on the brink of war and there is a cost of living crisis, can we please have a sense of proportion over the Prime Minister’s being given a piece of cake in his own office by his own staff?
The verbal attacks were many and vicious.
Ellis was able to put one Scottish MP, Pete Wishart (SNP), in his place.
Wishart asked:
Does the Paymaster General not think that it would be a good idea to set up a police special operations unit room in No. 10 Downing Street, because, while the police are looking at this case, they could perhaps look at cash for honours, cash for access, personal protective equipment for pals, paid advocacy, breaking the ministerial code, and all the other general Tory badness?
Ellis responded:
I have to say that a quick Google analysis of the SNP would not be particularly edifying. Despite noises off, this Prime Minister is focused on what matters to the British people and it is right that those matters conclude in an orderly way.
On Friday, January 28, news emerged that the Met told Sue Gray not to publish her report in full:
That day, The Guardian reported that a comedian issued a fake Sue Gray report:
The comedian Joe Lycett, who apparently caused chaos and “mass panic” in government when he tweeted a fake version of Sue Gray’s “partygate” report, has said his social media stunt was motivated by anger after the death of a close friend during the first lockdown.
Lycett tweeted a parody Gray report with a fake Cabinet Office letterhead, titled: “A summary of my main findings”, captioning his tweet: “BREAKING: Leaked Sue Gray report reveals shocking abuse of rules. Hard to see how the PM can cling on after this.”
He later shared a message that he said came “from someone who works for a cabinet minister. Source verified.”
The message, purportedly from someone who works in parliament, read: “Your tweet this morning was read as an actual serious leak from Sue Gray’s report. U had MP staff literally running around panicking from what it said. Panic dialling MPs like we need to discuss this right now.”
On Saturday, January 29, Steven Swinford of The Times reported that Sue Gray was just putting the finishing touches on her report when the Metropolitan Police intervened.
Swinford’s first sentence drew me in. It’s hard not to like an article that begins with this:
Sue Gray had been looking forward to a holiday.
It is unclear why the Met intervened when they did:
The timing of her intervention is said to have surprised Gray and her team of investigators. She had been in discussions with the Met for weeks, sharing information as she went along. Yet the force had declined to get involved until the point when her report was almost completed and ready for publication …
“She’s in a horrible position,” a Whitehall source said. “The delay just creates an air of conspiracy. Sue’s integrity is at risk here. If a partial report is produced it will look like she’s been got at. She just wants a holiday, she feels like she’s had enough of it. Very few people could do what she does but she just wants to be on the other side of this one.”
Some think that the Met’s intervention could be good news for Boris:
Johnson’s critics and supporters agreed that the Met’s intervention strengthened his position. One cabinet minister said: “Sue Gray cannot prejudice the Metropolitan Police’s investigation. It would be insane if she went ahead and published the details. The longer this goes on, the more ridiculous it looks. The prime minister is out of the danger zone, the worst is over.”
Or is he?
Sue Gray ‘update’
On Monday, January 31, Sue Gray issued a summary — termed an ‘update’ — of her report.
Guido Fawkes has the update in full.
Gray concluded:
a number of these gatherings should not have been allowed to take place or to develop in the way that they did. There is significant learning to be drawn from these events which must be addressed immediately across Government. This does not need to wait for the police investigations to be concluded.
At 3:30, Boris addressed MPs (see full transcript of the session). He said that he was sorry and that changes would be made in Downing Street.
He concluded with this:
First, it is time to sort out what Sue Gray rightly calls the “fragmented and complicated” leadership structures of Downing Street, which she says
“have not evolved sufficiently to meet the demands”
of the expansion of No. 10. We will do that, including by creating an Office of the Prime Minister, with a permanent secretary to lead No. 10.
Secondly, it is clear from Sue Gray’s report that it is time not just to review the civil service and special adviser codes of conduct, wherever necessary, to ensure that they take account of Sue Gray’s recommendations, but to make sure that those codes are properly enforced. Thirdly, I will be saying more in the coming days about the steps we will take to improve the No. 10 operation and the work of the Cabinet Office, to strengthen Cabinet Government, and to improve the vital connection between No. 10 and Parliament.
Mr Speaker, I get it and I will fix it. I want to say to the people of this country: I know what the issue is. [Hon. Members: “No!”] Yes. [Hon. Members: “You!”] It is whether this Government can be trusted to deliver. And I say yes, we can be trusted—yes, we can be trusted to deliver. We said that we would get Brexit done, and we did. We are setting up freeports around the whole United Kingdom. I have been to one of them today that is creating tens of thousands of new jobs. We said we would get this country through covid, and we did. We delivered the fastest vaccine roll-out in Europe and the fastest booster programme of any major economy, so that we have been able to restore people’s freedoms faster than any comparable economy. At the same time, we have been cutting crime by 14%, building 40 new hospitals and rolling out gigabit broadband, and delivering all the promises of our 2019 agenda, so that we have the fastest economic growth of the G7. We have shown that we have done things that people thought were impossible, and that we can deliver for the British people. [Interruption.] I remind those on the Opposition Benches that the reason we are coming out of covid so fast is partly because we doubled the speed of the booster roll-out.
I can tell the House and this country that we are going to bring the same energy and commitment to getting on with the job, to delivering for the British people, and to our mission to unite and level up across this country. I commend this statement to the House.
It did not go down well with the Opposition benches, nor some of the Conservative MPs.
Theresa May was deeply unhappy:
She said:
The covid regulations imposed significant restrictions on the freedoms of members of the public. They had a right to expect their Prime Minister to have read the rules, to understand the meaning of the rules—and, indeed, those around them him to have done so, too—and to set an example in following those rules. What the Gray report does show is that No. 10 Downing Street was not observing the regulations they had imposed on members of the public, so either my right hon. Friend had not read the rules, or did not understand what they meant—and others around him—or they did not think the rules applied to No. 10. Which was it?
The SNP’s Westminster leader, Ian Blackford, followed the former Prime Minister. He cited two of Boris’s contradictions and ended with this:
Nobody—nobody—believed him then, and nobody believes you now, Prime Minister. That is the crux. No ifs, no buts; he has wilfully misled Parliament.
Blackford broke two rules there. First, he said ‘you’. Secondly, he said ‘wilfully misled’.
The Speaker of the House, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, interrupted him:
Order. It would be acceptable to say “inadvertently misled the House”, but “misled the House” is not acceptable. The right hon. Member must withdraw that comment.
Blackford doubled down, concluding:
… the public know that this is a man they can no longer trust. He is being investigated by the police. He misled the House. He must now resign.
The exchange between him and the Speaker continued for some time. Blackford refused to withdraw his remark.
At that point, the Speaker was ready to suspend him, but Blackford left voluntarily:
Order. Under the power given to me by Standing Order No. 43, I order the right hon. Member to withdraw immediately from the House—
Another MP said:
He has left anyway!
Here’s the video:
Hoyle concluded:
It’s all right; we do not need to bother. Let us move on.
Aaron Bell MP spoke later on. Although he is Conservative, he made a good point, asking if Boris was trying to make a fool of him for obeying the restrictions at a family funeral:
Not surprisingly, the Mirror (Labour) picked up on it:
Boris was at the despatch box for a little over two hours.
That evening, he met with a group of Conservative MPs, wherein he pledged to reform how Downing Street operates. Guido’s colleague Christian Calgie said it went well:
Meanwhile, Labour MPs and the media hit the bar:
Incidentally, while Boris was giving his afternoon statement to Parliament, one of the bars there re-opened for business.
The next day, Mark Harper MP gave a good interview to Julia Hartley-Brewer at talkRADIO:
Labour’s Chinese spy story ignored
In mid-January, news emerged that a Chinese operative had donated £500,000 over a period of several years to a Labour MP. Yet, apart from GB News, no one in the media was — or is — talking about that (Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer is pictured, not the MP involved):
Subplots
There are two important subplots running through this sorry saga: Boris’s mention of Labour leader Keir Starmer’s record as Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) with regard to Jimmy Savile (a celebrity paedophile) and the revelation of ghastly text messages by members of London’s Metropolitan Police, casting doubt on the force’s investigation of the Downing Street parties.
Metropolitan Police
The Metropolitan Police are investigating the Downing Street parties, which is interesting, since the organisation said initially that they would not be doing so, as the events happened too long ago.
One wonders, however, how credible any investigation would be since Commissioner Dame Cressida Dick has come under fire for her leadership. Some constables in the Met have been texting violent and vicious messages that are misogynistic and hateful.
Although Dame Cressida cannot be expected to know everything that her constables are doing, these text messages could cast doubt on the credibility of the investigation.
Furthermore, it is interesting that Dame Cressida announced the Met’s investigation of Downing Street at a meeting of the London Assembly, headed by the capital’s mayor Sadiq Khan (Labour).
Sir Jimmy Savile
On Monday, January 31, Boris gave the House of Commons an update on Sue Gray’s inquiry into the Downing Street parties.
The Metropolitan Police allowed the civil servant to write a summary report pending their own inquiry, which is still ongoing.
As such, there is no conclusion as to whether Boris should resign.
However, Labour and the other Opposition parties have been pushing for Boris to stand down for weeks now.
On Monday, in response to Boris’s statement, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said:
Conservative Members can heap their reputation, the reputation of their party, and the reputation of this country on the bonfire that is the Prime Minister’s leadership, or they can spare the country a Prime Minister totally unworthy of his responsibilities. It is their duty to do so. They know better than anyone how unsuitable he is for high office. Many of them knew in their hearts that we would inevitably come to this one day and they know that, as night follows day, continuing his leadership will mean further misconduct, cover-up and deceit. Only they can end this farce. The eyes of the country are upon them. They will be judged by the decisions they take now.
Boris replied:
There is a reason why the right hon. and learned Gentleman said absolutely nothing about the report that was presented by the Government and put in the Library of this House earlier today. That is because the report does absolutely nothing to substantiate the tissue of nonsense that he has just spoken—absolutely nothing. Instead, this Leader of the Opposition, a former Director of Public Prosecutions—although he spent most of his time prosecuting journalists and failing to prosecute Jimmy Savile, as far as I can make out—chose to use this moment continually to prejudge a police inquiry. That is what he chose to do. He has reached his conclusions about it. I am not going to reach any conclusions, and he would be entirely wrong to do so. I direct him again to what Sue Gray says in her report about the conclusions that can be drawn from her inquiry about what the police may or may not do. I have complete confidence in the police, and I hope that they will be allowed simply to get on with their job. I do not propose to offer any more commentary about it, and I do not believe that he should either.
The Speaker objected:
Boris’s mention of Starmer’s failure to get the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) to investigate Savile ran all week long. Conservative MPs also objected to it. It is unclear why that is; after all these years, someone needed to speak up:
Boris’s opponents call it a ‘far-right conspiracy theory’, although Starmer was in charge of the CPS at the time Savile’s activities came to light. Starmer even issued an apology for the oversight at the time:
More recently, when Starmer ran for the Labour leadership, he said:
Hear me out: I had 8,000 staff for five years as the director of public prosecutions. And I acted, I hope, in the right way with them, which is when they had victories I celebrated victories on their behalf, I picked up awards on their behalves. When they made mistakes, I carried the can. I never turn on my staff and you should never turn on your staff… I will carry the can for mistakes of any organisation I lead.
Starmer’s biography states he was responsible for all criminal prosecutions in England and Wales:
Leader of the House, Jacob Rees-Mogg rightly defended Boris’s remark on Thursday, February 3:
In any event, that day, four Downing Street staffers resigned.
Munira Mirza, who had worked for Boris for 14 years — since he was Mayor of London — was the most prominent. The former policy chief said that she took strong objection to her boss’s mention of Savile:
Guido posted part of Mirza’s resignation letter:
I believe it was wrong for you to imply this week that Keir Starmer was personally responsible for allowing Jimmy Savile to escape justice. There was no fair or reasonable basis for that assertion. This was not the usual cut and thrust of politics; it was an inappropriate and partisan reference to a horrendous case of child sex abuse. You tried to clarify your position today but, despite my urging, you did not apologise for the misleading impression you gave.
In a second post, Guido said that Boris asked Mirza to hold off until he gave a briefing to the media. The briefing only caused her to confirm her resignation:
When the pool clip came without an apology, more of a clarification, she confirmed her resignation via an email which concluded:
Even now, I hope you find it in yourself to apologise for a grave error of judgement made under huge pressure. I appreciate that our political culture is not forgiving when people say sorry, but regardless, it is the right thing to do. It is not too late for you but, I’m sorry to say, it is too late for me.
The public do not understand what the problem is with the mention of Starmer’s indirect failure to investigate Savile:
Furthermore, we all understand that Boris wasn’t implying that Starmer was personally responsible. However, he was the head of the CPS, so he bore responsibility for it, as Boris told the media:
Let’s be absolutely clear, I’m talking not about the Leader of the Opposition’s personal record when he was DPP and I totally understand that he had nothing to do personally with those decisions. I was making a point about his responsibility for the organisation as a whole.
Too right.
One of Guido’s readers summarised what Boris was saying in Parliament and to the press. It concerns double standards, wherein Starmer expects the Prime Minister to take responsibility for Downing Street activities but not for his own sins of omission at the CPS. This is a good get-out rationale from Guido’s reader paraphrasing Boris:
I was not aware of event X being organised or taking place, and so while I apologise it happened under my watch and plan to change systems to avoid such events in future, it is not reasonable for me to resign over it. That is entirely consistent with the Leader of the Opposition’s own behaviour while DPP over the Savile issue.
In any event, three more Downing Street staffers resigned after Mirza did, including Martin Reynolds, who issued the email about one of the parties, requesting that people bring their own alcoholic beverages:
It is unclear why the other three left. Some say that they are afraid of being investigated. Others say it was an excuse for Boris to clean house.
Of the three additional resignations, GB News reported:
Martin Reynolds is one of the most senior officials in No 10 but had largely avoided the limelight until the emergence of his email inviting colleagues to “socially-distanced drinks” during England’s first coronavirus lockdown.
As Boris Johnson’s principal private secretary, he played a key role advising the Prime Minister on a wide range of issues, but resigned from the role on Thursday alongside three other senior Downing Street aides …
Mr Johnson’s former adviser Dominic Cummings previously said the influence wielded by the principal private secretary within Downing Street was not widely appreciated.
“The PPS exercises far more influence and actual power over many issues than Cabinet ministers,” Mr Cummings said.
“He can nudge policy, he can nudge vital appointments (real power). He can and does walk into the PM’s office and exclude all political people ‘on security grounds’.”
A leaked photograph of the Prime Minister and officials drinking in the No 10 garden on May 15 2020 – five days before the “bring your own booze” event that Mr Reynolds invited colleagues to – showed the PPS sitting at the same table as Mr Johnson …
Mr Reynolds offered his resignation on Thursday alongside Downing Street chief of staff Dan Rosenfield, hours after policy aide Munira Mirza and director of communications Jack Doyle both quit.
A No 10 spokeswoman said: “Dan Rosenfield offered his resignation to the Prime Minister earlier today, which has been accepted.
“Martin Reynolds also informed the Prime Minister of his intention to stand down from his role as principal private secretary and the Prime Minister has agreed to this.
“He has thanked them both for their significant contribution to government and No 10, including work on the pandemic response and economic recovery.
“They will continue in their roles while successors are appointed, and recruitment for both posts is under way.”
As I write on Friday morning, an aide to Munira Mirza has also resigned:
Tom Harwood adds that Chancellor Rishi Sunak has been keeping his distance from the Prime Minister and did not defend the remark about Keir Starmer and the Jimmy Savile case.
One of the commenters makes an excellent point about civil servants finding the Savile remark more offensive than what happened to 60+ million people for … a virus:
Those people live in their own bubble.
Interestingly, Boris has appointed an MP rather than a civil servant to succeed Mirza. Andrew Griffith represents the Arundel constituency on the south coast of England. He seems to have a truly Conservative voting record.
Therefore, it seems as if Boris is cleaning house, which can only be a good thing for him. The civil servants do not seem to have been doing him many favours.
In more positive news for the Conservatives, Anna Firth won the by-election in Southend West, served by Sir David Amess until he was stabbed to death last October:
Because of the nature of Sir David’s death, Labour and the Liberal Democrats did not put up candidates to run against Anna Firth, although minor political parties did.
Therefore, although she won 86% of the vote, only 24% of the electorate went to the polls.
The party debacle is far from over. This will run and run and run.
COP26? Oh, the hypocrisy of it all!
I watched the first hour of it on Monday, November 1 and nearly gagged but had to hear the actual speeches so that I would know exactly what the more prominent speakers actually said rather than read fake news regurgitations in the comment sections of the sites I read most frequently.
Air and limo travel: ‘for me but not for thee’
The G20 summit in Rome closed on Monday, then it was time for the leaders to jet off to Glasgow for COP20.
While COP26 was scheduled to take place last year and couldn’t go ahead because of the pandemic, it does seem as if these events, e.g. G20, could be better co-ordinated so that they took place in cities which are closer to each other.
But, you know, when it comes to our notional betters, no expense is spared. It’s okay for them to fly then ride in limos all over the place, but it’s not okay for us to go on a budget airline holiday with our family once a year:
In addition, Glaswegian women were made to walk down dark, unfamiliar thoroughfares while a COP26 VIP reception took place:
Let’s take a closer look at the double standard that we, the great unwashed, are experiencing.
Ed Miliband MP
Ed Miliband used to lead the Labour Party. He is now in the Shadow (Opposition) cabinet.
On Sunday, October 31, he went on Andrew Marr’s show on the BBC to object to Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s lowering of passenger air duty on internal flights in the UK.
In fact, Miliband told Marr that domestic flights should be stopped ‘as much as we possibly can’. However, in January 2020, Guido Fawkes revealed the MP’s own air travel habits:
Guido’s 2020 post said, in part (emphases mine below):
Last April, Guido reported on Ed Miliband’s hypocrisy of constantly windbagging about the ‘climate emergency’ despite wracking up 19,000 air miles from his flights abroad, pumping out tonnes of carbon dioxide …
Green Ed’s wracked up 12,000 air miles in 10 months – half the circumference of the globe.
Miliband is one of the North London elite who represents a working class city in the North of England, Doncaster. As one would expect, Miliband is more interested in promoting himself than Doncaster. This is what one of his constituents had to say:
Ed wants Britons to take the train, but that is not always possible within the United Kingdom, which includes Northern Ireland — and various islands:
One wonders if Miliband finally bought an electric car, the type of vehicle he insists the rest of us should have:
Miliband has complained about our rising energy prices which will be increasing by 20% per annum in 2022. However, he was the one who started the ‘green tax’ on energy when he was the energy secretary during Labour’s last few years in power 10+ years ago:
Lorna Slater MSP
Another hypocrite is the Scottish Green MSP, deputy party leader Lorna Slater, originally from Canada.
She slammed G20 leaders for not going by train from Rome to Glasgow, which would have taken 28 hours:
However, Guido pointed out that, in 2019, Lorna Slater enjoyed a flight from Brussels to Sweden:
Couldn’t she have gone by train?
As Guido points out:
According to Lorna’s logic, Guido is outraged she didn’t set an example by taking the 36-hour train from Glasgow Central via Euston, London St Pancras, Amsterdam and Berlin to Stockholm Central.
Joe Biden
As is customary for the leader of the free world, an American president has to have a ginormous motorcade for security purposes.
Apparently, in Rome, Joe Biden had to have more vehicles than usual because the city has social distancing laws during the coronavirus crisis. As such, he had an 85-car motorcade. The Daily Mail has the story along with numerous photos:
Biden at the upcoming environmental summit plans to tout $550 billion in new environmental programs in his Build Back Better framework, which he unveiled before jetting to Rome on Air Force One (another gas guzzler).
Here’s the US motorcade leaving Edinburgh International Airport for Glasgow:
Here is his motorcade upon arrival in Glasgow:
https://twitter.com/LenzGrimmer/status/1455189319166136326
Less hypocritical transport
Late last week and into the weekend, North West England and the South West of Scotland, including Glasgow, had a lot of heavy rain.
As a result, media reporters and other lesser beings found their trains from Euston to Glasgow Central cancelled:
https://twitter.com/Robfm/status/1454844272725958656
CNN’s Wolf Blitzer reports from … Edinburgh
Incredibly, CNN’s veteran reporter, Wolf Blitzer, must have thought COP26 was taking place in Scotland’s capital:
How does that happen?
Boris’s opening speech
On Monday, as COP26 host, Prime Minister Boris Johnson was one of the first speakers welcoming everyone to the conference.
He laid out the purpose of this year’s conference, which is to determine exactly how the Paris Agreement will work in practice:
The Daily Mail has a good summary of what he said:
The Prime Minister compared the situation facing the globe to the climax of a James Bond film where the hero has to thwart plans to blow up the planet.
But Mr Johnson said ‘this is not a movie’ and the ‘doomsday device is real’ as he urged his counterparts to do more to reduce harmful emissions.
The premier said the longer countries wait to take action then ‘the higher the price when we are eventually forced by catastrophe to act’.
He said the world has ‘long since run the clock down on climate change’ and there is now just ‘one minute to midnight’, with action required immediately to prevent a global disaster.
The PM used his speech at the opening of the summit as a rallying cry to try to build momentum as he welcomed foreign leaders to Glasgow after securing only lukewarm climate commitments at the G20 summit in Rome over the weekend …
Mr Johnson pledged in his lunchtime speech to put another billion pounds into green finance – as long as the UK economy performs as expected in the coming years.
The PM repeated he wants global leaders to unveil steps on ‘coal, cars, cash and trees’ – the things he believes will make the most different in limiting temperature rises to 1.5 degrees.
Mr Johnson had set the tone as the G20 wrapped up last night by reading the riot act to his fellow world leaders, saying their promises on tackling climate change are starting to ‘sound hollow’.
The PM said there are ‘no compelling excuses for our procrastination’ on reducing harmful emissions and action already taken amounts to ‘drops in a rapidly warming ocean’.
Boris said that Glasgow was the site of the first steam engine, which James Watt invented. If I remember rightly from history class back in the mists of time, Britons called it the ‘doomsday machine’, because it was such a departure from anything anyone had known before.
In the event, it kicked off the Industrial Revolution which, despite its ‘dark satanic mills’ (William Blake), actually improved millions of people’s lives not only in Britain but, with time, around the world:
As such, it seemed strange for Boris to refer to it at COP26. Was he inferring that Watt’s steam engine was responsible for climate change?
Hmm. Look how GDP per capita has increased in England ever since the Industrial Revolution:
Tom Harwood of GB News nailed it, by pointing out how much Boris’s views have changed:
This is what Boris wrote for The Telegraph in 2015, when we had a warm December. His editorial ends with this:
Scientists look at the data. But everyone else just looks at the weather – and it is the weather, therefore, that makes the psychological difference to the debate. Look at the recent summit in Paris, which ended in a good agreement to cut CO2, in contrast to the debacle at Copenhagen six years ago. What was the real difference? It was the weather. Paris was ridiculously warm for December. Six years ago, Copenhagen saw the biggest snowfalls anyone could remember. “Global warming?” everyone asked.
It is fantastic news that the world has agreed to cut pollution and help people save money, but I am sure that those global leaders were driven by a primitive fear that the present ambient warm weather is somehow caused by humanity; and that fear – as far as I understand the science – is equally without foundation.
There may be all kinds of reasons why I was sweating at ping-pong – but they don’t include global warming.
Joe Biden and Boris — sleepy or just heads down?
The media are saying that Joe Biden fell asleep. It looks as if Boris did too.
Here are the photos and a video of Sleepy Joe:
https://twitter.com/Irish7Summits/status/1455362490573934596
The Queen’s video message
In a recorded video message sent to the conference, the Queen expressed her wishes for COP26.
The message was aired on Monday evening at the aforementioned VIP reception in the centre of Glasgow.
She asked the world’s leaders to rise above politics.
As ever, she had a photo on her desk that tied into the theme: a photo of Prince Philip surrounded by monarch butterflies.
The Mail‘s Robert Hardman reported:
Summoning the wisdom which comes with being the longest-serving head of state on the planet, the Queen distilled the monumental task facing this summit into just a few words.
‘For more than 70 years, I have been lucky to meet and to know many of the world’s great leaders,’ she said.
‘And I have perhaps come to understand a little about what made them special. It has sometimes been observed that what leaders do for their people today is government and politics. But what they do for the people of tomorrow – that is statesmanship.’
This was, she told them, their chance to be ‘written in history books yet to be printed’. Big words from one who has already been written in to a few herself. But then the Monarch knows of what she speaks.
Though this was a speech she had wanted to make in person until her doctors decreed that it had to be delivered via video, it lost none of its punch. The poignancy of the setting only added to the power of her words.
There she was in the White Drawing Room at Windsor Castle, the same room in which delivered her historic address to a Covid-ravaged nation last year. At her side, was a favourite photo of the Duke of Edinburgh surrounded by butterflies during a 1988 visit to Mexico.
For years, she reminded us, she had watched him nurture a bright idea that turned in to a charity – the World Wildlife Fund – that, in turn, paved the way for so many of today’s environmental organisations.
Between them, the couple had watched their eldest son and his eldest son embrace the same cause.
‘I could not be more proud of them,’ she said. And what was that on her lapel? Her much-loved butterfly brooch …
Another Mail article has more:
In her most personal speech to date, the monarch also paid tribute to Prince Philip and described how ‘the impact of the environment on human progress’ was a subject close to the heart of her ‘dear late husband’ – who in 1969 told a gathering: ‘If we fail to cope with this challenge, all the other problems will pale into insignificance.’
The Queen’s stern intervention, which was displayed on screens during a VVIP reception at Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Museum, came hours after the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi pledged that India will target net-zero carbon emissions by 2070 – two decades later than the targets for the conference – disappointing many delegates.
It also comes after Boris Johnson kicked off the climate change summit by exhorting world leaders to back up their talk on climate change with action – warning it was ‘one minute to midnight’.
A GB News panel thought that she had content and tone just right:
Archbishop of Canterbury apologises
The Anglican Communion is really into the impending doom and disaster of climate change.
To see that they are so wrapped up with the United Nations makes my skin crawl.
They sent a delegation to Glasgow:
Earlier on Monday, the Archbishop of Canterbury gave an interview to Radio 4’s Today show. Later on, he had to apologise for his remarks in which he compared coming deaths from climate change to the Third Reich:
Coronavirus hypocrisy
As ever, delegates were expected to wear masks, but as the Daily Mail‘s photos show, world leaders took theirs off and defied social distancing.
How nice for the great and the good!
As for everyone else, it was masks or no admittance:
Public not interested
Thankfully, the general public are not interested in COP26. They have actual pressing issues with which to deal:
Guido’s post says that a poll shows the British public are unwilling to shoulder the cost for any nonsense arising from COP26:
The lack of correlation between the BBC’s output and what people want to read, and what it suggests about the British public’s true feelings towards tackling climate change, seems to be backed up by a poll by Portland this morning. It found that while the public supports hypothetically punishing climate-damaging behaviour, or the government incentivising green behaviour, just 7% say “my family and me, and other families like me” should pay most of the cost. Just 36% are willing to pay more than £50 a month on top of existing bills to limit CO2 emissions.
I plan to feature more on climate change tomorrow.
The 2021 Westminster Dog of the Year event was held on Thursday, October 28, 2021 in Victoria Tower Gardens, Westminster, London.
Had he lived, Sir David Amess MP (pictured) planned on entering with his French bulldog Vivienne. In the wake of his murder two weeks ago, his close friend and fellow Essex MP Andrew Rosindell was allowed to enter with Vivienne:
On the day of the competition, Rosindell said:
No one loved animals like David, and no one loved their dog like David. I could not feel more sadness at the fact that it will be me chaperoning Vivienne, his dog, at the Dog of the Year, instead of him, but I also could not feel more pride to be able to pay tribute to him in this small way.
Another Essex MP, Mark Francois, accompanied Rosindell, holding the dog’s lead.
The public was allowed to vote for their favourite MP/dog duo. The Kennel Club judges determined their own winner.
Both public and judges voted overwhelmingly for Vivienne, a pawfect tribute to her late master.
Here’s the photo of the winners. Andrew Rosindell holds Amess’s dog and Mark Francois the picture of Sir David and a rescue dog from a previous year’s entry:
The Kennel Club‘s article says:
French Bulldog Vivienne, entered with Sir David Amess before his tragic death, has been crowned Westminster Dog of the Year 2021. In second place was Stanley, a Border Terrier owned by Edward Timpson MP for Eddisbury. Placed third was Henry, a Labrador owned by Selaine Saxby MP for North Devon.
Although Conservative MPs won the top spots, Parliamentarians from Opposition parties also entered the competition, held for the first time since 2018. The 2019 contest had to be cancelled because of anti-Brexit protests and last year’s couldn’t take place because of coronavirus.
The Kennel Club explains that the event is a chance to bring all dog-loving MPs together to highlight animal welfare and responsible canine ownership:
Westminster Dog of the Year is a celebration of the unique bond between dogs and their owners. The competition gives parliamentarians the opportunity to highlight the important work that they have undertaken in Parliament on dog related matters, whilst promoting responsible dog ownership. All Members of Parliament are able to enter regardless of ‘pawlitical’ persuasion.
Owen Sharp, Chief Executive of Dogs Trust, explains: “The Westminster Dog of the Year competition is so much more than a canine beauty pageant. The competition is strictly apolitical; judges will be looking for the dogs’ good deeds and devotion to their owner rather than policies or opinions. It is a fun filled day out with an important message at its core – helping to promote dog welfare issues and encourage responsible ownership.”
Another Kennel Club article explains how the contest was judged. The Dogs Trust is part of the panel:
The judging panel – Mark Beazley; Chief Executive at The Kennel Club, Owen Sharp, Dogs Trust Chief Executive and Alex Norris MP, 2018 Winner – spent the morning with dogs from different political persuasions and ambitions and led tributes to Sir David Amess, with speeches from the Rt Hon Lord Benyon.
The Kennel Club’s Mark Beazley and the Dogs Trust’s Owen Sharp paid tributes to Sir David:
Mark Beazley commented: “Today we pay tribute to Sir David and all he has done for dog welfare, and hope to honour his legacy to protect and improve the lives of the nation’s pets, who make such a difference to so many. Crowning Vivienne as Westminster Dog of the Year and the public’s winner is testament to Sir David’s commitment and his passionate campaigning for animals. We would like to thank all the MPs and their four-legged counterparts for taking part in the competition and their tributes to Sir David, and for their commitment to dog welfare.”
Owen Sharp, Dogs Trust Chief Executive said:
“Sir David Amess was a cherished friend of Dogs Trust and a great supporter of Westminster Dog of the Year. He was a fantastic advocate for animal welfare and a huge dog lover, making it an honour to award his dog, Vivienne, with the coveted title of Westminster Dog of the Year today.
“His constituents and supporters across the UK voted in their tens of thousands to also crown Vivienne as the winner of the public vote – testament to his unwavering dedication to dog welfare. Sir David’s memory lives on at this event and we want to thank him and the other MPs here today for caring and for making a difference to the lives of dogs here in the UK.”
Afterwards, Tom Harwood of GB News interviewed Andrew Rosindell, who discussed his friendship with Sir David. The interview also has a few clips from the event. Even those who don’t know what a French bulldog looks like will have no problem identifying Vivienne. She’s wearing a blue bib with ‘City of Southend’ printed on it — Sir David’s dogged cause in Parliament, posthumously successful:
The Independent also covered the event and has highlights in this minute-long video:
Well done, everyone.
I, too, voted for Sir David and Vivienne.
Yesterday’s post recapped the horrific murder of Sir David Amess MP on October 15, 2021.
Today’s will cover more about this much admired man’s personal character and political causes.
Posthumous victory: Southend-on-Sea now a city
I was delighted to learn at dinner time last night that the Queen granted Southend-on-Sea city status. Sir David must have mentioned Southend at least once a week in Parliament. He had long campaigned for it and made 115 references to it. Here he is with his two French bulldogs, one of which is Vivienne. He was due to participate with her in the Westminster Dog of the Year charity event on October 28:
The GB News article says that Prime Minister Boris Johnson made the announcement to MPs on Monday, October 18 (emphases mine):
The Prime Minister has notified the House of Commons that the Queen has agreed to confer city status upon Southend in tribute to Sir David Amess who was recently killed.
MPs cheered in the Commons as the Prime Minister announced Southend “will be accorded the city status it so clearly deserves”.
Mr Johnson said: “As it is only a short time since Sir David last put that very case to me in this chamber, I am happy to announce that Her Majesty has agreed that Southend will be accorded the city status it so clearly deserves …
That ‘short time’ was probably last Thursday, October 14:
In a three-hour debate on Monday, preceding a service of remembrance at St Margaret’s, the Parliamentary church next to Westminster Abbey, Boris noted that Amess was never an MP interested in climbing the greasy pole to a Cabinet or party leadership position:
“That Sir David spent almost 40 years in this House, but not one day in ministerial office, tells everything about where his priorities lay.”
Boris Johnson, opening tributes to Sir David Amess, told the House of Commons: “The passing of 72 hours has done little to numb the shock and sadness we all felt when we heard of the tragic and senseless death of Sir David Amess.
“This House has lost a steadfast servant, we’ve lost a dear friend and colleague, and Julia and her children have lost a loving husband and devoted father.
“Nothing I or anyone else can say can lessen the pain, the grief, the anger they must feel at this darkest of times.”
Returning to Southend-on-Sea, having city status will help to increase its profile and encourage outside investment, as the leader of the city’s council explains below. Incidentally, having a cathedral, the traditional marker of an English city, is no longer necessary. City status is now a symbolic designation:
On Friday night, this Southend business owner said that Amess was dedicated to making his town a city:
Everything I know about Southend I learned from David Amess’s contributions in the House of Commons:
‘Community man’
There are MPs and there are MPs.
Sir David was the type of MP who will be sorely missed by his constituents, who called him a ‘community man’. GB News interviewed several over the weekend, some of whom were in tears or close to it, including men, such as this Leigh-on-Sea councillor:
This councillor from Southend says that Sir David, whose mother lived to the age of 104, used to throw parties for constituents over 100 years old. He also used to ask about local issues in Southend and resolve them with the help of councillors:
Another councillor remembers that Sir David would check on certain constituents to see if they had transport for important meetings, probably related to issues of theirs he was dealing with as an MP. The man says that Sir David would personally drive those constituents to the places they needed to go. And, yes, there were right to life issues he campaigned for:
The Chairman of Leigh-on-Sea council recalls Sir David’s selflessness:
This lady from Leigh-on-Sea, the Essex town where Sir David was stabbed to death (17 times), discusses his dedication to his constituency. Like many other people, she had the pleasure of meeting him at work in nearby Southend:
As was the case with other people GB News interviewed, a man interviewed (at 2:35 in the next video) said that people used to see Amess in the local Lidl, where he took time to chat with fellow shoppers. The man said that he did not vote for him but said that the MP was always available and accessible to everyone:
Vigil Mass
On Friday evening, the Revd Jeffrey Woolnough conducted a vigil Mass at St Peter’s Catholic Church in Eastwood, Leigh-on-Sea.
This is the church the Amess family attend.
The video below has a few photos from the Mass. Starting at the 40-second point, notice how traditional it is. The priest stands with his back to the people, as in days of yore. He also wears a short chasuble that is very pre-Vatican II, a fiddleback. How fortunate for the Amess family to have found such a church:
At 1:50 in the video above, two ladies expressed their grief on Friday night following the vigil Mass. One of them said that Amess ‘knew everybody’. As was the case with other people GB News interviewed, one of ladies said that people used to see him in the supermarket.
GB News was on hand to cover the Mass:
A service at Saint Peter’s Church in Eastwood Lane, close to where Sir David was killed, was held on Friday evening to remember him – where he was described by a priest as “Mr Southend”.
The church fell silent as Father Jeffrey Woolnaugh paid tribute to the Conservative MP and invited his constituents to remember him.
He placed a photograph of Sir David at the front of the church, and said: “This liturgy is one I was not expecting to lead today.
“The whole world grieves. In this Mass we pray for the repose of the soul of dear David.
“Have you ever known Sir David Amess without that happy smile on his face? Because the greeting he would always give you was that happy smile.
“He carried that great east London spirit of having no fear and being able to talk to people and the level they’re at. Not all politicians, I would say, are good at that.”
Around 80 people attended the service and listened as Father Woolnough recounted his own memories of Sir David.
He said: “When you can speak to your MP and you can talk and get on like a house on fire, that’s when you can talk to them later about things that are important to your area.
“What can we say? He died doing the thing he loved, meeting his constituents, his local people.”
Father Woolnough added that his constituents could “count on” Sir David, and said: “He was always available. We don’t have the words tonight.
“Dear Sir David, rest well.”
The priest also said that Amess’s smile is ingrained on everyone’s hearts:
On Saturday night, a secular candlelit vigil took place near where Sir David was murdered. The Daily Mail has many moving photographs of the gathering.
Biography
Most Britons think that all Conservatives were born with a silver spoon in their mouths.
Not so.
David Amess was born in humble circumstances in London’s East End.
The Telegraph recounted his life:
David Anthony Andrew Amess was born on March 26 1952 in working-class Plaistow, East London, to James Amess, an electrician, and Maud, née Martin, a dressmaker. As Amess recalled, “we were very poor and lived in a small terraced house with no bathroom, an outside toilet and a tin bath hanging on the wall”. In 2014 he would compile and publish a pamphlet, Party of Opportunity, containing short biographies of Tory MPs with working-class origins.
David’s mother was a Roman Catholic who brought him up in the faith and he remained a staunch Catholic throughout his life, his commitment reflected in his opposition to abortion and to the broadening of LGBT rights. “Confession,” he once said, “is very important to me.”
He attended St Antony’s Junior School, Forest Gate, where he was “often in classes of 50, and the teachers still gave us excellent tuition and kept order to a high standard”, and St Bonaventure’s Grammar School, Newham, where he remembered being “quite bossy and pushy” and was rumoured to have once hit a fellow pupil over the head with a bicycle pump.
Until the age of five, Amess said, he had the nickname of “Double Dutch” on account of a bad stutter: he could not make the sounds “st” or “the” and saw a speech therapist for three years, which also had the effect of virtually eliminating his Cockney accent.
He had a varied career prior to entering politics:
He took a degree in Economics and Government at Bournemouth College of Technology. Then, after 18 months’ teaching at a primary school (“I specialised in teaching children who were described as ESN”), and a short stint as an underwriter, he became a recruitment consultant.
One wonders if he met his wife Julia while he was an underwriter:
In 1983 he married Julia Arnold, a former underwriter, who survives him with their four daughters and a son.
Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister during Amess’s early years in politics:
A dedicated Thatcherite, Amess contested the safe Labour seat of Newham North West in 1979, and in 1982 became a councillor in the London borough of Redbridge.
During those years, Essex went from electing Labour MPs to Conservative ones. The county is still Conservative-dominated in Parliament.
In the 1980s and 1990s, the media coined expressions for Essex voters, many of whose families had been moved out of London after the Second World War had ended. The next generation of voters became known collectively as ‘Basildon man’ and ‘white van man’.
Amess rode the crest of that wave, as The Sun‘s Trevor Kavanagh explains:
Basildon was the first constituency he served, beginning in 1983:
When the incumbent Tory MP for Basildon, the Right-wing Harvey Proctor, moved to safer Billericay for the 1983 general election, Amess was chosen to fill his shoes and was duly elected. Three years later he stood down from the council to concentrate on his Westminster seat.
Basildon was regarded as a bellwether seat, and when Amess won it again in 1992, albeit with a tiny majority, it provided the first indication that despite the pundits, and the triumphalism of Labour’s leader Neil Kinnock, the Tories were on course for a fourth successive election victory. He would later describe his campaign in a short pamphlet entitled 1992: Against All Odds! (2012).
Boundary changes prior to the 1997 general election meant that Basildon was almost certain to go Labour, so Amess decided to look elsewhere, and in 1995 was selected to fight Southend West after the retirement of Paul Channon. Returned to Westminster again, he held the seat until his death.
Amess focused on his constituents, first and foremost:
Assiduous and likeable, Amess built a strong personal following by concentrating on constituency issues: the Guardian’s Andrew Rawnsley once suggested that the secret of his electoral success was that “he never completed a sentence without mentioning his constituency”.
This was also reflected away from Parliament:
Amess … was a lifelong supporter of West Ham United, and also followed Basildon United …
Even after he left Basildon, he still returned to visit, as this former Basildon councillor remembers:
He had many accomplishments with regard to charity, earning him a knighthood. He:
was knighted in 2015 and received several awards for his contributions in parliament, including the Animal Welfare and Environment Champion award of the 2011 Dods Charity Champion Awards, and the “Outstanding Achievement Award” at the same event the following year, in recognition of his lifetime commitment to charitable work.
This was how the newly knighted Sir David celebrated:
He did not always follow the Conservative line in Parliament:
… he incurred the wrath of many fellow Conservatives by consistently voting to ban foxhunting and hare coursing (though he was in favour of capital punishment), and supporting numerous other animal welfare campaigns.
Many MPs will remember his staunch support of Brexit, however.
They will also remember him for supporting animal causes and an end to fuel poverty:
The most significant of these were the Protection Against Cruel Tethering Act (1988), and the Warm Homes and Energy Conservation Act (2000) …
The animal-related Act, supported by the NFU, banned the tethering of “any horse, ass or mule under such conditions or in such manner as to cause that animal unnecessary suffering”.
The second piece of legislation, following on from the death of a constituent from cold, required the Secretary of State to “publish and implement a strategy for reducing fuel poverty”. The measure was credited with pushing fuel poverty to near the top of the political agenda, contributing to a dramatic fall in the problem in England from 5.1 million households in 1996 to 1.2 million in 2004.
Another cause that Amess supported, thanks to a Leigh-on-Sea constituent, Carla Cressy, was that of endometriosis.
The Telegraph has the story:
“I first approached Sir David Amess when I’d just found out I had endometriosis five years ago,” says Carla Cressy, 30, an accounts manager from Leigh-on-Sea. “I didn’t know much about it, and realised there was very little awareness, support and education around it. He’s my local MP so I visited him at his surgery. I had no expectations of what would happen. I just knew I wanted to share my story with him, about how I’d suffered with endometriosis for an entire decade before I was diagnosed.
“He was so lovely – genuinely concerned and upset about what I’d been through. He said we need to do something about it, and he then really did. He went above and beyond to champion this community like a beacon of light. It was incredible. I am devastated that he’s gone.”
This is what happened:
“Sir David recognised the significant impact endometriosis could have, and really wanted to make a difference to help those with the disease,” says Emma Cox, CEO of Endometriosis UK, a charity that was working closely with an All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) that Sir David set up in 2018 to raise awareness in Parliament of the condition …
One of Sir David’s goals when he created the APPG was for the government to provide education on endometriosis in schools. It’s something the group achieved over a year later, meaning menstrual wellbeing is now included on the English curriculum. “We made so much progress together,” says Cressy, who worked closely with Sir David on the campaign. “He really has changed so many lives, including my own.”
One of Sir David’s upcoming tasks, had he lived, was to ask for further research funding, as a Labour MP explains:
“He really wanted that debate,” says Labour MP Emma Hardy, vice-chair of the APPG on endometriosis. “We’d published a report last year, collecting evidence from women around the country with their experience of endometriosis, and Sir David wanted to draw attention to our recommendations.”
Their key goals are to reduce the time it takes for people to be diagnosed, ensure GPs have enough information to make them aware of the condition, raise public awareness, and fund more research into non-invasive ways of diagnosis …
“The main thing that comes from women is not being listened to, not being believed, taking ages to be diagnosed and then when they are, there’s not much change. Sir David wanted to change that. Endometriosis isn’t party politics, but he was really passionate about trying to do something about this condition. I don’t want him to be remembered as the person this tragedy happened to, but the person who worked so hard to improve the lives of people with endometriosis. We can’t replace him, but I hope we can find another Conservative MP to champion his work and continue with the APPG.”
This GB News video covers Sir David’s public life from the time he entered politics:
MPs paid respects
On Friday afternoon, Union flags were lowered to half-mast over government buildings, including No. 10:
On Saturday morning, prominent Conservative and Labour MPs laid flowers near the Methodist church hall where Sir David was murdered:
Government whips have reminded MPs that there is an Employee Assistance Programme for anyone among them who wants counselling after Sir David’s senseless murder.
Everyone, regardless of party affiliation, was deeply sorry to lose this man:
This was because he befriended MPs from both sides of the aisle and found ways to work constructively with them:
One of the things I found moving in watching and reading these tributes was the recollection made by more than one MP, regardless of party affiliation, on his befriending of new Parliamentarians. He introduced himself, asked how they were getting on and enquired if they had any issues with which he could help.
Conservative MPs
These are some of the Conservative MPs’ tributes, beginning with Boris’s:
Long-time friend David Davis paid tribute to Amess’s career of service, rather than ambition:
Stuart Anderson remembers Amess helping him settle into the job:
Andrew Rosindell, another Essex MP, lamented the loss of his oldest friend in the Commons:
Another long-time friend, David Jones, called him ‘frankly irreplaceable’:
I agree with Mike Wood. Forthcoming Adjournment debates will never be the same. That said, Southend is now a city:
The folks running PARLY agree on the adjournment debates, during which Sir David addressed more issues than Southend:
Labour
Party leader Sir Keir Starmer emphasised Amess’s Christian faith and the fact that he was well liked across the House:
Hilary Benn remembered Amess’s dogged campaigning and dedication:
Siobhain McDonagh will forever connect Amess with Southend, and who can blame her?
Steve McCabe will remember Amess’s cheerful nature:
John Cryer was a former neighbour:
Liberal Democrat
The most moving tribute, however, came from Lembit Öpik, a former Liberal Democrat MP, who spoke to Mark Dolan on GB News Saturday night:
The former MP was so moved that he had to sit down and recover after that interview. Mark Dolan’s producer was with him during that time.
Conclusion
It was serendipitous that the Gospel reading for Sunday, October 17, was about service (Mark 10:35-45):
10:42 So Jesus called them and said to them, “You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them.
10:43 But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant,
10:44 and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all.
10:45 For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.”
What apposite verses for Sir David Amess, who gave his all in service to his constituents.
May his place in Heaven be an exalted one.
Churchmouse Campanologist 