Preface
Each time I try to focus on setting out a long term view of the trials and tribulations that beset our increasingly battered and scarcely recognisable ‘British Constitution’, the short termism of everyday politics keeps breaking in. The present moment sees us in an unprecedented constitutional situation. The shifty and self-serving Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, has been ditched as leader of the Conservative Party, but remains in office as Prime Minister. While Britain burns, he disappears on holidays, or parties, or appears in several photo opportunities that suggest he is auditioning for some imagined future military role as a pilot or gunner or tank commander, while draped in a union jack. The one thing he does not dress up for is the role of a real live Prime Minister, the job for which he is paid and for which he remains responsible in times of crisis. And there’s no mistaking the national crises that are crowding in: the burgeoning cost of living crisis, the related energy crisis, the crisis in public services staffing and provision, the environmental crisis, the international relations crisis, the crisis in our European relationships, the crisis in our public morality. While drawing his Prime Ministerial salary and perquisites, Johnson refuses to address any of these issues, saying that they must be left to whoever replaces him as Prime Minister. This is, of course, an abject dereliction of duty on his part, the equivalent of throwing his toys out of the pram.
Who will address these problems and when? There is sheer paralysis in the central government. It almost defies belief that the whole country is obliged to wait and watch in dismay as the Tory party plays out at excruciating length the charade by which its tiny membership of 160,000 (predominantly white, male, pensioners) is allowed to choose our next Prime Minister. We have to watch between our separated fingers an unedifying contest in which the two candidates left standing, Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss, try to outdo each other in their increasingly frantic appeals to a hard right agenda they believe those members to espouse.
If allowed a choice, most of us would record: ‘none of the above’. Terrifyingly, current opinion polling of the Tory membership suggests that Truss is likely to win out: terrifying because her undistinguished record, her unconvincing aping of Maggie Thatcher, the increasingly dismal and ill-informed banality of her political rhetoric, and the absence of any discernible moral compass, suggest that she is every bit as unfitted to lead the country as her predecessor. As I write, she is reported to have accused the civil service of antisemitism and intends to root it out, drawing an indignant response both from civil service leaders and Jewish representatives. I’d suggest she is more likely to encounter antisemitism among the Tory members whose support she seeks. And she would be wise to remember that if she becomes Prime Minister she will depend heavily on that same Civil Service to design and implement the policies she seeks to introduce (or what’s left of the Civil Service when her right hand acolyte Rees-Mogg gets rid of 90,000 of them). Is she losing the plot? Will she crash and burn? Watch this space….
Part 3 Contracts, Chums, and Charlatans
My focus so far on contemporary problems with the British Constitution and the political system has been on the broad concept of ‘the rule of law’, and various attempts by the current political leadership to undermine both concept and practice, so that they can avoid the normal rules. In this piece I want to examine practices that often fall somewhere between the legal rules and the moral social norms that most of us try to live by. These can be grey areas, all too often activities and relationships that are shrouded in secrecy. Powerful people thrive most in this environment because they can use their formidable resources to avoid or manipulate the legal process. Their actions may anger us because there seems to be ‘one law for them, another law for the rest of us’. Or if they appear to live without any regard for conventional social and personal morality they may not be acting illegally, but would earn our distaste and disrespect, even our contempt (remind you of anyone?). At worst, though, these powerful people may simply not care what the rest of us think.
The Tory party, which has been in government now for 12 years (if you count the Tory/Lib Dem coalition), have been described recently as “the party of spoilt unruly aristocrats” and as “a priestly caste”, a social and political elite who feel themselves entitled by birth, education and social position to govern in their own interest and to the advantage of their equally elite friends and supporters. This is one reason why it seems apt to compare this group, and their ‘new’ corruption with the ‘old corruption’ of aristocratic elites in earlier centuries.
Dodgy contracts and dubious chums
There have been many examples of both categories, and the participants keep recurring under both labels, since a major feature of recent years of Tory rule has been the secretive award of significant numbers of lucrative taxpayer funded state contracts to an unappetising mix of Tory friends, relations, members and donors. These are too numerous to list here, and pending further revelations from the major inquiry that Johnson has so far succeeded in booting well down the road, let’s focus on those examples that are most telling because we know more about them.
The NHS and the Pandemic
At the beginning of 2020 the Covid 19 pandemic was initially ignored and scoffed at by Prime Minister Johnson, who crucially missed five meetings of the top level emergency Cobra committee intended to deal with such national crises. But the pandemic was ultimately a face saver for Johnson as he wrestled with post-Brexit difficulties. Despite egregious errors and missteps (that some medical experts judge may have cost up to 20,000 deaths), he was boosted by the success of the search for effective vaccines. Desperate to row back from the misfiring attempts to reduce the incidence of infections and deaths both in hospitals and the social care sector, Johnson’s government needed a rapid response to make good substantial deficiencies in the supply of personal protective equipment (PPE: face masks, ventilators, specialist clothing) and testing kits for a new track, test and trace system.
A major decision was (obscurely) made to create a ‘fast’ VIP lane for the award of commercial contracts to supply the goods and services that were thought necessary. We now have ample evidence that nominations to this fast lane were primarily made both through specific invitations to favoured large contractors such as Serco, and by nominations though a range of Conservative Party links, including Ministers themselves, several party donors, and other party activists. The normal rules of ‘due process’ to protect against fraud and mismanagement were set aside, and later analysis showed that providers nominated to the VIP lane had a significantly greater chance of being awarded contracts. Unsurprisingly, serious errors were made, and poor outcomes were substantial. These are illustrated by:
The case of Randox
The players in this most damning case were:
- Owen Paterson, a former Tory Cabinet Minister and MP for North Shropshire
- Randox, a healthcare company which paid Paterson £100,000 a year to lobby government on their behalf, which broke Parliamentary rules; and between 2010 and 2018 Randox donated £160,000 to the Conservative Party
- Health Secretary Matt Hancock, who had several meetings with both Paterson and Randox at a time when ‘fast lane’ contracts were under consideration, (and who would himself be fingered for nominating his wholly unqualified local pub landlord to the VIP lane)
- Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who sought to defend Paterson from parliamentary censure when a Guardian investigation revealed his improper lobbying for Randox, but was compelled by a large backbench rebellion of his own outraged MPs to give way to Paterson’s resignation in November 2021. The defeat for the Tory candidate at the subsequent bye-election was almost certainly a major contributing factor to Johnson’s own later downfall in July 2022.
The whole saga was laid bare in a July 2022 report from the prestigious House of Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC). They found that Ministers and officials had played “fast and loose” when awarding contracts worth £777m to Randox. These were awarded in 2020 without any competition. The PAC Report noted: “Randox struggled to deliver the expected level of testing capacity against its first contract…Yet the department still awarded Randox a contract extension worth £328m seven months later, again without competition”. While both Hancock and Randox denied any impropriety, the PAC concluded that because of poor record keeping it was impossible to establish that the contracts were properly awarded, or whether they produced excessive profits, though the firm’s profits for the year to 2021 were “more than 100 times greater” than for the previous year. Hancock’s role remains obscure, but he had in any case been brought down by then by a different piece of sleaze in June 2021, involving dodgy kisses rather than dodgy contracts.
Randox is an outstanding case of all that went wrong with government procurement and the dubious links to Tory party politics. The wider picture was laid out in a Report in March 2022 by the National Audit Office, an independent Parliamentary body responsible for auditing public accounts and expenditure and ensuring value for money in the management of public funds. This Report is one to make you blink in disbelief at the possible financial losses we as taxpayers must ultimately bear through the inefficiencies, waste, fraud and corruption associated with this whole contracting episode. The main points to be registered are these:
- DHSS awarded 394 contracts worth £7.9bn: 115 of these contracts went through the VIP lane, 46 without any process of ‘due diligence’
- Of 31.5 bn items received, only 17.3bn were actually delivered to front line services
- 14.2bn items remain in storage at a cost as of October 2021 of £737m
- 10% of these items are not now needed, while 11% of all items received were considered unfit for purpose
- more than half of VIP suppliers provided equipment that was unsuitable
- 176 contracts remain in dispute with a further taxpayer loss of £2.6bn at risk
Prime Minister Johnson, former Health Secretary Matt Hancock, and other Ministers have defended this poor set of outcomes on the basis of the urgency of the crisis at the time, but the VIP Lane scenario inevitably leaves a bad smell. Much remains to be investigated and uncovered. The difficulty of pinning down possible miscreants is illustrated by the case of Tory peer
Lady Michelle Mone
Lady Mone is a successful business entrepreneur, ennobled as a life peer by David Cameron. She is now married to Douglas Barrowman, a billionaire who made a large part of his fortune through the promotion of tax avoidance schemes described by tax reform campaigners as ‘repugnant’ and much favoured by the Tory Party’s many City friends. Fittingly, he and his wife live in the tax haven of the Isle of Man. Lady Mone was connected to a firm called PPEMedpro, (in which Barrowman had a financial interest). At her instigation, through the Tory peer Lord Agnew, this company was referred to the VIP lane for PPE contracts. The company then received two contracts worth £200m. One of these contracts failed to deliver any usable medical gowns, but PPEMedpro refused to return any of the £49m they had received. A case of potential fraud is being pursued by police through a National Crime Agency investigation, which has gathered evidence from documents and other materials from the Mone/Barrowman home in the Isle of Man.
From the very outset of these investigations Lady Mone denied any connection with the PPEMedpro business, but evidence quickly emerged to undermine these denials, so that in effect she also stood accused of lying. There was also evidence that she had sought through political contacts to obtain further contracts in relation to testing kits. A DHSS Minister has refused to release documentary evidence on this case, which “reeks of a cover up” according to Labour’s Deputy Leader Angela Rayner.
So: a Tory peer who appears to be anything but a glowing role model for young business people, married to a purveyor of ‘repugnant’ tax avoidance schemes, allowed through their political friends to perpetrate an enormous waste of taxpayer funds in a time of crisis through a scheme later declared illegal by the High Court. But will these dodgy practices and dodgy relationships attract any penalties? Not, I think, if we get a Prime Minister Truss, certain to avoid any real accounting for an iniquitous scheme endorsed by a Cabinet of which she was a leading member.
At least the January 2022 judgement by the High Court, ruling on a challenge brought by the Good Law Project, found this whole procedure to be “unlawful”, and that such “illegality” could not continue. The particular cases on which the judgement rested had been made on “a flawed basis” and showed that the majority of products supplied were defective and/or unusable. Jo Maugham, Director of the Good Law Project said “never again should any government treat a public health crisis as an opportunity to enrich its associates and donors at public expense”.
Lobbying, Donations, and Revolving Doors
The components of corruption in public life are clear enough in themselves: lobbying Ministers, peers and MPs to obtain influence over decisions and awards; making party donations to much the same groups, to make it more likely that that contracts will be awarded, honours gifted, inconvenient regulations and rules axed; cementing such access to power by appointments of favoured political allies to key public and private positions, a process we label revolving doors.
Again, these interacting relationships are not always easily pinned down and exposed, particularly where the party in political power, controlling the chief institutions of the state, actively uses its undoubted patronage in its own interests. We can best illuminate such practices by specific examples, and here we turn to what became the notorious case of
Cameron and the Greenhill Affair
This controversy involved the shadowy relations between David Cameron, Prime Minister from 2010-2016, and an Australian financier called Lex Greensill, and his company Greensill Capital. Unusually, Greensill was allowed what one report called “extraordinary privileged access” to 10 Downing Street and also to at least ten government departments. This access allowed him to develop contacts inside the heart of government, and promote Greensill Capital projects, particularly in relation to health service activities. Some of these projects would have involved taxpayer-based insurance against failure. This unusual situation was in a subsequent internal Cabinet Office inquiry conveniently blamed on the then Head of the Civil Service, Jeremy Heywood, later Lord Heywood: conveniently, because he had meanwhile died and was unable to explain or defend himself.
Much more concerning is what happened after Cameron’s departure from No 10 in 2016 after losing the extremely ill-judged and disastrously formulated Brexit referendum. In 2018 Cameron took up an advisory role with Greensill Capital, the reward being calculated, as salary and bonuses, at approximately £7m (before tax) for what amounted to 2½ years of part time work. This did not in itself break any existing rules. But what should raise our eyebrows more than somewhat is the story of Cameron’s persistent and highly personal lobbying on Greensill Capital’s behalf for government support which would have conveyed an enormous financial benefit to Cameron’s own finances as a major shareholder in the firm. He drew on his own former high level contacts in the Treasury, including Chancellor Rishi Sunak, and persistently lobbied two very senior Treasury officials. This whole story only emerged after Greensill Capital collapsed into insolvency in March 2021.
While this lobbying assault on the Treasury by a former Prime Minister ultimately bore no fruit, and Greensill collapsed anyway, there was major political and public criticism of Cameron’s actions and his unwillingness to reveal the considerable extent of his financial benefits from the position he held in the failing company. A Public Accounts Committee report found that £335m of taxpayers’ money was at ‘increased risk’ due to woefully inadequate checks on Greensill Capital. The various official inquiries into this affair found that while Cameron had not broken any formal rules, he had understated his real relationship with Greensill and had ‘showed a significant lack of judgement’. This perhaps should come as no surprise, given a similar lack of judgement over the Brexit issue. How do these people get to be Prime Minister, and why are we to get a hopelessly third grade and inept one such again in a couple of weeks?).
This case is instructive because
- it shows how much the quality of our political and constitutional system has deteriorated in recent times: it’s difficult to imagine Harold Macmillan or Margaret Thatcher or John Major acting in Cameron’s shamelessly self-serving way on leaving office. His behaviour is notably ironic, given that a decade earlier he had pronounced that lobbying was an unacceptable practice that he intended to reform; a reform which was described by a member of the overseeing committee as “a dog’s breakfast”
- it demonstrates the risks when the boundaries between state and business sectors are rendered so permeable that conflicts of interest become unavoidable for political actors who should be protecting the public interest
- the issue of ‘revolving doors’ could not be more clearly illustrated: here, Lex Greensill’s revolving door into 10 Downing St is mirrored later by Cameron’s revolving door into lucrative transactions with Greensill Capital. Clear conflicts of interest are neither declared nor regulated. In short, if no rules were broken in this case, the rules need to be significantly strengthened
Lest We Forget
In looking at specific recent examples of questionable ethics in government, I have necessarily been unable to consider the very many other cases that have disfigured government decision making in the past decade.
WHO CAN FORGET ‘Failing Grayling’ (thank you John Crace of The Guardian), who when Minister of Transport awarded ferry contracts to a dodgy company that had no ships and no port connections? And who had to settle out of court compensation of £33m with Eurotunnel over awarding such contracts in what was described as a “secretive and flawed” process? It has been estimated that while Transport Secretary Grayling had misspent £2.7bn of public funds (already in 2013 he had as Justice Secretary introduced a botched prisons and probation reform estimated by the National Audit Office to have cost £171m in terminated private sector contracts.) His reward? A sinecure with another tax haven based shipping company of £100,000 for a 7 hour working week; disgracefully, this is alongside his salary as a sitting MP. You could not make it up. In the 2019 General Election, Grayling was re-elected by the voters of Epsom and Ewell with an increased majority. Did they never take notice of what their appalling MP was up to?
WHO CAN FORGET the many failures of contracts awarded to the company Serco (boss Rupert Soames, brother of Tory grandee Sir Christopher Soames)? The most egregious related to the ill-conceived and ill-managed Track, Test and Trace programme, the National Audit Office judging that overall there was no evidence that the £22bn programme had reduced rates of Covid19 in England. And there were other cases: Serco was in 2019 fined £23m for failures in its contract for electronic tagging of prisoners; and had also been fined for poor delivery of housing for asylum seekers; and meanwhile said Chief Executive Rupert Soames was in 2020 paid £4.9m, 61 times more than the pay of his average employee, as Covid-related contracts boosted company revenues.
WHO CAN FORGET, talking of Track, Test and Trace, the hapless and clueless Baroness Dido Harding, Tory Life Peer created by her friend and then PM David Cameron? Having badly failed as Chief Executive of the media company Talk Talk, her appointment through close political associate and horse racing friend Health Secretary Matt Hancock, raised murmurings of ‘nepotism’. Together they presided over multiple failures linked to this expensive and wasteful programme, employing consultants who cost £1m a day, days in which hundreds of junior employees often sat around doing nothing, because the system was not working. Unbelievably, Dido’s husband MP John Penrose at this time held the position of Anti-Corruption Champion to the Home Office. You wonder about their conversations over the breakfast table…
The worry is that there may never be a proper and full holding to account for all these serial failures and cosy contractual relationships between Tory Governments and Tory donors, MPs, supporters, and even family relations. PM Johnson carefully structured the official public inquiry under Baroness Hallett to be delayed well into the future; the agreed terms of reference were only published in June 2022. Probable Prime Minister-in-waiting Liz Truss has also made clear her intention to do the same booting-down-the road. Given the many other national crises, political interest in the failures of crisis management in the past two and a half years may fade. Johnson will go on a spree of lucrative engagements as the people he rewarded with jobs, contracts and honours while in office make sure to return his favours. That’s the way corruption works the world over, and that’s how it works here and now; sadly, we always thought Britain was better than this.
In a week or so, Johnson will finally depart, but not without a Big Honours Bang, where we’ll see possibly the worst and most extensive honours list since Lloyd George. I’ll be making that comparison next time in Part 4.
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