THE POLITICS OF THE JUNGLE – OR, WATCH OUT FOR THE SNAKES IN THE LONG GRASS
If you read my previous blog in this series on the British Constitution (Contracts, Chums and Charlatans, 31st August 2022) you will see that I am changing metaphors somewhat, leaving behind Tory ferrets-in-a-sack in favour of what’s going on in a different part of the woods. This switch has been occasioned by the recent antics of some of those ferrets. Matt Hancock, lately but frequently disgraced Secretary of State for Health, has been at it in the real jungle, though one that seems totally unreal seen through the distorted and distorting lens of television reality shows. He should, of course, have been in Parliament and in his constituency, doing the job for which he is paid, and it is scandalous that this can happen. He is reported to be getting upwards of £400,000 pounds for having managed to look ignominious in the public gaze, a skill he perfected while in government. It is absurd that while he might have self-destructed his political career, he will, like his equally disgraced former boss Boris Johnson, be able to reap wholly undeserved financial rewards in the world of low-level celebrities. I have recently listened in to conversations where the following opinions were expressed: ‘seems like a good chap’; ‘I was surprised to see what a good sport he is’; ‘you have to admire his spirit, the way he coped with all that jungle stuff’; ‘he showed himself to be a survivor’.
‘NO! NO! NO!’ as his one time political heroine, Mrs Thatcher, might have cried. It really is depressing to hear this kind of thing being parroted. Hancock was indeed a good sport and a good chap where his friends were concerned, strewing in their path contracts later found by the High Court to be illegal. He may have survived the various indignities of a television ‘reality’ show, but numberless people afflicted by the all too chillingly real Covid19 pandemic did not. Their deaths are attributable in no small part to some of the manifest policy failures of Hancock and his well-rewarded political friends. Let’s not forget that he was involved in rather a lot of ‘jobs for the boys’, (e.g. Owen Paterson, Radox) or more notably ‘jobs for the girls’ (Baroness Dido Harding, see below), or his intimate Health Ministry friend, Gina Coladangelo. It’s an appalling thought that he might never be fully held to account for these at worst corrupt and at best disreputable behaviours. We might note here the mighty irony that at one point in Hancock’s early political career (2014-2015) he was a UK Anti-Corruption Champion. (Has anyone ever heard of one of these? What do you suppose they do? Whatever it is, they appear not to be having much success.)
Hancock’s time in the jungle was, of course, a carefully staged step in his construction of an alternative narrative. Another step came this week with the publication of a ‘memoir’, published in parts in that well known defender of public morality, the Daily Mail. I have long denied myself the pleasure of reading this toxic rag except through spread fingers. It is reported that a former Tory cabinet minister, Stephen Dorrell, has said that Hancock’s current version of the decision-making (when he was Health Secretary) was rewriting history, with provably untrue statements about the treatment of patients in care homes. Dorrell said that Hancock needed to remember that when he gives evidence to the Hallett Covid inquiry he will have to justify such statements “under oath”. In other words, Dorrell thinks Hancock is lying.
In another part of the Westminster jungle we have had another sighting of Baroness Michelle Mone. In the earlier blog referenced above I highlighted her lobbying for dubious transactions related to the infamous ‘VIP lane’ by which well-placed Tory parliamentarians and donors secured lucrative contracts for the supply of NHS equipment. I suggested that her denial of any involvement with the PPEMedpro company’s contracts for the delivery of health service equipment was undermined by the evidence available. So I was rather pleased when the Guardian (28 November 2022) splashed this evidence all over its front page, adding the crucial revelation that Baroness Mone and her children had actually benefited from this company to the tune of £29m, through a complex set of financial relationships between the company, her husband Andrew Barrowman, and offshore bank accounts that may well avoid tax on this benefit. Barrowman had received at least £65m in profits from PPEMedpro. Let’s not forget that Barrowman made a large part of his considerable wealth from the design and promotion of tax avoidance schemes linked to offshore tax havens. Let’s also not forget that the medical gowns that earned these profits for the Mone/Barrowman family were found to be unfit for use, but PPEMedpro refused to return any of the money
Government Ministers are under pressure to clarify these financial issues, and the somewhat opaque relationship between Baroness Mone and her favourite political contacts Lord Bethell and Michael Gove. Unsurprisingly, there have been calls for a specific public inquiry, not least since the VIP fast lane process was judged illegal in the High Court. We now learn from a leaked source in the Department of Health that Michelle Mone also lobbied hard on behalf of a firm called LFT Diagnostics to secure a contract relating to governmental lateral flow contracts. LFT Diagnostics is described as ‘a secret entity’ in the office that manages the wealth of her husband. Mone was described as “in a class of her own in terms of the sheer aggression of her advocacy”, and received a formal rebuke from Lord Bethell, then a junior minister involved in government procurement, who reminded her of “the need for propriety in dealings with officials”. It seems doubtful that she would understand the meaning of the word. She has never declared this potentially beneficial family interest in the appropriate House of Lords register of members’ interests, as she should have done.
We also learn that Baroness Mone has now taken ‘leave of absence ‘ from Parliament. As John Crace of The Guardian commented: ‘how would we tell the difference’, given that she has rarely appeared in the House of Lords and last spoke there more than a year ago. It is unlikely that she will miss the daily attendance allowance of £350, though most workers would be delighted to get such a sum just for turning up. But she might also have chosen this withdrawal because it allows her to avoid declaring any financial interests for the time being. In any case, she is still under investigation by the Lords’ commissioner for standards over potential breaches of the Lords’ code of conduct in relation to PPEMedpro, which is still the subject of a potential fraud investigation by the National Crime Agency.
But good news this very day (19 December 2022) as the DHSC (Department of Health and Social Care) finally bend to all this pressure and announce that they are bringing an action in the High Court to recover the £122m paid to PPEMedpro, and to recover the substantial cost of storing and disposing of the useless gowns delivered under the contract, and which the NHS have never been able to use. Perhaps a little bit of justice will finally, if more than a little grudgingly, be done
Do we call this kind of thing ‘corruption’? Or designate it by the much weaker and vaguer term ‘sleaze’? Or just think of it as ‘normal Tory business practice’? Whatever the nomenclature we choose, whatever the lax rules and secretive practises that enable these dubious financial gains by people linked politically to an existing government, we surely can make one judgement: the principal players here are rich, greedy, over-privileged people who stick to the body politic like the leeches they are. They create enormous and wilful damage to the public interest by failing even to show any competence in supplying the goods they have contracted to deliver. They add insult to this injury by salting away their ill-gotten gains in tax havens, and by refusing to admit any liability or responsibility for their own failures. The accompanying photograph shows how such people flaunt their wealth overseas, while showing utter contempt for the British state and its public services. Shame on our political system, and its leaders over our twenty-first century’s ‘low, inglorious decade’ for enabling such contemptible people to manipulate it to their own benefit, while awarding them honours and privileges they cannot possibly have deserved.
Meanwhile the odious and self-serving Hancock is slinking off into the long grass, announcing that he will not expose himself to the verdict of the electorate in any forthcoming general election. Like many other Conservative MPs, he has read the runes and intends to jump before he is pushed. What odds Johnson will deny him the peerage he might have expected in more normal times? Quite high, I should say. Particularly as Johnson has a considerable number of favours to return to a motley crew of ex-Tory ministers, of whom there are now a worryingly large number, and to both genuine and more dubious donors to the Tory party. He has already elevated his brother Jo Johnson to the peerage (in 2020) and the same honours list reeked of what we now tend to label ‘cronyism’: I suppose it’s better to keep this sort of thing of thing in the family, or what used to be called ‘nepotism’. (Johnson is the first Prime Minister ever to give a peerage to his own brother.)
Slow Horses
[I owe this subhead to the title of Mick Herron’s excellent spy novel in which ‘slow horses’ is the designation given by British intelligence chiefs to failed or unreliable spies who nevertheless are kept on as ‘useful idiots’: an entertaining read, John Le Carre for the 21st century; pub. John Murray, Baskerville edition, 2022]
The past two decades have seen a steady and relentless deterioration in our public life, leaving our public services in disarray, our society deeply divided and scarred by ever increasing inequalities. Much of the damage to our social and economic lives in this period lies at the door of a political leadership characterised by one part of corruption to two parts of incompetence. This has proved to be a most deadly combination, and at this point could be described as an exercise in self-harming. Yet we seem quite unable right now to put a stop to this process of self-destruction. Some choose to close their eyes to what is playing out, much as most people now do in relation to the most serious problem that we all face, i.e. the relentless march of environmental collapse. But we could at least make a start here by calling out the dreadful set of politicians who have lead us into this mess, and make some attempt to replace them with less inept and less self-interested leaders who can reshape and restore our political institutions. We can best do that by examining what went so badly wrong in the recent past.
The concept of ‘slow horses’ turns out to be very apt, in terms of the inappropriateness of significant appointments to public office, linking forms of nepotism to basic failures of competence.
The history of British governance offers some insights here; there were good reasons, for example, why William Gladstone in 1870 introduced the notion of competitive public appointments according to merit rather than patronage. The rising business middle class was fretting at the ways in which aristocratic patron-client relations inhibited and damaged effective economic policies and practices. Amusingly, this reform was for a time undermined by the creation (on the Treasury payroll) of two very weak candidates against whom the desired candidate would always prevail. They became known as ‘the Treasury fools’, and looking at the recent political history of Treasury appointments we would seem to have come full circle.
I will illustrate the contemporary dynamic here by looking briefly at one aspect of the Covid19 crisis. The handling of this crisis throws a clear light on the failures of our political leadership, and their worrying tendency to ride roughshod over normal political and governmental conventions and practice. The thumbs up for this came all too clearly (and visibly) from Boris Johnson. But his fellow Ministers and political cronies were quick to get the message.
Not many peers are to be found in the jungle, but we retain a link to the unstoppable Matt Hancock. In May 2020, at the height of the Covid 19 crisis with thousands dying every week, he appointed Baroness “Dido” Harding to head the crucial NHS Test and Trace programme, established to track and limit the spread of the disease. You will notice that the vital part of such a programme, ‘Track’, does not appear in the title, aptly, because that bit never really happened.
This was an odd appointment because Harding was essentially a business consultant and executive with no practical experience in the health service. Her principal claim to fame as a business manager was that in 2015, as Chief Executive of the telecoms company TalkTalk, she presided over a hugely mismanaged business scandal which lost her company £60 million, and 95,000 customers, and a subsequent fine of £400,000 by the Information Commissioner, who blamed “a failure to implement the most basic cyber security measures.” A leading business journal ran the headline “TalkTalk boss Dido Harding’s utter ignorance is a lesson to us all”.
So how did she contrive to get such an important public service post with an already poor management record? This question is easily answered when we consider her political connections:
- Created a Tory life peer by Prime Minister David Cameron in September 2014.
- Friend of Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary who appointed her, through a common interest in horse racing, she a successful Cheltenham Gold Cup winner on her own horse Cool Dawn, and member of the Jockey Club; he also a sometime jockey. Newmarket is in Hancock’s constituency.
- Married to a close political friend of Prime Minister Boris Johnson, John Penrose, until recently Johnson’s Anti-Corruption ‘Tsar’. (I know, I know….)
We then find that the High Court, after a legal challenge to her appointment by the Runnymede Trust and the Good Law Project, ruled in February 2022 that Hancock had failed to comply with the 2010 Equality Act when appointing Harding, as he was also when appointing as director of testing in September 2020 one Mike Coupe. Coupe was a former colleague of Harding at Sainsbury’s, and was added to the short list of candidates at her instigation.
The trace lines of cronyism can be tracked throughout this whole operation, one which should have demanded the very highest recruitment standards. And the results, unsurprisingly, were demonstrably both ineffective and inefficient. A clear early failure was the maladministration of a highly touted and promoted new UK app which in a rapid U-turn was dropped in favour of a combined Apple-Google one to rescue Harding’s ‘late-running project’. The Test and Trace programme also received heavy criticism ,with claims (as yet unverified) that it had cost the taxpayer upwards of £20 bn for very little impact on the spread of the pandemic. Harding had to defend payments of £1000 a day to private consultants, when existing local authority practitioners could have provided a cheaper and more effective programme. Jolyon Maugham, Director of the Good Law Project bitingly commented: “For Ministers or special advisers to choose their friends or close associates for these key roles is to exclude those who are more able, or better value. And ultimately it is the public interest that suffers”.
Indeed. Finally, the penny dropped, and Harding too was quietly dropped late in 2021, when she failed in her bid for the position of Chief Executive of the newly created NHS England. Around the same time Hancock had been rather loudly dropped, after his own bit of personal sleaze. We might conclude that Hancock could run fast in the jungle, and Harding could ride a fast horse on the racecourse, but both are perfect examples of Mick Herron’s ‘slow horses’ and even ‘useful idiots’ might be too generous.
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