Is it really ‘business as usual’ in Boris’s government?

Priti Patel was supposed to be going before the Home Affairs committee this morning, but pulled out, citing ministerial changes in her department and recent events. The Home Secretary is understood to have cancelled the long-planned appearance at 5pm yesterday, seriously angering members of the cross-party committee.

This sounds like the sort of thing that only parliamentary nerds could possibly get cross about. But it does raise an important question about whether the government is really running a ‘business as usual’ operation while the Conservative party hunts for a new prime minister. Boris Johnson claims that he’s filled the ministerial holes left by last week’s resignations so that the business of running the country continues. More than that: he’s instructed his cabinet to keep delivering this government’s priorities, while promising them that he won’t be expecting them to go off in any radically new directions in the final weeks of his premiership.
With all this in mind, it would make more sense for Patel to have attended the session today to show that Johnson’s government is getting on with things, rather than allow the opposition to argue, as it has done, that the government isn’t actually functioning at all.

I suspect that the truth is more that the Johnson administration is continuing with business as usual when it comes to parliament. Throughout this Prime Minister’s tenure, the government has treated parliament as an afterthought. It was the case in the Covid press conferences where ministers announced new policies and spending commitments before telling the Commons, often without allowing MPs to have a contemporaneous debate and vote on these measures. It’s been the case so many times since that the Speaker has repeatedly lost his temper and threatened to haul ministers in for more and more urgent questions. The legislation that Jacob Rees-Mogg has been drawing up on Brexit freedoms will allow ministers to keep ignoring parliament even when creating new laws.

So indeed why bother going to a session that scrutinises the operation of a department when the general view of government is that parliament is an annoying inconvenience, not the forum for improving your policies?