Even if there has been no mistake at all in the guidance to civil servants about what documents they can share with pro-Brexit ministers during the referendum campaign, the government has clearly made a number of mistakes at least in the presentation of that guidance, as this afternoon’s urgent question in the Commons showed.
The first mistake that ministers made was purely a process one: they failed to get any supportive MPs who are in favour of the guidance to attend the session, which meant that Matt Hancock spent the whole urgent question being beaten up by pro-Brexit MPs who are furious a minister will not be able to obtain information that an MP can quite easily get through a parliamentary question. Michael Fabricant accused ministers of making a ‘huge blunder’, Liam Fox argued that there was a ‘serious constitutional issue here which goes to the heart of House of Commons accountability’. From the other side of the Chamber, John Cryer said this was the ‘latest sordid attempt’ to rig the referendum, while Sarah Wollaston warned that doing so would make it more difficult for voters to accept the result. Even Bercow made the minister’s life a little bit more miserable, teasing him at one point about his claim to have an affinity with Disraeli (made, of course, in an interview with the Spectator).
Hancock sounded rather bored as the session wore on, telling one MP that ‘I don’t know how many times I am going to have to repeat’ what the role of a civil servant was. Tory MPs afterwards described the session as ‘highly embarrassing’ and said Hancock was ‘defending the indefensible’. They predict that it will lead to ill discipline on Tory benches. This issue is not going to change the way that the referendum campaign goes, and it is also unlikely to really contribute to a serious sense of betrayal among voters on the ‘Out’ side if they do not win. But what it will do is make it just that bit more difficult for the Tories to piece themselves back together after the result.
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