The utter uselessness of Sir Philip Barton

Steerpike has seen many abject appearances before select committees. There was the time Sir Philip Green told Richard Fuller to ‘stop staring’ at him after BHS went belly-up. There was Russell Brand’s cowboy-hatted testimony on drug abuse. There was even the infamous occasion when Rupert Murdoch was attacked by a pie. But few civil servants have given such a pathetic performance as Sir Philip Barton managed today before the Foreign Affairs Select Committee on the loss of Afghanistan.

The Foreign Office Permanent Secretary was up before a panel of seething MPs to respond to this morning’s revelations about the department’s dire response to the collapse of Kabul. To say that his appearance was a turkey shoot would be an embarrassment to turkeys, as the former mandarin was asked again and again why he refused to cut short his leave as the Taliban prepared to take the capital. In the course of this afternoon’s grilling it transpired that the £185,000-a-year official – who has a pension worth £1.7m – stayed on holiday until 26 August, some 11 days after Kabul fell. With Icarus-level hubris, Sir Philip refused to disclose where his jolly jaunt exactly was – only that it was split between the UK and abroad.

Under forceful questioning from a visibly enraged Alicia Kearns, Sir Philip admitted he now ‘regrets’ not coming back from his holiday sooner – presumably because his gold-plated career is now on the line. The brazen Barton nevertheless insisted that more people would not have been evacuated from Afghanistan if he had returned earlier from holiday – an insistence that prompted Kearns to mutter darkly: ‘he couldn’t be bothered.’ 

‘It is not enough to say mea culpa’ she continued ‘How in two weeks did you not think I have to go in and protect my people?’  Sir Philip only claimed that: ‘I don’t believe me being present in London would have changed the outcome – the number of people evacuated.’ Doesn’t exactly say much for his in person presence among the troops now, does it? At least Sir Humphrey had charisma. Not for nothing did the Rutland and Melton MP tell the flailing mandarin that ‘this was a catastrophe of incomparable nature.’

Kearns was just one of many queuing up to turn their fire on Barton’s clapped out Rolls Royce of a department. Tory Bob Seely contrasted the soldiers at Kabul airport working around the clock with the ‘unfocused and rubbish’ Foreign Office pen-pushers refusing to work more than eight hours a day – a comparison which led Barton to bleat that ‘there’s not a clocking off culture’ among his staff. This was despite him admitting in the same session that many of the 500 FCDO staff ‘masterminding’ the Afghanistan evacuation were, in fact, working from home. And to make matters worse, the department only ordered 24 hour shifts – i.e. night teams – for the crisis from August 14, just the day before Kabul fell, with ministers unable to say for sure that these teams actually showed up on August 14. Trebles all round.

The anger at the Foreign Office was not merely confined to those in Whitehall. Under questioning about what his then political master, Dominic Raab, was up to during the crisis, Barton failed to provide any details as to when Raab went on holiday in August. Asked as to why the call leagues provided to the committee missed out the entire first two weeks of that months, Barton could only stutter and claim he would have to go away and check the information.

Unprepared, unimpressive, underwhelming and ill-advised: that answer seemed to encapsulate Sir Philip’s whole dreadful approach to the entire sorry episode of Britain’s Kabul debacle. As for the farce of Pen Farthing’s animal evacuation, Barton furiously insisted that ‘there was no decision to evacuate animals over people’ — hours after No. 10 claimed the Prime Minister was not involved in the decision to evacuate the Nowzad animal sanctuary. So it was somewhat embarrassing tonight when LBC revealed a letter from, er, Boris Johnson’s then parliamentary aide Trudy Harrison confirming Nowzad staff could travel to Kabul airport to be evacuated.

Curiously No. 10 claim Trudy Harrison was not acting in her role as the Prime Minister’s PPS – despite that title being on the letter and Pen Farthing not being her constituent.

As a row kicks off over a leaked No. 10 video of aides joking about a Christmas party, is it just one more example of Downing Street saying one thing and doing another?

Parliament, not judges, should decide our laws

The British commentariat has not covered itself in glory in its reaction to Dominic Raab’s proposed reforms to judicial review. The Times reported yesterday that the government is planning to introduce a novel legislative tactic, the ‘Interpretation Bill’, to try to shift the balance of power back towards parliament. To be clear: there is no prospect of ministers being given the power to strike down court judgments they dislike.

In fact, the core of the proposal is perfectly orthodox. The proper way for parliament to change the law is through legislation, and an Interpretation Bill is legislation. It would need to be passed in the normal way, and MPs would have to vote it through. No despotism involved.

The barrister and commentator Matthew Scott has suggested on Coffee House that parliament would be unable to improve on the carefully considered judgements of the courts in the limited amount of time that an annual bill would allow.

There is some merit to the idea that an annual bill would be impractical, but it is not an insurmountable hurdle. Yes, an annual bill would place more strain on an already-crowded legislative timetable and there could well be a case for reducing the frequency of the legislation.

However, an omnibus bill tackling multiple cases at once remains less time-consuming either than bringing forward ad hoc legislation in response to individual cases or trying to do a wholesale overhaul of any legislation affected by adverse judgments. If you believe in what the Interpretation Bill is trying to achieve — returning to parliament ultimate sovereignty — it seems the least-worst means of doing it.

This approach also has the advantage of focusing parliament’s intervention directly on the point of controversy, which would make it more difficult for judges to interpret their way around the point in future. Take for example Evans, the famous ‘black spider letters’ case about Prince Charles’s missives to ministers. The Freedom of Information Act gave the Attorney General a discretionary veto; the Supreme Court, in Evans, basically interpreted it out of existence. It is one of the most egregious examples of interpretive overreach highlighted by sceptics of judicial power.

It isn’t obvious that a general overhaul of the FoI Act would prevent future judges doing the same again. A targeted intervention on the point of contention, which basically saw parliament legislate specifically to the effect that Evans was wrongly decided, is quite another matter. It is precisely such interventions that the government intends to make in an Interpretation Bill.

What about the Prime Minister’s desire to overturn Miller II, which saw the Supreme Court annul his prorogation of parliament?

This would not, in principle, be difficult to do: parliament could simply legislate that the lower court’s finding in the same case, which the Supreme Court overturned, was the correct interpretation of the law. Those trying to pretend the Supreme Court made the obvious decision skate over the fact that the High Court judgment was a crystal clear and, at the time, entirely unremarkable statement of constitutional orthodoxy which surprised nobody.

The general sense from the government’s critics is more that they simply do not want particular judgments overturned. Gina Miller herself, for example, has said of the plans that the government is ‘transforming our proud constitutional democracy into an autocracy, and seeking revenge on those who hold it to account’. We have already tackled the ‘autocracy’ claim; the Prime Minister’s motivations are neither here nor there. The merits of an Interpretation Bill as a legislative tactic are separate to whether or not you or I consider the government’s specific ends to be wise.

Judges play an important role in our system of governance. They take general legislation and, by applying it in individual cases, give it granular detail. Nobody denies the importance of this. However, it is an unsustainable leap to claim that the role of judges (and lawyers) in deciding what the law is gives them or should give them some privileged role in deciding what the law ought to be.

Clearly judges are able to rule in a way that is contrary to the intentions that parliament had when it passed a law — particularly when a case is technical and specific. But when judges’ interpretations deviate from that of politicians, parliament has every right to update the law to make its intentions clear, and its executive arm, the government, to draft and table legislation to that effect. The principles of parliamentary sovereignty, the constitution, and the supremacy of the democratic arm of the state demand nothing less.

Those who disagree with this principle, for understandable reasons, can’t just up and say so. So they try to bury the issue in talk of practicality and process. The question of ‘better law’ is a red herring; the heart of this struggle is about ends, not means. If the government’s opponents are really just concerned about the practicalities, ministers should challenge them to suggest a better way for a more active parliament to bring the law into line with its will. I suspect they will be waiting a long time for an answer.

Gender is contentious. The BBC is pretending it isn’t

The BBC has produced its annual 100 Women list, a showcase for women who have done interesting, important things. There’s a lot to like about this year’s list: half the women on it come from Afghanistan; some of them, tellingly, can’t be pictured for their own safety. Perhaps if fewer British resources had been deployed getting Pen Farthing’s dogs out of Kabul in the summer, some of those women wouldn’t live in fear for their lives. But that’s another debate.

There’s something else interesting about the BBC’s 100 Women, which says something about the Corporation’s ongoing struggle for impartiality. At least two of the people on the 100 Women list were born male and now identify as transwomen. I’m not going to name them here, because this isn’t about them; the BBC list’s accounts of their lives and work make clear they are impressive.

The point is that by including transwomen on a list of women, the BBC is taking sides in a contested issue. Because not everyone accepts that people who are born male can become women. Some people argue that the male biology and male socialisation which — by definition — transwomen start their lives with mean they cannot ever truly belong in the category of women.

A quick expansion of that last sentence, since this stuff sometimes needs to spelled out very clearly and slowly. Transwomen are by definition anatomically male and receive at least some degree of male socialisation: if they weren’t they wouldn’t have any change or transition to make in their status or anatomy. ‘Trans’ comes from Latin and refers to crossing from one place or state to another. If transwomen didn’t start off male, there would be no such ‘trans’ journey for them to make.

A fundamental of that argument is that admitting into the category of women people who were born male is unfair. Males have more power in pretty much all human societies. Transwomen, by dint of male anatomy and socialisation, have therefore received at least some share of privilege that is unobtainable to natal women.

The continuation of this argument is that including transwomen in the category of women is harmful to natal women and against the interests of natal women. These harms can take many forms. In law and policy, the ‘transwomen are women’ approach can mean the erosion or removal of boundaries around single-sex spaces. In culture and society, ‘transwomen are women’ diverts attention from — and potentially devalues — the unique experiences that natal women have based on their female biology and socialisation.

And when finite resources are allocated, ‘transwomen are women’ means that some things that might otherwise have been allocated to natal women are given to people who were born male. It is a simple statement of fact that because the BBC awarded some places on its 100 Women list to transwomen, those places — and the status and acclaim they bring — cannot be given to natal women.

Now, I apologise for the paragraphs above sounding a bit like a poor undergraduate philosophy essay, but it’s important here to set out as clearly as possible that there are points of contention around treating transwomen as women and including them in that category of ‘women’.

Some people who’ve read those paragraphs above will agree with and endorse the arguments I’ve summarised. They worry that treating transwomen as women can have adverse consequences for natal women, and wonder if there aren’t other ways to support trans people without negative impact on women.

I know many people who take that position. They include women and men, not to mention trans people. They include politicians, officials, lawyers, teachers, doctors. They include household-name celebrities and ordinary members of the public. Having doubts and questions about treating transwomen as women is not a marginal or fringe position. (It is also, incidentally, one that is now recognised in UK law, since Maya Forstater’s employment tribunal case established that ‘gender critical’ views are a philosophical belief worthy of protection under the Equality Act 2010.)

Meanwhile, some people will strongly disagree with and deprecate the arguments I’ve summarised above. They believe that transwomen are women like any other and should be treated as such. They note that trans people suffer harms and injustices that must be addressed. For them, including transwomen in the category of women is a matter of justice and decency.

I know many people who take that position. They include women and men, not to mention trans people. They include politicians, officials, lawyers, teachers, doctors. They include household-name celebrities and ordinary members of the public. Arguing the case for treating transwomen as women is not a marginal or fringe position.

In short, there is a disagreement here and a serious one. And it is a disagreement in which the BBC has taken a side. By including transwomen in that 100 Women list, the Corporation is siding with those who argue that ‘transwomen are women’ and against those who reject the unqualified inclusion of transwomen in the category of women.

I think that is a mistake for the BBC, whose leadership has correctly identified the need for the organisation to demonstrate its impartiality on contested issues. I also think it’s an unnecessary mistake: surely the BBC could find ways to celebrate and highlight the impressive stories of its chosen transwomen in a way that didn’t require telling a significant portion of its audience that their understanding of the word ‘woman’ is incorrect?

Ah, but wouldn’t producing a 100 Women list that didn’t include any transwomen be ‘exclusionary’? Would that not also mean the BBC taking sides on this contested issue? It depends on how it was done. If the BBC were to state unequivocally that transwomen are not women and so cannot be included on that list, yes, it would be making just the same mistake I have criticised here. That would be wrong.

But there is always a middle way to be found. There are ways to acknowledge this dispute without taking sides. It surely cannot be beyond the wit of a global media giant to find a way to publish a list of 100 natal women of note while also celebrating the achievements of notable transwomen — and acknowledging an ongoing debate about the relationship between those groups? Describing the arguments against including transwomen in the category of women is not the same thing as adopting those arguments and asserting that transwomen are not women.

Are transwomen women? Some people say yes. Some people say no. Some people aren’t sure and would like to know more before reaching a conclusion. The result is a debate that is far from settled among the public who fund the BBC and consume its output. The BBC should report that debate, not take sides in it.

Has Christine Lagarde just let slip the truth about the euro?

Ursula von der Leyen dispensing vaccines, with a halo over her head perhaps? Emmanuel Macron riding a tank to symbolise the continent’s strategic autonomy? Or various commissioners whose names no one can quite remember setting carbon targets, fining Google and Apple, and dishing out grants for roads, bridges and tunnels? 

It remains to be seen just what the European Central Bank comes up with for its planned re-design of the euro banknotes. One point is perfectly clear, however: the makeover will reveal the currency’s true colours as a vehicle for European integration rather than an effective instrument of economic policy.

With the recovery from the pandemic, zero interest rates, mounting government debt, and inflation above five per cent, you might think the ECB had more important stuff to worry about than the design of its notes. Even so, its president Christine Lagarde made time this week to announce that it was planning a new look for its paper money. In what almost seems like a deliberate parody of the EU’s cumbersome decision-making process, 19 ‘experts’, one from each country inside the zone, in fields such as art, physics and astronomy have been tasked with coming up with initial proposals. These will then be put to the public, followed by a competition for the design of the notes, followed by a further consultation, followed by a final decision.

Simple? Well, not exactly. You could just settle on Beethoven on day one and leave it at that. The important point, however, was surely this. According to a statement from Lagarde put out by the ECB, the notes for the euro ‘are a tangible and visible symbol that we stand together in Europe, particularly in times of crisis.’

Well, at least that is clear. In fact, when it was originally created two decades ago, the euro was sold as mainly a technical way of improving the European economy. It would lower transaction costs, make trade easier, remove currency fluctuations, and provide a global alternative to the dollar. To its cheerleaders, however, it was always much more than that. It was meant to be a stepping stone towards a single state, a symbol of political unity, and a way of binding members together so tightly that it would be impossible for them to ever leave. The proposed redesign at least makes that explicit.

In fact, if the ECB really wanted to redesign the euro, it could try pushing through a proper banking union, mutualise its debts, create a fiscal policy strong enough to balance out demand across the region, and find a way of controlling the massive German trade surplus. This would ensure that it didn’t simply drain demand out of the rest of the bloc. It might also help prevent a re-run of the Greek crisis of a decade ago, and balance out growth around the bloc. The trouble is, that would be a little bit too much like hard work – so the zone will have to settle for a few years debating the look of the new bank notes instead.

Durham University to probe Rod Liddle speech

The masters of Durham University have reacted with Olympian swiftness to the hysteria which greeted Rod Liddle’s dinner speech at South College on Friday night. Students professed themselves to be ‘literally shaking’ at The Spectator columnist’s comments on sex and gender issues — poor darlings. The adults in and around campus, meanwhile, were equally eager to vent their sense of horror. The local Labour society insisted that ‘Our university doesn’t owe hate a platform’ and the Students’ Union demanding the resignation of the College Principal Tim Luckhurst.

And the Durham dons are at pains to show such concerns are taken seriously, issuing thumping public statements disassociating the university from such dreadful remarks and now even launching a full inquiry into the ‘incident’. Last night Professor Antony Long – Durham’s Acting Vice Chancellor and the most senior administrator in the university management – took the unusual step of emailing all students to ‘assure you that the University categorically does not agree with views expressed by the external speaker at this occasion.’ Highlighted in bold was the following passage:

We are looking into the circumstances surrounding the events on Friday as a matter of urgency and have taken immediate steps to launch an investigation which will follow our established processes. We will report more on this soonest.

Long wrote that ‘the entirety of the event and some surrounding circumstances have caused significant upset for our students and staff, and other members of our University community’ adding that ‘I am most concerned, as are my UEC (University Executive Committee) colleagues, at reports that some behaviours exhibited at the occasion may have fallen short of those that we expect.’ Good luck to Principal Tim Luckhurst, who was chastised by some of his students for labelling those walking-out as ‘pathetic.’

Long’s missive triggered a flurry of self-righteous condemnation from other Rod-fearing folk at the university. Hannah Richards, the President of Grey College’s Junior College Room, emailed round to ‘commend the bravery of those who chose to walk out’, claiming that Rod’s comments amounted to ‘hate speech and discrimination’ and insisting on ‘appropriate action.’ She added that: ‘the JCR is entirely committed to ensuring that similar incidents never happen at Grey and that all students feel safe, welcome and included.’ Bang goes Steerpike’s invite to that Christmas party.

Meanwhile Dr Peter Swift, the acting master of Grey College, referred his students to welfare teams and wrote that: ‘myself and the other staff here at Grey College find the upset caused by this event deeply concerning.’ Declining to comment on the speech while it is being investigated, Dr Swift magnanimously added that ‘I also deplore the intolerant and hurtful remarks attributed to the speaker’ – just in case there was any doubt.

Raab’s law reforms are ridiculous

What should we make of the Times story yesterday, which appeared under the headline ‘Boris Johnson Plans To Let Ministers Throw Out Legal Rulings’? The impression given is that ministers will somehow be handed powers by the Prime Minister simply to ignore court rulings that they do not like. That would lead to an extraordinary constitutional crisis, involving either the arrest and imprisonment of ministers for contempt of court, or the arrest and imprisonment of judges with the government exercising Erdogan-style despotism.

Nobody can seriously believe that this is what is intended, and the rest of the Times story makes clear that it is not. Instead, the idea which is said to find favour with the Justice Secretary and the Attorney General, is ‘an annual “Interpretation Bill” to strike out findings from judicial reviews with which the government does not agree’.

That, of course, is a very different thing from giving ministers a power to ignore awkward court rulings. Parliament has always had the power to pass statutes to reverse court judgments. But an annual bill to reverse particular rulings seems not so much sinister, as ridiculous and unworkable.

Passing an Act of Parliament takes time. A bill must be drafted. Time must be found for all its stages in both Houses of Parliament. If there is to be an annual Interpretation Act, other legislation will have to be dropped. Aggrieved ministers cannot expect that the bills will be nodded through parliament without objection. They will deal with contentious matters and will be opposed and amended. The House of Lords would not find itself constrained by convention, because reversing particular judgments will not have featured in any manifesto.

And while ‘reversing legal rulings’ might sound conceptually easy, the practicalities are another matter altogether. Take, for example, the Supreme Court’s ruling that Boris Johnson acted unlawfully in proroguing parliament in 2019. Mr Johnson is said to be particularly keen to reverse the ruling. But ‘reversing’ it would require a great deal more than an empty-stable door-bolting declaration that the judges got it wrong.

Would the objective be to exclude any judicial intervention in any future decision to prorogue parliament? Where then would that leave the courts in the event that a future prime minister wished to suspend parliamentary democracy for 12 months, or indefinitely? Even many loyal Conservative MPs might think it unwise to rely too heavily on the central British constitutional principle that good chaps wouldn’t do something like that.

So perhaps, rather than excluding all possible judicial intervention, the bill would seek to limit the possibility of judicial intervention rather than exclude it altogether. That would be more sensible, but it would raise the obvious question: limit it in what way, and to what extent? There are good arguments for putting some or even all royal prerogatives — the powers that ministers can exercise without statutory or parliamentary approval — on a statutory basis, but an annual Interpretation Bill is one of the worst possible ways of doing so. Tinkering with the constitution is a complex business. It needs to be done carefully and thoughtfully, not rushed through in an annual bash-the-judges Revenge Bill.

And what is true about the prorogation case is equally true about another judgment, said to be exercising Mr Raab; that concerning the privacy of the Duchess of Sussex’s letters. How, exactly would ‘reversing’ that go? Would MPs be asked to vote on a clause saying, in effect, ‘everyone’s right to privacy is hereby abolished’? I doubt that would find much favour, and especially not among those MPs who prefer, in many cases quite reasonably, to have some secrets.

There is a great deal to be said, and almost all of it has been said repeatedly over the course of many years, for some sort of statutory right to privacy. There is nothing to stop parliament creating one — least of all judges. The reason it has not done so already is, first, that it is extremely difficult to frame a privacy law that balances the reasonable protection of privacy with the legitimate freedom of the press; and, secondly, that the likely effect of any statutory privacy law would be to make the judges the ultimate arbiters of where the balance should lie, in effect reproducing much the same common law as we have already. The idea that an annual bill rushed through parliament would produce a better law than that is absurd.

The idea will come to nothing. Those responsible for floating the story know that perfectly well. What is depressing is that attacking the judges plays well politically. This nonsense appears to be another way of continuing that attack. It is disingenuous, it is dangerous and it will end badly.

Fact check: are cycle lanes really making traffic worse?

London is the most congested city in the world and it’s the cycle lanes wot done it. That is the impression you will pick up from the headlines this morning. 

‘Cycle Lanes Blamed as City Named Most Congested,’ reads a BBC headline, to take but one example. The story emerges, it turns out, from a global index published by transport consultancy Inrix, which claims that motorists in London spent an average of 148 hours in traffic jams this year, more than in any other country in the world. In the past year, the city climbed from being the 16^th most-congested of those studied to the most congested of that lot.

But are the cycle lanes hurriedly put in during the lockdown, to provide for people to get about when they might not want to cram onto trains and buses, really to blame? It is true that Peter Lees, operations director at Inrix, has comments that the installation of cycle lanes has had ‘a negative impact on congestion’. But he also suggested – and this failed to make it into the headlines – that the main reason for London’s rapid rise through the congestion rankings this year was its rapid economic recovery: traffic was simply rebounding from a very low level in 2020, to a greater extent than in other cities.

In fact, the report itself hardly mentions cycle lanes. Further, it reveals that congestion has fallen slightly since 2019, before Covid – and before some emergency cycle lanes and other traffic measures were put in place. In that year, London motorists spent an average of 149 hours in traffic jams. 

It is a similar story in other large British cities: Birmingham has seen the number of hours stuck in traffic jams fall by 34 per cent since 2019, Manchester by 33 per cent and Bristol by 36 per cent. Congestion has grown, on the other hand in smaller towns – the sorts of places to which middle class, car-owning families decamped to on the arrival of Covid: in Exeter the number of hours lost to traffic jams is up 27 per cent since 2019, Cheltenham 18 per cent and Cambridge seven per cent.

There are some other questions which might be asked of this report, but which it fails to answer. The headline figures focus exclusively on the number of hours that the average motorist has lost in traffic jams. But how many motorists are trying to get about by car? Is that going up and down? The report doesn’t provide data on that. If jams have increased over the past year because economic activity has increased – as Lees suggested – then that should surely be received as good news.

And what about cyclists and pedestrians: are their journeys getting easier or more difficult? Answer comes there none. If you are going to judge the success, or otherwise, of emergency cycle lanes and other traffic-reducing measures (many of which have, in any case, been reversed) you would need to know the overall effect on transport: if, say, 30 per cent of motorists had switched to cycling to work and were enjoying faster journeys as a result that would put a different complexion on the data relating to the number of hours being lost by motorists in traffic jams.

But no data is offered relating to other road-users’; only motorists. This report has been enlisted as a weapon in the hundred years’ war between motorists and cyclists without it offering any useful data to judge the allocation of road space.

Afghanistan: five shocking claims made by the Foreign Office whistleblower

Dominic Raab faced the media round from hell this morning. The former Foreign Secretary faced a series of questions about evidence published by a former Foreign Office official over the government’s handling of the Afghanistan crisis.

Raphael Marshall – an Oxford graduate with three years in the diplomatic service – worked in the department’s special cases team during the evacuation efforts. In testimony given to the foreign affairs select committee published on Tuesday, Marshall has given an account of the dysfunction and chaos he says dominated the government response.

Among the most eye-catching claims:

1. Animals were prioritised over humans

During the evacuation, there was a very public row over the summer between the animal charity Nowzad and Defence Secretary Ben Wallace over whether they should be given government help to leave. In his testimony, Marshall claims that the Foreign office ‘received an instruction from the Prime Minister’ to use ‘considerable capacity’ to help get the animals out of Afghanistan. He said this decision – which led to uproar in the Ministry of Defence – meant there was ‘a direct trade-off between transporting Nowzad’s animals and evacuating British nationals and Afghan evacuees, including Afghans who had served with British soldiers.’

2. Thousands of emails were not processed correctly

Despite claims that the government would log each request for evacuation, many went unread. After widespread anger at thousands of emails slipping through the net, a new system was brought in. Marshall says all emails were then read – but he alleges that nothing was done about them – suggesting the main purpose of the new system was to ‘allow the Prime Minister and the then Foreign Secretary to inform MPs that there were no unread emails’. Marshall suggests the new system served ‘a public relations purpose’ – noting it was locked temporarily.

3. Lack of institutional knowledge and expertise

In the special cases team on which Marshall served, there was a lack of expertise when it came to Afghanistan. Marshall claims that no members of the team had worked on Afghanistan previously. Calls were made in English and this lack of expertise showed when emails in Dari inviting Afghans for evacuation inaccurately said the email had to be printed – adding an extra hoop for applicants to jump through – when in truth a digital copy would have been fine. Marshall says that on-duty team leaders also showed a lack of experience, referring to Afghans as ‘Afghanis’.

4. ‘Work-life balance’ hampered efforts

Dominic Raab’s badly timed holiday was just the tip of the iceberg according to Marshall when it came to staff issues. He says that despite the limited time to evacuate Afghans, ‘the default expectation remained that FCDO staff would only work eight hours a day, five days a week. FCDO employees were only asked to work shifts for which they volunteered’.

The fact that some officials were working from home only added to the potential for miscommunication while grappling with the unfolding crisis: ‘Whilst a healthy “work-life balance” is important in moderation, in my opinion the FCDO’s approach has undermined organisational effectiveness… staffing shortages were exacerbated by some staff working from home, which hampered communication.’ While soldiers were eventually drafted in to help with the effort, this also proved chaotic – they were given laptops without the passwords that would allow them to function.

5. Raab was too slow in making decisions

Dominic Raab is accused of taking hours to make key decisions that were time sensitive. Marshall says that the then-Foreign Secretary demanded cases were put to him in a ‘well presented table’ after the crisis centre sent notes up to Mr Raab’s office regarding the most difficult cases. Marshall claims that this suggests Raab ‘did not fully understand the situation’ – a claim his team denies, pointing to the fact that over 500 special cases were evacuated.

So, where does this go next? Raab has hit back at the claims – suggesting the testimony is ‘inaccurate’ and defending the UK response as one the country can be proud of. Yet he could still be pressed further on the claims – given that the foreign affairs select committee could summon him to give evidence once more.

Given Raab is Justice Secretary, the allegations have limited sting when it comes to his own position. However, the testimony doesn’t just make difficult reading for Raab – it paints a picture of dysfunction in a great office of state that cannot just be put down to one person.

Pope blasts ‘Nazi dictatorship’ EU

With England and France feuding, Russia mobilising and Brussels incurring the wrath of Rome, it all feels a bit 1530 in Europe at the moment. The latest Renaissance throwback has been the octogenarian Pope Francis coming out swinging against the European Union for its efforts to ban the word ‘Christmas’ among Brussels bureaucrats. 

Hand-wringing pen-pushers have told their fellow Eurocrats to swap it instead to ‘holiday period’ as it could be offensive to non-Christians, as part of a guide on ‘inclusive communication.’ The document ordered staff to substitute saying ‘Christmas time can be stressful’ for ‘holiday times can be stressful.’ Naturally such talk did not go down well in the Vatican where Cardinal Pietro Parolin accused the EU of trying to ‘cancel our roots.’

Other EU suggestions include replacing Christian names such as Mary and John with ‘international’ names such as Malika and Julio in generic examples and using the word ‘man-made’ in place of ‘human-induced.’ Mr S would say ‘Lord, give me strength’ but such traditional patriarchal expressions of exasperation might offend the right-on Eurocrat brigade…

Fortunately though – in enjoyably punchy language reminiscent of the Old Testament prophets – Francis this weekend attacked  the supranational entity in the strongest possible terms. The Holy Father declared the Brussels bloc was embarking on ‘the path of ideological colonisation,’ that ‘the EU document on Christmas is an anachronism’ of ‘watered-down secularism’ and that such efforts ‘throughout history’ have ‘not worked.’ He said: ‘In history, many dictatorships have tried to do these things. I’m thinking of Napoleon, the Nazi dictatorship.’ 

Guess that’s one list card on Ursula von der Leyen’s Christmas list – or should that be holiday list?

Lords blows six figures on correcting its peers

While much ink has been spilled over the Covid Commons, far less has been written about the Lords. Overlooked and unloved, the impact of the pandemic on the Upper House has attracted little of the attention granted to their elected counterparts – despite increasing rumblings about the chamber’s future direction. In September, Mr S brought news of discontent among peers at recent efforts by self-styled modernisers in the Palace to usurp what many feel are the traditional rights of members of the Upper House. 

Lord Forsyth, the newly elected chair of the Association of Conservative Peers, cited discontent with the administration of the House as a major factor in his victory, telling Mr S that: ‘the House of Lords has been taken over by a commission where decisions are taken without proper consultation – it is no longer becoming a self-governing institution.’

And such fears will not allayed by fresh figures seen by Steerpike which show that more than £288,000 will be spent this year on diversity training and services for peers and staff, including some £105,000 on ‘workplace culture and behaviour.’ These include more than £2,500 on training and inclusivity webinars on ‘challenging microaggressions’ and being ‘LGBT+ Allies’ alongside more than £23,000 on the notorious ‘Valuing Everyone’ sexual harassment courses which saw the nonagenarian Betty Boothroyd probed by a parliamentary watchdog. An additional £13,900 is spent each year on memberships of ‘inclusivity’ organisations including £3,000 to the controversial charity Stonewall to access ‘online and in-person advice on policy and best practice in LGBT inclusion.’ 

And that’s not all: according to Deputy Speaker Lord Gardiner there are also three full-time professional staff employed in the Lords ‘Inclusion and Diversity Team’ whose annual budget runs to £172,640. This of course is just centralised spend on ‘learning and development interventions’ which are ‘related to culture and behaviour’; other individual offices have ‘localised training budgets’ meaning that the true cost is likely higher.

Yet for all this spending, there’s little sign that such standards are any better as a result. A Freedom of Information request to the Lords shows that since the landmark report by Naomi Ellenbogen QC in June 2019, there were 71 complaints received by the House of Lords Commissioner for Standards relating to bullying, harassment and inappropriate conduct involving peers up until October 2021. 

Just 18 of these 71 complaints – or 25 per cent – were assessed to be within the scope of the Code of Conduct and were investigated by the Commissioners. The remaining 53 fell outside the scope of the Code and were therefore dismissed at the preliminary assessment stage, meaning that three in four complaints against peers were not scrutinised by the House of Lords authorities.

Of these 18 complaints, five had ‘no further action after investigation,’ six peers were referred for behavioural training, one member was suspended for four investigations about them and referred to training. Another member had to write a letter of apology with two of these cases currently under an ongoing investigation.

Separately, the Lords also received 25 complaints about bullying, harassment and inappropriate conduct which were not directed to the Commissioners for investigation. Of these 12 were about peers and 13 about staff in the House of Lords: notably one member who had retired from the chamber had their security pass removed for such behaviour.

Is such taxpayer-funded largesse making a difference to the Lords’ culture? Mr S looks forward to finding out.

The importance of small pleasures

The book Small Pleasures will warm even the stoniest heart. It defines joy as simple, brief instances in everyday life which people can access with little or no cost. My favourite chapters include: the joy of an evening sky, letting a child win at a game, a hot bath. We tend to let these things pass by unnoticed for the pursuit of other, bigger pleasures. This year, we had time to stop and pay attention.

My new peace of mind was interrupted last week as I walked down a quiet pavement on a blue-sky day enjoying the cold air and sun on my face. A van drove past, the driver wound down his window, beeped his horn and shouted something sexist at me. I felt angry. I had an urge to chase after him and call out something equally offensive. As well as small pleasures, there are many small annoyances in life, things that grate or get on my nerves. For example: passive aggressive people, face masks, cold coffee, people that say ‘cheer up’ or ‘smile it may never happen,’ adverts, form checking, drivers who come up right behind me on the motorway, hiccups, small talk, being told to sit down, one word answers in texts, people who don’t listen and tourists who walk so slowly they might as well be standing still. I sent a message on my sibling whatsApp group asking them to make a list of all their small pleasures and small annoyances. They said it proved more satisfying writing about the everyday loves rather than the everyday hates, and that writing a list of all the simple delights made them feel happy.

My sister Pandora had sarcoma, a rare form of cancer. She was told she wasn’t going to survive. I watched her fight for her life in the face of huge adversity including having her face reconstructed, infections, meningitis, epilepsy and losing her sense of taste and smell forever. Fortunately, she recovered. Months later I stood on top of a hill with her looking out at a beautiful view. A tear slid down her cheek and I asked her why she was sad. She said, ‘I’m not sad, just thankful.’ Walking, trees and storms outside were amongst her lengthy list of pleasures which contained many things we often take for granted. But most strikingly, at the top of her list was simply, ‘the beginning of the day.’

So, I’m not going to scold myself for enjoying my own little delights. I’ll stare out the window and go on rambling walks when a voice tells me I should be working or getting things done. If I’m feeling stressed or frightened about the future, I will take a step back. I’ll spend too long in the bookshop, curl up by the fire with my dog and kiss her velvet ears or light a candle and listen to old festive tunes. And next time an annoying, shouting man in a van comes along, I won’t let him ruin my day.

For more information about sarcoma, visit https://sarcoma.org.uk 

The dos and don’ts of Christmas cards

Not even a pillowy panettone or the most lethal of brandy butters can beat the thud of a round robin letter on the doormat. It’s that perfect concoction of mundane detail (how the electric car is faring) and low-level bragging (news of a child’s Oxbridge acceptance letter) that make them so tantalising, the ultimate yuletide indulgence. You simultaneously snigger at how on earth this distant relation could think you’d be interested in the trials and tribulations of their daughter’s grade eight trumpet exam, while combing through it with the diligence of a lawyer. If our Instagram addiction has taught us anything, it’s that we are, after all, interested in the seemingly irrelevant status updates of day-to-day life. And here it is in its purest form. A stream of consciousness about all life’s wonderful banalities, peppered with badly disguised boasts.

The alternative, of course, is a soulless card addressed ‘To you all’ with an illegible signature tail ending it, which muster­­­s the same level of festive goodwill as a business card being slapped into your hand. It might as well say ‘I’m still alive’ — which, on second thoughts, shouldn’t be sniffed at. Pandemic or not, you’re unlikely to have seen the full roster of loose acquaintances who have qualified for your list from one Christmas to the next.

With all the efficiency of a corporate PA, my mother has mastered a clinically efficient middle ground. For each of her four daughters, whatever mine and my sisters’ years have entailed, she can condense events into one line (‘Madeleine – now married, living in Wiltshire’).

But how ever sparing the sender is with their pen, it’s worth reading between the lines. As Jilly Cooper wrote in her 1986 tome How to survive Christmas: ‘Couples who send you photographs of themselves surrounded by all their children are saying that a very sticky patch in their marriage has been circumnavigated.’ Another to be on standby for is the recent divorcee. ‘A husband who has walked out on his wife often sends you a photograph of himself surrounded by his laughing children, which can be translated as, “You may think I was fiendish to Samantha, but the children don’t,”‘ warned Jilly.

It was perhaps a savvy move, then, for Boris Johnson and Carrie Symonds to break with the tradition of a Prime Minister’s family photo last year to throw their Jack Russell-cross Dilyn into the spotlight in the bleakest of locked down Christmases; a tinsel clad terrier is hard to overthink.

There’s something about an animal in the mix that manages to negate any amount of festive boasting. Take the racehorse trainer’s Royal Ascot winner artfully photoshopped with a piece of holly to make that triumphant June day relevant in the depths of winter. Or the old trick of using the Labrador’s voice to tell the tale of the round robin letter, softening the blow of an assault of achievements.

But nothing can deter from the faux pas of sending a non-charity card; a blunder likely to evoke a silent tut as the recipient slowly turns the card over on opening it, scanning for clues of a worthy cause.

If my late grandfather could see the sad trickle of cards most millennials receive in comparison to his own generation’s haul, he’d pity the seemingly feeble state of our social circle. For him, the true marker of a triumphant Christmas was receiving enough cards to string around both the drawing and dining room, with his regimental card taking centre stage on the mantelpiece, flanked by those from his children. As his 90s beckoned, and the cards dwindled, he had no qualms in digging out last year’s selection to fill the gaps. And I don’t blame him; here was the chance to bask in a lifetime of friendships and colleagues. Whilst we might eschew the writing of them, who doesn’t love to receive a card? All that generic festive well wishing on social media just can’t compete with the thrill of paper, ink and stamps sent from afar. 

Rees-Mogg’s No. 10 party jibe

It’s a difficult time for liberty lovers in the cabinet. The country is £400 billion in debt, the risk of Covid restrictions linger on and there’s a Prime Minister addicted to spending. Luckily though, while the convention of collective responsibility binds our ministers tightly, it cannot entirely gag them. 

Jacob Rees-Mogg, the leader of the House of Commons, took to the stand tonight as the guest of honour at the IEA think tank. In a sly pop at Downing Street’s current difficulties over whether a lockdown-breaking party was held last December, Rees-Mogg told the fervently Thatcherite crowd:

I see we’re all here obeying the regulations aren’t we? I mean this party is not going to be investigated by the police in a year’s time, you are all being carefully socially distanced I’m glad to say. 

Given it’s the festive season, the Somerset MP decided to give a panto-style speech, teasing his audience with a classic call and response performance. To cries of ‘lower taxes’ and ‘lower regulation’, he told the crowd:

Now we have to recognise that we need a growing economy to pay our way and how are we going to get that: higher taxes or lower taxes, you tell me? Can we have a shout out? You see I’m bound by collective responsibility so I didn’t want to express an opinion, I just wanted to seek the opinion of the IEA? And do you think we will get that via higher regulation or lower? Very good! I again am not expressing an opinion…

Let’s hope for JRM’s sake the PM isn’t feeling like a pantomime villain this Christmas…

Will someone wake up the Bank of England?

It is called managing expectations: the steady drip of forecasts and scenarios designed to prepare us for bad news, so that when that news does finally arrive it doesn’t seem nearly as bad as it would otherwise have done. So is that what the Bank of England is up to with its deputy governor, Ben Broadbent, telling us that inflation next April could ‘comfortably exceed’ 5 per cent? It is reminiscent of the moment in July when the Bank’s departing chief economist, Andy Haldane, dropped in the suggestion that inflation by the end of 2021 could be closer to four percent than three percent.

You can’t fault Haldane’s forecasting skills on that occasion. The year isn’t quite out and already the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) has reached 4.2 per cent. But that merely begs the question: if the Bank is so good at spotting inflationary forces, then why have they still not increased the base rate from 0.1 per cent, the emergency level to which it was reduced in March 2020? Ben Broadbent was one of seven members of the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) who voted again last month to leave the base rate unchanged.

Broadbent, markedly, is no longer claiming, as his boss Andrew Bailey has done, that the rise in inflation is transitory. The labour market, he concedes, is now fuelling inflation, as the end of the furlough scheme does not seem to have made it easier for employers to recruit staff. That ought to be a red flag: if wages rises are starting to feed into inflation we are starting to get close to the dreaded spiral, where higher prices lead to higher wage demands which, in turn, leads to higher prices and so on.

The MPC is coming to behave like these energy companies which respond to higher wholesale prices by jacking up retail prices, but which then take ages to respond to falling wholesale prices. At the first sign of economic trouble, it will react with a pre-emptive emergency cut in rates. But the, amid the end of the crisis and signs of healthy economic growth, it doesn’t want to raise rates — it is a case of just waiting until next month to see how things look then.

The MPC is behaving like a Chancellor who wants to stoke the economy in order to generate a feel-good factor before an election. Yet the Bank’s mandate quite clear: it is supposed to set interest rates at a level which ensures that inflation remains at close to 2 percent. That inflation is already at twice that level and the Bank of England’s deputy governor is now warning us to expect it to rise to at least two and a half times the target, But with an over-borrowed government having a political interest in higher inflation, who will dare tap the governor on the shoulder?

A war on drugs? I do hope so

I’m not going to lie, I let out a little chuckle — maybe even a murmur of approval — when I read that the government plans to target middle-class drug users. About time, I thought to myself. For too long the so-called ‘war on drugs’ has focused on the poverty-stricken poppy-growers in far-flung fields, or the desperate ‘mules’ who risk life and liberty to get drugs across borders, or the working-class kids in the UK who get caught up in drug-dealing because they feel they have few other prospects in life.

And all the while the privileged people whose narcissistic needs motor this industry, whose selfish desire for a synthetic high is the driver of all this risk-taking and crime, get off scot-free. They lounge around in their hip clubs shoving the white stuff up their noses with barely a second thought for the people who have died or who languish in jail just so that they can enjoy their cheap coke thrill.

Now, at last, the government says it will go after the real culprits in the world of drugs — not the suppliers, who only want to make a buck, but the demanders, who seem to think it’s fine that poorer people’s lives are put on the line for their vain debauchery. Good.

Look, I don’t want a tyrannical clampdown on these plummy consumers of illegal drugs. I don’t want them locked up. I’m even a tad uncomfortable with the government’s proposal to confiscate their passports or their driving licences in order to teach them a lesson. But I do want them to face up to the consequences of their habits and the government is taking a positive step in that direction.

Part of the government’s ten-year strategy for tackling the scourge of drug-taking will focus on the ‘wealthy professionals’ whose habits, in the words of the Guardian, are ‘driving exploitative practices’. So, for example, police will have the power to go through drug dealers’ phones and send a message to their clients to warn them about their drug use.

I have no problem with this at all. It speaks volumes about the class privilege of the coke-snorting set that they are up in arms today about this relatively mild proposal. They really do believe that they should have the right to get embroiled in iffy, criminal activity without suffering any consequences whatsoever, even if it’s just a reprimanding text message from the cops. The arrogance of these people.

This is one of the ironies: the young darlings of wokeness are obsessed with consequences. They think ‘consequences’ should be rained down on anyone who has the temerity to deviate from correct-think and conformist behaviour. Feminists blaspheming against the ideology of genderfluidity? Football fans booing the taking of the knee? Unleash the consequences! Demonise them, isolate them, no-platform them.

Yet when it comes to them possibly facing consequences for snorting a substance that was farmed, developed and transported in the most dangerous of ways, by often desperate and very poor people, they reach for the smelling salts. Or at least for something to put up their nose. ‘How dare you impugn my pristine and virtuous reputation?’, they inquire, with last night’s white powder still clinging to their nostrils.

It would be funny if the consequences of their decadent compulsions were not so dire. These are the kind of people who only eat fairtrade chocolate and who would never desecrate their hair with a shampoo that was tested on a bunny rabbit — and yet they are happy to ingest substances smuggled across borders in the stomachs or anuses of hard-up women.

These are the kind of people who will tell anyone who will listen that they never shop at Amazon because its workers sometimes have to eat their lunch on the job — the horror! — and yet they’ll happily buy a product whose providers frequently stab each other to death in order to maintain their gangland monopolies. Amazon is the employer of the century in comparison with the hyper-exploiting gangs who provide the posh with their little bags of fun.

‘Hypocrite’ is too soft a word for those people who pose as purveyors of virtue during the week and who then, at the weekend, gobble up a drug whose production regularly causes death to those involved in its trade.

Of course every now and then they’ll say ‘End the war on drugs!’ because they’d like nothing more than to be able to engage in their bourgeois degeneracy without having to worry about all the black and brown people whose back-breaking criminal behaviour makes their weekend indulgences possible. But the fact is that drugs are still illegal and are likely to remain illegal for a long time and still these people do what they do. They have made a conscious choice that their temporary ersatz thrill is more important than the life and liberty of armies of poor people.

So, good on the government. Traditionally the ‘war on drugs’ has been severe on suppliers and soft on demanders; ferocious against working-class dealers and gentle with middle-class snorters. Shouldn’t it be the other way round? We certainly need to do something about the decadence of the addled elites that underpins so much of today’s dangerous drugs market.

Six highlights from Mark Francois’s memoirs

Certain dates will go down in the annals of Brexit: 23 June 2016, 12 December 2019 and 31 January 2021. To that pantheon can now be added 6 December 2021 – for today is the day that Mark Francois, a proud Brexiteer and longtime member of the European Research Group (ERG), released his memoirs titled ‘Spartan Victory: The inside story of the Battle for Brexit.’ 

Steerpike was among the first to get their hands on a copy, with the 464-page tome centring on Francois’s life and the events around the 2016 vote to leave the European Union. Below are some of the highlights that caught the eye of Mr S, as he manfully relived those dark days of Meaningful Votes, Change UK, Olly Robbins and the Cooper-Boles amendment.

1. Francois’s meeting with Robbie Gibb

Few works thus far have had kind words to say about the unhappy administration of Theresa May. Francois’s book is no exception. Perhaps the best indication of how unequipped and ill-prepared her staff were is illustrated in one early 2019 encounter between the protagonist and the No. 10 Director of Communications Robbie Gibb. The two former members of the Federation of Conservative Students shared a drink at the Grenadier, with Gibb spending a quarter of an hour lecturing Francois on why he ought to back May’s Brexit deal. Francois then asked a simple question: ‘Have you actually read the Withdrawal Agreement yourself?’ 

Gibb blustered, claiming he’d ‘read a summary’ which ‘was compiled for me by the Civil Servants’ – who, as Francois pointed were ‘the same Civil Servants who helped negotiate the Withdrawal Agreement in the first place’ adding: ‘Unlike you I have read the thing – until you do that, we are wasting each other’s time.’ Francois says that ‘I never heard from again, until after the Battle for Brexit was over.’

2. Francois’s meeting with Dominic Cummings

The same question eluded a different response in July 2019 when Francois met with Dominic Cummings. The Vote Leave chief had previously described the ERG as ‘a metastasising tumour’ and ‘useful idiots for Remain.’ Cummings told Francois that as ‘no one Parliament can bind another’ the government ought to vote for some elements of the Withdrawal Agreement before changing it after the election. 

Francois claims he showed Cummings his copy after being told the latter had not read the document. When they reached Article 174, which laid out the superiority of the European Court of Justice in the dispute resolution mechanism, Johnson’s adviser simply exclaimed ‘Who the fuck negotiated that?’ Francois replied: ‘Metaphorically – you did! Or at least your predecessors in No. 10.’ 

3. The ‘Buddies’ system

Historians and geeks of parliamentary procedure will find plenty of interest in Francois’ account of the Spartans’ unofficial whipping system on Theresa May’s deal. Given there is only one Whips Office, Steve Baker suggested calling the rebel ringleaders ‘the Buddies’ instead; Francois was named ‘Chief Buddy’ and Baker his deputy. The other ‘Buddies’, who were unknown to each other, were David Jones, Laurence Robertson, Theresa Villiers, Anne-Marie Trevelyan, Adam Holloway, Charlie Elphicke, Simon Clarke, Michael Tomlinson, Ross Thomson and one other anonymous MP. Like the whips, each ‘Buddy’ had a section of the parliamentary party, with Baker organising a spreadsheet of each MP’s voting intentions.  

Every MP was graded from +5 to -5 on their likelihood to vote against the Treaty. Longtime Eurosceptic Bill Cash was given a +5 rating; lifelong Europhile Ken Clarke was ranked as -5. According to Francois, ‘Whipping is rather like bespoke tailoring’ Intelligence was shared with the senior members of the ERG on a conference call held every Sunday evening. Such calls were nicknamed the ‘Five Families’ conference call by supporter David Canzini, in reference to The Godfather’s five leading gangster families in New York. 

4. How Francois beat out Boris

Certain parliamentary vintages loom large in the Tory imagination: the 1950 election saw Ted Heath, Iain Macleod, Enoch Powell and Reggie Maudling enter the House; in 2001 it was the turn of Boris, David Cameron, George Osborne and Francois himself. Being part of such a memorable intake gives him a fair few brushes with future greatness. His first Oral Question was nearly derailed by a backbencher by the name of George Osborne whispering beforehand ‘Remember Rule one of all political life – don’t fuck it up’ just as Francois was called. 

But Francois’ successful selection for his current seat of Rayleigh in that election came at a price: he beat the current Prime Minister Boris Johnson when he too was searching for a seat in 2000 as the then editor of The Spectator. On the day of the selection meeting, Johnson chose to walk the ten minute distance from Rochford train station – a decision which coincided with freak weather and a ‘shower of almost neo-biblical rain’. This meant he was ‘quite literally, soaked to the skin.’ Handed a large towel by the association he was still dripping water from the ends of his cuffs and hair, which, having been dried roughly with a towel, ‘had risen up to make him look like something out of the Lion King.’

Sadly, despite a very amusing speech with virtually no reference to the actual constituency, the first question Johnson faced bowled him clean out: ‘What is your opinion of PPG3?’. This was a reference to the planning policy guidance note 3, which governed what could be built on the Green Belt. It promoted the immortal reply: ‘Yup, erm, PPG3. Seminal. Fundamentally important to everything that the modern Conservative Party is trying to achieve… Never heard of it!’ By contrast, Francois, a local councillor, gave a comprehensive reply; Johnson never made it to the second round.

Still, as the current backbencher notes: ‘I have teased him about this a number of times down the years – which perhaps explains why I do not serve in his Cabinet and most probably never will.’

5. IDS helped Johnson survive the ERG

After Theresa May resigned in 2019, the ERG organised a ‘job interview’ between Dominic Raab and Boris Johnson to see who would win the group’s backing. At his first encounter Raab made the mistake of trying to catch out Sir Bill Cash on a point of European law. Johnson had two meetings, which he described as ‘my viva’ – an Oxford term for a detailed oral exam – over two different hours.

At the second encounter, Johnson finally secured the Spartans’ backing. His winning response? Answering Francois’s question that ‘if you become Prime Minister’ will the UK leave the EU at the end of October ‘come hell or high water’ with the retort ‘If we don’t, this party will soon cease to exist’. It was a popular answer. Yet as Francois notes, ‘I discovered sometime afterwards that Boris had been very effectively ‘coached’ for his two interviews with the ERG’ by former party leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith. After an initial rehearsal had not gone well, IDS apparently said to him: ‘You are going to need much better answers than that if you are going to get Baker and Francois to support you Boris, let alone Bill Cash!’

6. Bercow v Francois

In an ironic reflection of their later politics, in their younger days both Francois and future Commons Speaker John Bercow ran to be the last chairman of the Federation of Conservative Students in 1986, prior to the organisation being abolished by Norman Tebbit for, er, being too right wing. As a Bristol undergraduate, Francois was selected as the moderates’ candidate on ‘something of a suicide mission’ against the then ascendant Libertarian faction behind Bercow, now a Labour member. 

Francois reflects that by the time he reached the actual conference he was nicknamed the ‘Member for Bristol Niagara’. His hustings speech was interrupted by Bercow supporters in the first three rows putting up umbrellas as if to emphasise his ‘wetness.’ Bercow described Francois as ‘intellectually knee high to a grasshopper’ and won the contest by 197 votes to 123. Who’d have guessed the sides they’d be on some 30 years later during the Brexit debate?

Why the No. 10 Christmas ‘party’ story matters

It’s crime week for the government — with Boris Johnson and his ministers set to unveil a range of measures to show how they plan to get tough on law and order. Only the ministers sent out to land that message are themselves facing questions over criminality. The claims of a ‘boozy’ Christmas party of up to 50 people, held last year when the rest of the country was banned from mixing between households, emerged in the Mirror last week but don’t seem to be going away anytime soon. 

In various broadcast rounds, ministers have been pressed on whether the party occurred and if so whether it broke the rules. The standard response is that Covid guidance has been followed at all times. Downing Street has insisted that no rules had been broken though the Prime Minister has not denied that an event took place. Today the Prime Minister’s spokesperson said in a lunchtime lobby briefing that there was not a party and insisted Covid rules have been followed at all times. 

This denial appears to come down to what one defines as a ‘party’ given others have since come forward with similar accounts. A Downing Street insider told the Financial Times that drinking would regularly take place in the evenings last winter — as ‘they were the only things that kept us going, bearing in mind we were the only people in Whitehall in the office working throughout’. While that quote will garner little sympathy, it does point to part of the issue: people working in government had a very different lockdown experience to the general public. 

While No. 10 clearly wants to move on from the story, ministers are tying themselves in knots defending the government. On Question Time last week, Maggie Throup, the vaccines minister, was heckled as she said she didn’t know if there had been a party — but then insisted all rules were followed even if there was one. On Sunday, Justice Secretary Dominic Raab conceded that had a party occurred it would be ‘the wrong thing to do’ but, when asked about potential criminal proceedings, said the police ‘don’t normally look back and investigate things that have taken place a year ago’. This appeared to come as news to policing minister Kit Malthouse who this morning said he would ‘expect the police to have a look’ if a complaint had been made.

It’s little wonder then that Downing Street appear to now be hardening the language around the claims. As concerns rise over the Omicron variant, the story has the potential to make Johnson’s life difficult. Pressed on whether there will be new restrictions at Christmas, the government is due to formally review its plans on 18 December. Aides are hopeful that no new rules will be brought in this side of Christmas (with January looking trickier on Covid than December). But if new restrictions are needed, it will be a harder sell if the public thinks those making the rules don’t follow the same ones as the rest of the country.

Omicron: cause for hope?

It will be weeks before we know just how worried we should be about Omicron — but the first indications seem hopeful. The epicentre of the first recorded outbreak has been the subject of a study that suggests that it may be milder than Delta. Early data from 166 patients in the Tshwane district comes with the usual caveats, especially that very little Omicron has been found among South African over-65s. But the study nonetheless has two weeks of hospitalised Omicron patients to analyse — more than any other country. Here are the main indications so far: 

• Fewer people hospitalised with Omicron have ended up in intensive care: 8 per cent, compared to 25 per cent for Delta.
• Fewer patients need oxygen: only about a third. A big change, the study says, because until now pretty much every Covid patient has needed oxygen.
• Most Omicron patients were not admitted for Covid: they registered due to hospital policy of testing everyone admitted.
• Vaccines may explain the younger profile of Covid patients: 57 per cent of over-50s have been vaccinated in the Tshwane province ‘compared to 34 per cent in the 18-to-49-year group’.
• Omicron patients are out of hospital sooner: 2.8 days ‘compared to an average length of stay of 8.5 days for the past 18 months’.

The report says that all this ‘constitutes a very different picture compared to the beginning of previous waves’. While we don’t know that every recent case in South Africa is Omicron, most of the Covid that has been sequenced has been the new variant. It is tempting to conclude that Omicron is bypassing vaccines if it has become dominant so quickly, but South Africa doesn’t have nearly the same level of vaccination as Britain — only 24 per cent have had two doses, compared to 88 per cent here.

The UK’s high vaccination rates put us in good stead, but what about reinfection? A British government-funded study in South Africa claimed that Omicron had the potential to reinfect people who’ve already had Covid. This would be new, as there has yet to be a variant that can do this to any significant extent. The data suggests that Omicron could be 2.6 times more likely than Delta to cause reinfection. Public Health England estimated that 1.2 per cent of Delta cases were people having had Covid twice, so if the South African figure is correct, we should expect about 3.1 per cent of Omicron cases to be among people who have already had Covid. A tangible rise, but not a catastrophe.

The biggest threat this winter will probably come from how transmissible Omicron is. Angelique Coetzee, chair of the South African Medical Association, told the BBC that the R number (the average number of people someone with Covid will give the virus to) was ‘about 6.3’ (Delta’s is just above 5). The original Wuhan strain was 2.8, so we could be looking at a variant more than twice as transmissible as the one that started the pandemic. 

As Robert Peston writes, Omicron is no doubt spreading more than official case numbers suggest (246 cases were reported in the UK yesterday). But no one is suggesting the government’s numbers are exact: what they will tell us over the next few weeks is the rate at which Omicron is increasing. On this, early figures suggest a case-doubling time of three days (Delta is estimated to be 4.6 days). So there is reason to believe that Omicron is more contagious than any previous strain.

If Omicron becomes the dominant variant, it will do so in the new year. It seems likely that any pressure on the NHS would come from Omicron’s transmissibility — more people being infected at any one time — not from a nastier illness. We are still waiting for real-world data on how much it blunts the vaccines — but if it does, for most people it will be a reduction from three doses, not two (Pfizer said its booster increased protection by 96 per cent). If the early data from South Africa suggests Covid could be milder in a relatively unvaccinated population, there is reason to hope that a population with 93 per cent antibodies, such as the UK, could fare better.

What’s the point of vaccine passports?

What is the purpose of vaccine passports: to keep down infection or to try to persuade more people to get vaccinated by making life for the unvaccinated inconvenient and restricted? Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen wasn’t trying to conceal her intentions when she announced in a press conference on 8 November that vaccine passports would be reintroduced. ‘For all of you who are not vaccinated, it of course becomes more burdensome and that is also how I think it should be,’ she said. ‘In my eyes, there are no excuses to not go out and get vaccinated.’

But did her cajoling do more harm than good? A study led by Frederik Jorgensen of Arhus University suggests that while the reintroduction of vaccine passports (they had previously been abolished along with other Covid restrictions on 10 September) increased the vaccination rate, it further reduced trust in the government and healthcare authorities among people who have chosen not to have the vaccine.

The study analysed the results of a Kantar survey on public attitudes which has been carried out in Denmark regularly since May 2020. Respondents are asked six questions, including: ‘I trust the political strategy behind the health authorities’ advice’ and ‘the health authorities’ advice are important to achieve a safe society’. Researchers found that among the unvaccinated, trust in health authorities’ handling of the Covid epidemic plunged by 11 to 13 per cent and their individual motivation to engage in collective action to stop Covid infections fell by 7 to 9 per cent. There was no such change in attitudes among the vaccinated. The findings were based on responses from just under 25,000 people, 800 of whom were unvaccinated.

In other words, while vaccination passports appear to have persuaded some people to get vaccinated, it has hardened the attitudes of a small proportion of people who had already decided that they did not wish to have the vaccine — possibly making it less likely that they will agree to have a vaccine in the longer term. Given Denmark’s relatively high vaccination rate — 77 per cent of the population have been jabbed, including 88 per cent of the adult population — the Danish government might decide that it is not too bothered about a small number of holdouts. 

What we don’t know, however, is what effect strong-arm tactics will have on public trust in the longer term, and on issues other than Covid.

Durham students try to cancel Rod Liddle

The University of Durham has boasted many distinguished students over the years: Sir Harold Evans, Justin Welby, Andrew Strauss and even the worst 007, George Lazenby. But it seems the current crop of angry undergraduates are not so keen on old-fashioned notions of argument and debate. For Friday night saw the good neophytes of South College attempt to cancel a guest at their Christmas formal, a man quite well-known to Mr S: none other than The Spectator’s own Rod Liddle.

Steerpike is yet to get Rod’s account of the incident but plenty has been said already by the protagonists in this early Christmas pantomime. Students walked out before his speech at the meal and continued to do so throughout his five-minute contribution, with most declining to stand as the guests on high table walked out afterwards, as tradition dictates. Among the offending lines which sparked the wrath of Durham’s finest include The Spectator columnist joking that he was disappointed not to see any sex workers – a reference to the recent controversy over safety training provided by the university to undergraduates working in this industry. 

One of the Rod-fearing folk involved has now composed a lengthy Twitter thread, declaring that the night was a betrayal of South College’s motto ‘liberty, equality and global citizenship’ as ‘all it takes is a Google search to see how much of an awful person this man is.’ They declared themselves ‘absolutely livid, literally shaking’ at Rod’s comments about sex and gender issues, with the self-proclaimed Durham’s Working Class Students’ Association now demanding an investigation and the local Labour society insisting that ‘Our university doesn’t owe hate a platform.’

To his credit, the college’s Principal, Professor Tim Luckhurst, disagreed, telling his charges that ‘At South College, we value freedom of speech’ and labelling those walking-out as ‘pathetic.’ Still, plenty of material for Rod to use for his next column, thanks to the good students of Durham.