It is not possible for the nation’s hacks to have observed, been briefed by and worked with the malignant shower who have been exposed by the Covid inquiry this week, without noticing what everybody else noticed at the time: their egomania, self-serving incompetence and functional corruption. Yet night after night they appeared on our screens, making excuses for these monsters, reassuring us that we were in safe hands. Millions raged at their TVs, demanding answers. But to the audience, the hacks were asking the questions their political masters had told them to ask. Why is it that national political journalists, whose job it is to keep us informed, were almost the only people in the country who claim they hadn’t a clue that it was a chaotic cover-up?
Thousands died unnecessarily, through Boris Johnson’s indifference and arrogance – surely grounds for an investigation into corporate manslaughter. (Which of course won’t happen because, you know, we’re British and we don’t like that kind of unpleasantness. Especially when it means confronting authority.) Yet Laura Kuenssberg and her colleagues must have had a sense of what was going wrong. They did nothing. They allowed it to happen. Perhaps the greatest political and public health scandal of our time, and they connived at covering it up.
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Watching the events at the Covid inquiry, one can’t help wondering how so many liars, charlatans and frauds* were able to get away with so much, with nobody fingering their collar. Can it be possible that no law was broken during this whole grisly charade?
Who should we look to for justice, then? The ideal person of course would be the leader of a party with an excellent chance of sweeping to power after the next election who, let’s say, just happened to have been a former director of public prosecutions.
*Naturally, this description is not intended to refer to any of those mentioned here by name
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And on the subject of confronting authority, there are others who should be held to account. Every public office holder in the Conservative Party, all those thousands of MPs and councillors, also bear a degree of responsibility. They too must have had at least a glimmer of realisation about what was happening. They were privy to much of the outcome of this hubristic chest thumping from Downing Street. They must have seen what was going wrong. But they stood by. You mustn’t make waves. Not if you’re British. Causing a fuss is unpatriotic, close to treason.
Let the same good old boys muddle on who have muddled on through so many years, betraying our country for their own small-minded or self-interested ends. As the bodies piled high, to borrow a phrase, the man most culpable for this chaos and all these deaths was praised because – in a plangent phrase which was thought to have the right ring – he ‘got all the big calls right’.
In fact, Johnson got them all wrong, where he could be bothered to make decisions at all or even turn up to meetings. (There was that major wallpaper crisis he had to deal with, you will recall.)
Not one Tory MP or councillor deserves re-election. Not one.
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There are many risible Tory MPs we could hold accountable for Johnson’s ascendancy – off-hand for example there is obviously that pompous Richard Bacon (S Norfolk). He told BBC Newsnight that: “I think, overall the prime minister has done a really good job in what is, in normal circumstances a superhumanly difficult job and, in these circumstances, in probably the greatest crisis we have faced in over a hundred years – almost an impossible job.”
Then Mr Bacon lost credibility altogether when he went on to claim that Mr Johnson was “working very hard – 16 to 18 hours a day”. But Mr Bacon is already ‘oot the windy’ – de-selected by his party partly, one has to observe in all modesty, through reports in EAB.
But let us not forget Jerome Mayhew (Broadland), who assured one of his sceptical constituents that Boris Johnson has “been the leader who has been getting the big policy decisions right”. Right.
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One of the most contemptible characters in this whole disaster has been Matt Hancock (West Suffolk), of course. According to Helen MacNamara, giving evidence this week, he showed “nuclear levels” of self-confidence and has been described as an “over-confident liar”.
This word ‘liar’ seems to crop up often with regard to Mr Hancock. But of course, giving evidence before the Covid inquiry is a serious business: it is under oath. Perjury is a criminal offence. No doubt Mr Hancock has nothing to fear, but any discrepancies between his own account of what happened and that of others might well be closely scrutinised.
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But there is more on Mr Hancock. There always is. On Thursday, the witness statement of the former chief executive of the NHS, (now Lord) Simon Stevens was talking about the danger that the NHS might have become overwhelmed, and claims Mr Hancock “took the position that in this situation he – rather than, say, the medical profession or the public – should ultimately decide who should live and who should die”.
This from the strutting jackanapes who presently turns up on TV screens, always the small man trying to look big. And what could be bigger for a megalomaniac than having the power of life or death over millions?
This was the man the government and the news media told us to trust. This was the man who had climbed the greasy (or in this case a rather ucky) pole to get to the top of Tory politics. Now be honest, dear reader, can you seriously imagine Matt Hancock was just one bad apple?
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Like buses, Matt Hancock stories come along in threes. Unlike buses, however, there seems no long interval between them. As we go to press, the then head of Public Health England, Yvonne Doyle, is telling the Covid inquiry of having explained what she felt (and nobody has since disputed) was the scientific truth about Britain’s situation. But Mr Hancock was furious and forbade her to give any further media interviews. It might have been the scientific truth, but it wasn’t the version of the truth he wanted the suckers public to hear.
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The little acknowledged saint of diary writers is St Francis de Sales, and according to rumour ‘Frank’, as he is known, is with us again and a regular toper at the Muckrakers. He it is who is always consulted on matters celestial. Recently he held the ring in a spirited discussion of whether it is possible to have sex in heaven. Suffice to say that the advice of the sainted person is that it would be impossible, because without corporeality one does not have the appropriate, er, apparatus.
Then it was wondered whether the same problem might affect drinking, and George had to call a halt because he felt it may affect his takings.
Anyway, this diarist will want a word with Frank after his assurances that we had heard the last of Nadine Dorries (formerly MidBeds). But oh no. She has a book out. Of course she has. And it is being serialised in the Daily Mail. Of course it is. And the Mail headline is: “Shadowy Tory No.10 fixer had pet rabbit butchered in Mafia-style warning to his ex-girlfriend”. Of course it is. And this diarist will have to continue to write about her.
One always assumed that saints had some kind of infallibility. But it has already been established that Frank can’t turn water into pints of Old Unprintable, so at the very least one can expect that this evening it’s his round.
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Last week in the Muckrakers, your correspondent was fortunate enough (if that can ever be the right phrase) to fall into conversation about Thérèse Coffey (Suffolk Coastal). A fellow toper had met her on several occasions in a professional capacity.
Sadly, the impression given is that Dr Coffey is exactly as she appears: haughty and with that slightly appalled demeanour, like the vicar’s daughter in Wodehouse who had just discovered Erastianism in the village. It begins to appear that she owes her long and wholly inexplicable career in government to several factors, which one can see would greatly appeal to our succession of Tory prime ministers. First, she is loyal and poses no threat. That in itself is essential. Then, she is prepared to turn up on TV as a barricade against problems, taking all kinds of flak without flinching and so ensuring that none of the shrapnel flies as far as Downing Street.
But also, and this is a core Tory belief these days, she makes the presumption that almost all public money is wasted, squandered on those too indigent to look after themselves. So everything is done on the cheap. Ministers bristle. They feel affronted and look upon us all as a bunch of scroungers. In their eyes we are all refugees in small boats, begging for charity which we don’t deserve. Our role, which Dr Coffey often appears to explain, is to continue our daily toil, salute the flag, squirm to the monarchy, be fleeced by whichever are the latest corporate donors to the Conservative Party, pay our taxes and ask no questions.
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Norwich North Conservatives have just chosen their candidate to succeed Chloe Smith, whose largely unnoticed incumbency will draw to a close with her retirement at the next election. Time for a fresh start, you might think. As the party faces the abyss, perhaps now would be a chance to choose a prospective candidate to represent a future in which the past few years’ insane delusions can perhaps be forgotten.
But no. Instead they have chosen Nick Rose. Low regulation, low tax, law ‘n’ order, climate change denier, opponent of refunding the NHS, anti-benefits and anti-woke. And damned proud of it, judging from his own publicity. Dear reader, as has been apparent for some time, the current crop of Tories are a species apart from the rest of the human race.
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The Hunting Trophies (Importation prohibition) Bill recently came before the Lords. It had all party support, so it was expected to pass. But several prominent fox hunting Tory peers filibustered the bill so that it ran out of time, and so failed to become law.
Four of them were from Norfolk: Lord Mancroft, who used to be head of the Master of Foxhounds Association; Lord Henry Bellingham, a life peer who was formerly the MP for NW Norfolk; Lord Howard of Rising; and the Earl of Leicester, Thomas Coke of Holkham.
It has to be said that the actions of this group of peers have earned derision of all sides, and their own party is as exercised over their actions as anybody else. So let us look at a couple of them.
Henry Bellingham was always referred to as ‘Little Henry Bellingham’ by the hacks when an MP, since he didn’t appear to be master of his own house. Those hacks telephoning him in the hope of a quote first had to negotiate a way past his mother, who usually made it her business to answer the phone. If she felt her boy had done enough for the day or the call might interrupt his tea, then she forbade it. And her word was final, for both the hack and her son.
Lord Coke on the other hand owns the vast Holkham estates on the north Norfolk coast, from which his family derive a very profitable income. Thousands of visitors come to enjoy the beaches, buy drinks in his very expensive pub, the Victoria, or arrange their weddings there. These visitors are entirely ignorant of their host’s bloodthirsty predilections, of course. One can only imagine how a wider knowledge of his support for fox hunting and big game hunting would affect the number of his visitors, and so his income. Visitors’ cars are parked in serried ranks in their hundreds on a summer’s afternoon. If by chance anybody were to make it their business to ensure in some way that all those families were aware of where their money was going, the estate’s popularity (and so its income) might drop alarmingly.
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