Parliament isn’t sitting at the moment, but even given those circumstances this has been a quiet week. Normally even when MPs are back in their constituencies, there is bombast from the usual suspects. For some time now, Tory MPs have been professing an unaccustomed commitment to their voters, but until now it has seemed Laodicean.
These days however, many of them have an embattled appearance. There are attempts at humility, which frequently make for an uncomfortable fit. The discomfort comes from knowing they have left it too late, and knowing their voters know it too. So the resultant spectacle is reminiscent of a man trying to keep his dignity whilst tap dancing without his trousers.
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The revelation in last week’s Observer of the “top secret” meeting on Brexit (also reported here at EAB) between the government, Labour and various other big wigs from business, defence, diplomacy and so on, poses any number of questions. It will certainly have discomforted avid Brexit supporters among the Tory ranks, though it will hardly have brought comfort to many Labour supporters either. The party still absolutely eschews any question of considering rejoining the EU, whatever the polls say; and whatever cunning tactical game you think Labour are playing, the fact remains that every statistic and every personal experience shows it to have been the greatest political disaster in our lifetime, and the number of voters who want done with Brexit now outnumber those who support it by two to one. Yet this huge majority is being shunned by both opposition parties.
One has to wonder: if the secret meeting should in some way lead to an amelioration of the government’s position on Brexit, where would that leave Labour? Stuck out by themselves as billy-no-mates, the sole remaining hard Brexit party? In following the government’s narrative on Brexit, Labour continues to play a dangerous game. Woe betide them if they lose it.
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The later revelation that apparently No.10 knew nothing about the secret post-Brexit talks, even though Michael Gove as a member of Rishi Sunak’s own cabinet was involved in organising them, further increases the sense of being down the rabbit hole.
We examined what might have been the purpose of the meeting, with all its secrecy, who might have leaked the story and with what aim in mind. The problem we have is that there are too many facts as we know them to fit into the simple picture we are asked to believe. But still, something is missing.
“I would draw your attention to the curious incident of the dog in the night-time,” said Sherlock Holmes.
“But the dog did nothing in the night-time.”
“That was the curious incident.”
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Earlier this week, EAB also published a story headed: “Tories failing to attract enough candidates for May elections“. It includes an informed and probably prescient observation from a former chair of one of the region’s local Conservative Associations. The “Tory brand” is coming to an end, he says. “Do you want to be involved with the party now, or bide your time and see what emerges in two or three years’ time?”
This question echoes an observation made by Pecksniff last week. If it is confusing to understand what the party stands for now, it will be impossible after a general election drubbing when factions with competing visions attack each other with medieval savagery. For the ingenu tip-toeing into the fray at the moment, it would be bewildering knowing how to explain on the doorstep quite what you stand for.
Besides, when a usually loyal Tory voter in a safe seat tells his MP to his face: “You’re finished!”, as reportedly happened this week, it takes a markedly kamikaze commitment to knock on the door in the first place.
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Which brings us to another triumph for the Pecksniff crystal ball. (Your diarist is a third generation fortune teller and is available for village fêtes at a modest fee.) This one concerns Stephen McPartland, the Conservative MP for Stevenage. The Diary of January 20 commented, after Mr McPartland had expressed unhappiness at one of his government’s decisions: “Here is an MP declaring openly that his government’s actions are shameful. Let’s see what repercussions this has, and keep an eye on Mr McPartland.”
And it is as well we did, dear reader, since this week Mr McPartland expressed his intention to retire at the next general election. Has he fallen out of love with his party? Is he jumping before he was pushed? We cannot know, though the last sentence of his resignation letter suggests a hankering for the kinder politics of John Major: “I will continue to support the party that offered a working class kid from Brixton, the opportunity to become prime minister”.
But Electoral Calculus at the moment gives him only a 9% chance of holding on to his seat, with a swing of about 19% to Labour.
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Kemi Badenoch (Saffron Walden) is often touted as one of the three front runners as next Tory leader. She appears to have most of the requisite credentials, and should any Tory loyalist doubt it then this week she has been keen to impress with one of them. She too is devoted to the creed of cronyism.
She has appointed as an equalities commissioner a woman who was one of the donors to her failed leadership campaign last year. Joanne Cash, a former Tory candidate, was appointed to the Equality and Human Rights Commission last month, with little attention and no mention of conflict of interest. She has, says Ms Badenoch: “A track record of promoting women’s rights and freedom of expression”. She certainly has a record of promoting one woman’s rights, those of Ms Badenoch.
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“I represent a rural constituency known for its pigs, potatoes and parsnips,” declares Thérèse Coffey (Suffolk Coastal) to a US audience as environment secretary. How they’ll laugh about that description of themselves back home in arty Woodbridge and media-savvy Southwold. Or perhaps not. Dr Coffey is often given to the most crass and banal observations. Like her great friend Liz Truss (SW Norfolk) she appears to have no self awareness whatever.
But her lack of delicacy also extends to the use of alliteration. Pecksniff has always felt that its use should be forbidden without a licence, to protect the language from abuse by those who have no respect for it.
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But perhaps there is hope. There was a demonstration in Woodbridge this week against Thérèse Coffey. Admittedly it was by a group of singers, which sounds a little too friendly to be taken seriously, but it is a start. At least there was no poetry, which we must hope bodes well.
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Oh very well. This entry has been pushed down the diary but it has to be addressed. There is a particular distaste connected with reporting on three of our usual suspects. Liz Truss is one and readers may easily guess the other two.
While she was foreign secretary, Ms Truss spent £1443 on one lunch and one dinner; and during 2021 the Foreign Office under her watch spent £344,803 on lunches and dinners, and £11,853 at Fortnum and Mason. Their spending on restaurants, bars, leisure activities and hotels all rose sharply during her time in office.
The Foreign office complain that expenditure via credit cards is necessary when entertaining foreign dignitaries. But by matching the dates of the expenditure with FO diaries, it is quite easy to show that much of the money was spent when there were no such dignitaries present.
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One of many other talents possessed by the pouting, nubile 22 year-old domestic who flits around the Pecksniff study with a feather duster is a shrewd grasp of politics. It was she who brought to the attention of your correspondent the bizarre story about Liz Truss turning up in Tokyo to lecture the world on where it’s going wrong in its attitudes to China. One has to wonder in which circle of hell live those whose inspired idea it was to invite her and pay her fare.
She has spent four months absent from both parliament and her constituency, whilst still drawing salary and expenses and with the additional £120,000 a year or whatever it is, which she receives in thanks from a grateful nation for squandering £38 billion of our money and so trashing the pensions of millions of citizens.
Last week we discussed her utter lack of self-awareness, and we won’t go there again. But the relief within the Pecksniff portals at her defenestration is being replaced by the ghastly realisation that we may never be rid of her. We are all prisoners of her self-delusions and it seems we are to continue paying through the nose for the privilege.
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This week Nicola Sturgeon resigned. Pecksniff can do no better than to quote a tweet on the comparisons between her departure and that of Liz Truss:
“The difference between Sturgeon’s and Truss’s departure speeches really is remarkable,” Peter Geoghegan points out. “In tone, content, gravitas, poise, the absence of Hallmark card bromides, the leader of a nation of 5 million is in a different league to the leader of 60 million.”
Perhaps there lies the difference: smaller countries can act with more humility. But a country doesn’t have to be small to be humble. Others have managed it, but Britain will never achieve it while we see the lyrics of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ as a serious manifesto for the future of the country.
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Next of course it had to be Matt Hancock (West Suffolk). Pecksniff is beginning to lose the will to live. It seems the disreputable Mr Hancock is now in dispute over his declaration of how much he earned from whatever distasteful TV programme he besmirched. The total seems to have been £400,000, but £80,000 went to his agent. (Can you imagine being the agent whose job it is to find money-making opportunities for Matt Hancock? What would one have had to do in a previous life to deserve that role?)
Somewhere in those figures is the £10,000 that eventually he gave to charity, a figure which appears by your diarist’s mathematics to represent 2.5%.
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It seems it’s not only his constituents in South Norfolk who are fed up with Richard ‘Fatty’ Bacon. It appears his Tory colleagues on the council are too.
In a leaflet distributed to promote their candidates in the forthcoming council elections, they show what they think of his efforts as their MP by declaring that: “Conservative-run South Norfolk Council ignores what goes on in Westminster”. Some rebuff, and hardly what he might have hoped for from his colleagues, given that for the first time his parliamentary seat may be under threat. Electoral Calculus currently gives Mr Bacon only a 37% chance of holding on.
But this attempt at “Nuffin to do wiv me, guv” by South Norfolk won’t wash. Throughout the brutal chaos, the incompetence and the corruption of the last few years, South Norfolk Tories have been supine if not actually cheering on the criminals who have destroyed this country. Now they are being found out, they deserve their come-uppance. It’s time for retribution. Vote them out.
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Both in Pecksniff and in other news stories, EAB has often reported on blatantly undemocratic moves by councils – most of them seemingly in Norfolk – to curtail expected transparency and exclude elected members from fulfilling their duties as councillors.
This week we hear of a typical initiative, this time from Broadland Council. It seems Trevor Holden, the managing director – presumably the title is supposed to infer it’s being run as a business – has set up a joint meeting between the chair of the committee which handles efficiency and financial savings and his equivalent at South Norfolk. But nobody else was consulted.
In an open letter to Mr Holden, the leaders of the three opposition groups say: “Elected members have neither been informed nor consulted about this intended procedure and not only have three meetings been arranged without consultation but terms of reference have also been produced – again with no consultation with members.”
They go on to point out that the meetings have no constitutional validity and so they will not feel bound by any recommendations.
EAB will be returning to this shortly. Perhaps just in time for the local elections…
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There may be celebrations in Downham Market at the news that Councillor Doug Lawson may no longer be eligible to stand again for his seat on the town council. A local matter, but illustrative of the kind of disputes over ethics and behaviour which these days characterise our political life. There are accusations of bullying and allegations that he called one woman member of the council a Nazi.
It has been going on for a long time, but Downham Market and Cllr Lawson are hardly the only town council where standards of normal courtesy have been discarded. We reported recently on Hadleigh, but there are others. The next parish and district council elections are due in little more than two month’s time, May 4. But if our councils are disorderly, if public life has become brutalised, then dear reader, it is our fault. We elect these hooligans. One would hope that the distasteful, self-aggrandising and often corrupt behaviour of our elected representatives over the past few years will be enough to get more of us off our bums and voting for people who are likely to be a credit rather than inflict further humiliation.
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The EAB newsroom is usually a place of measured calm and sobriety, except of course during licensing hours. However, this regime was challenged last Sunday, when the entire team (or at least those we could drag out of the Muckrakers) set about putting together our follow-up to the Observer secret Brexit deal story.
Such was the excitement that a problem with the headline was overlooked. It quoted a pro-EU spokesman verbatim, and as it happens unwisely. Fortunately, one of the ever-vigilant EAB team spotted it in time. It read: “EU groups dismiss talks as being “like putting your finger in a Brexit dyke”.
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Thanks this week go to the Tom Hunt Fan Club and to Rosemary Mann and her impeccable antennae
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