The newspapers are keeping up the onslaught this morning and even the BBC are leading with the story of how Johnson arranged the payment for redecorating the flat above No 11 Downing Street. He is this morning, we are told, to chair a cabinet meeting where he will apparently tell ministers to concentrate on 'the people's priorities.' This sounds like the last line of defence to me and won't survive until noon. Finally, the prime minister is being held to account for being the venal, dishonest charlatan that he is. The lifelong addiction to rule breaking may be meeting justice for the very first time.
The Daily Mail has him on the front page again and The Times carries a story of aides claiming he told them last year that he would "rather let coronavirus 'rip' than impose a second lockdown."
Tuesday’s TIMES: “Johnson ‘said he would let Covid rip’ in lockdown row” #TomorrowsPapersToday pic.twitter.com/6w0mL2mlHY
— Allie Hodgkins-Brown (@AllieHBNews) April 26, 2021
This just confirms the reports of his total lack of empathy for ordinary mortals, thousands of whom could have perished in the way we are seeing in India right now, a health service completely overwhelmed and people left to die in the most terrible way. No wonder he doesn't want an inquiry.
The cabinet secretary and head of the civil service, Simon Case, gave evidence to the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee yesterday afternoon about how the government managed the ministerial code. I watched quite a bit of it. If you are the sort of person who suffers from hyper tension watching paint dry, Case is your man. Dull, dull, dull,
It was like sitting in an anechoic chamber staring into nothingness - forever. Talk about see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil, he appeared to know very little about what was going on but had no difficulty expounding on his lack of knowledge at interminable length. Several members of the committee got quite shirty with him.
This was a tweet by Alex Wickham, the editor of Politico:
This ridiculous Simon Case stonewalling act going down very badly with Tory MPs as well...
— Alex Wickham (@alexwickham) April 26, 2021
One asks: “Who is this bloke and what has he been doing for the last six months? Judging by how little he knows about anything he can’t have been working as cabinet secretary”
He knew very little and in cases where he might know something he was 'constrained' in what he could tell the committee. This is the head of the civil service.
Did the PM pay for refurbishing No 11? He couldn't say but Johnson had asked him to carry out a review of Johnson's own actions, presumably because Johnson didn't know himself what he had done. This is the prime minister of a sizable western nation.
We learned that Chequers and Dorney Wood renovations' are paid for by a charitable trust and that last year (last year!) they had looked at setting up something similar for Downing Street. But, this isn't in force and can’t cover private areas of Downing Street anyway!
David Jones, the Brexiteer MP from North Wales pressed Case hard on whether or not he knew if any private donations had been used to pay for the refurbishing of Downing Street and he skirted around it, as he did everything else.
The question of the 'chatty rat' leak inquiry from last November came up. Committee members were incredulous that after five months Case could neither name the culprit or exonerate anyone. No wonder things take years to happen in Whitehall.
The whole session was an exercise in futility and a complete waste of time. He either didn't know, couldn't tell or would comeback to the committee later. There were no dates forthcoming and no idea if any of the multiple investigations would even yield results. Case did admit that 'chatty rat' would probably never be found - this was despite Johnson personally phoning newspaper editors last week to tell them it was Cummings.
What I learned was that Simon Case looked like a man completely out of his depth. Many mandarins have appeared before select committees in the past without revealing the inner secrets of their departments but at least they looked like they knew the secrets in the first place. Case didn't, and he didn't look like he even wanted to know. I assume that was why he was appointed.
