Friday 5 November 2021

Paterson and Johnson come up against a Stone

Johnson is well known for U turns but the one yesterday over Owen Paterson looked like a tyre smoking, high speed handbrake turn. On Wednesday evening, Paterson was giving defiant interviews staying he would do exactly the same sort of paid lobbying in future of the kind the parliamentary standards committee had recently found him guilty of. Twenty four hours later he was gone. Earlier on Wednesday, when it came to the House confirming his 30 day suspension, Tory MPs under orders from the chief whip, went through the lobby to support Andrea Leadsom’s amendment giving him an escape route.

A lot of Tory MPs abstained under a 3-line whip, and even the lackeys who voted for it were very unhappy about it.  The amendment would have created a new cross-party select committee, chaired by the Tory MP John Whittingdale, to review the evidence again to find a loophole through which Paterson would be able to escape.

This is the amendment:

"That a Select Committee be appointed to consider and make recommendations by 3 February 2022 on the following matters: [..] (iii) whether the case against Mr Owen Paterson should be reviewed or whether the Third Report of the Committee on Standards (HC 797) should be reconsidered by the House."

Unfortunately for Paterson, the opposition refused to play ball, saying they wouldn't put up any MPs to served on the new 'Save Paterson' committee and by mid-day the cunning plan quickly had to be abandoned, with a vote on the original motion being rescheduled for next week.

I assume at some point later on Thursday afternoon it became clear to Paterson, or at least somebody convinced him, the game was up, and he quit.  He later released a statement which said he had resigned after 'consultation' with his family.

Johnson, Rees-Mogg, Leadsom, Whittingdale and chief whip Mark Spencer are all coming out of this looking spectacularly stupid and inept. The 247 Tory MPs who traipsed through the lobby look like stooges (as they are) including the ever faithful Nigel Adams who would support killing the first born if he thought it would advance his career.

Kathryn Stone, commissioner for standards must be strengthened by it and so must Chris Bryant chair of the standards committee.

Kathryn Stone
I assume it was a bit of roller coaster for Stone. In the morning business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng (has there ever been anybody in parliamentary history more humiliated more frequently in his ministerial career than Kwarteng?) who had said on live TV that Stone didn’t really have a future and should consider her position. Hours later, she looks unassailable and he looks a right twerp. Paterson is no more. 

Stone's Wikipedia entry seems impeccable. She was appointed as the Commissioner for Victims and Survivors for Northern Ireland in 2013, and was also a commissioner for the IPCC (Independent Police Complaints Commission), overseeing investigations for seven police forces in the Midlands and North, including into the Rotherham force’s failure to tackle child sex abuse.

In 2016 she became Legal Ombudsman for England and Wales. and in 2018 awarded an honorary Doctor of Law by the University of Derby in 2018.  She is no slouch.

I note a lot of people on Twitter are suggesting it was originally a plot to discredit Stone who is still investigating Johnson over the wallpaper affair and the illegal funding of the refurbishment of No 10 but if so it has backfired in spectacular fashion. She will no doubt take special pleasure in investigating the details of Johnson’s murky dealings. Let us hope she can make it a double.

But what a debacle it all was, giving an impression of utter chaos inside No 10. I imagine it is constantly like that but we only get a peek when things really go badly wrong. 

One wonders how long it will be before someone comes to the conclusion that Johnson is a disaster for every thing he touches and everyone who knows him. I assume a lot of people at the top, not just Dominic Cummings, know he is totally out of his depth and is actually dangerously incompetent but don't reveal what they know for fear of damaging either the party of the government.

One imagines - or would like to - that when it all starts to go wrong, and Peter Oborne says it may have started yesterday, everybody who knows something damaging will pitch in with scandalous tales about the inner workings of Downing Street.  The illegal funding, the chaotic decision making, the callousness and sleaze, the infidelity and slovenliness. I bet there are more secret diarists in No 10 than we can know.

It is surely a golden opportunity to make a bit of money when he's gone.

The best take on Kwasi Kwarteng by the way must come from John Crace at The Guardian. which I thoroughly recommend. But it is the final paragraph which stuck with me:

"The past 24 hours had been peak Boris. Ur Boris. He had done what he always does. There isn’t a friend, wife, family member or colleague whom Bertie Booster doesn’t betray in the end. Or even in the beginning."

Johnson’s premiership has been characterised by a combination of optimistic boosterism, sloganizing and inept crisis management. The problem is when too many crises occur simultaneously and the next one is coming quickly down the track - the NI protocol row with the EU.  

Everybody expects Frost and Johnson to trigger Article 16 as soon as COP26 is out of the way. Watch out for that.

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