I’ve been watching quite a bit of the Covid inquiry livestream when I can and it’s been fascinating for various reasons. One is the number of highly paid, senior civil servants who keep telling the inquiry team that they didn’t know about things under their direct control. Martin Reynolds, Johnson’s PPS for example seemed to spend his day cutting and pasting messages from email to WhatsApp and sending them to the PM who would then respond by WhatsApp. It’s the sort of thing a junior official ought to have been doing. Why Johnson couldn't just read the original email I really don't know.
Yesterday we had Sir Simon Stevens (head of the NHS) and Sir Christopher Wormald, permanent secretary at the Department of Health giving evidence. I’m not clear what these men were being paid for. Everything appeared to be the responsibility of someone else or another branch of government. It looks as if junior members of staff were making all the actual decisions across Whitehall and simply feeding stuff back to the top, amazing.
I exclude Helen MacNamara, deputy cabinet secretary, from this because she seemed dedicated and professional and her witness statement was thoughtful, nicely formatted, and well-written. She also took decisions and owned them.
Cummings’ 115-page effort was different. It was notable for being a jumbled, self-justifying rant aimed at all of his many enemies in Whitehall. His statement goes off at tangents and is full of underlines, acronyms, jargon, and weird references. The sheer vitriol almost leaps off the page and smacks you in the face. It was vintage Cummings.
As I mentioned on Wednesday he lays into everybody (with a few exceptions, presumably people who agreed with him) and everything. He thought he was so exceptional that he - a relative novice - could ‘sort out’ problems in The Treasury, Downing Street, the Cabinet Office, the MoD, Health, and just about every other government department. Nothing was beyond his ego.
At the end of his statement in an appendix on page 112, there is even an email where he is reorganising desks and offices in No 10, shifting people here there and everywhere before dashing off on holiday. I wonder if he wasn’t also fixing computers, rodding drains, cleaning windows, and re-plastering walls in between meetings with cabinet ministers and MI5. I can almost smell the sweat from here.
To read the statement one gets the impression everyone in No 10 was sitting around waiting for Cummings to come and bark orders at them. Nobody appears to be doing anything unless he’s told them what they ought to be doing.
Boris Johnson who sat astride all this chaos, doesn't come across as the intellectual colossus his friends led us to believe. In fact, it turns out he's a bit of a twit as I always thought. We learn that he couldn’t follow the basic science of infection rates and had to be repeatedly walked through very simple stuff. At one point he asked government scientists if Covid could be cured by ‘blowing a hairdryer up your nose’ after seeing something on social media. Trump looks like a polymath in comparison.
Ms MacNamara’s statement also said something that resonated with me. In January 2020, at cabinet meetings, there was what she described as a confident, macho atmosphere where "we were going to be world-beating at conquering Covid-19 as well as everything else." There were jokes about how the Italians were "overreacting" to the pandemic and the "breezy confidence" that we would do better at it than others jarred with her.
In my experience that over-confidence usually comes from people who don't understand the issue.
Trade
To illustrate the thinking, I spotted a short piece on a website called Comment Central by David Millar, CEO of Heap & Partners: British manufacturing is surging post-Brexit. I assume he’s a Brexiteer because he writes:
"As manufacturers, we have been told for years that Brexit will destroy our sector. In 2018 a paper by the UK Trade Policy Observatory forecasted that leaving the EU could see manufacturing exports slashed by a third. In the same year, The Observer newspaper claimed one in five British manufacturing companies were expected to lay off workers because of our collective decision to leave the EU. And as I drove to my factory listening to the radio in 2016, ‘expert’ contributors to the Today Programme frequently told me I could be out of business by the end of the year.
"Fortunately for all of us who employ people to make and ship things around the world, the exact opposite has proven to be the case. Manufacturing employment is growing in 75 per cent of English regions and in the whole of Wales. The forecasted drop in exports to the EU just hasn’t happened. In fact, the UK’s overall share of manufacturing exports to the EU increased in 2022 to 52 per cent from 50 per cent in 2019. My own company has been exporting for the last 157 years but has never done very much in Europe. Post-Brexit, thanks to us onshoring production back into our own factory, we are now selling more than ever into the bloc."
I was struck by his words because the ONS yesterday published what looks like the worst trade figures in British history, with the trade deficit in manufactured goods increasing from £163.4 billion (7.2% of GDP) in 2021 to £219.3 billion (8.8% of GDP) in 2022. In 2016 it was £139.3 billion (6.9% of GDP). Brexit doesn't seem to have helped at all.
If British manufacturing really is 'surging' it either has a funny way of doing it or other countries are surging even more.
Anyway, I had a quick look at his company which is an SME with a turnover of just over £9m (2022) and 39 employees. They appear to both make and distribute specialist valves and actuators. It looks like a decent, profitable company.
However, they’ve been going since 1866 and in 2016, seven years ago, they had a turnover of £7.8m and 47 employees, so Heap & Partners itself doesn’t seem to be enjoying much of a surge itself. Turnover is up by by about half the rate of inflation (average since 2016 = 4.3%) and the number of staff is down nearly 20%.
