Wednesday 29 November 2023

'Twas Brillig and the Slimy Gove

I’ve been watching the Covid inquiry livestream whenever I can, as I expect you have, along with plenty of others. I didn’t bother with Gove’s evidence yesterday but it wasn’t difficult to catch all the key exchanges since there were dozens of clips posted on Twitter all afternoon and evening. It’s hard (for me anyway) to listen to him and not wish I was in the room with a baseball bat in hand. He always sounds so smugly confident and pleased with himself doesn't he?  He could confess to being a serial killer and make it all sound perfectly reasonable and even lawful. I assume this is what they teach at the Oxford Union.

All the other witnesses that I've seen have thrown themselves into the spirit of the inquiry. That is to find out the unvarnished truth of what happened in government during the pandemic so that proper conclusions are reached and recommendations made about the way any similar crisis in the future might be handled. They answered questions with commendable honesty and seemed genuinely to want the truth to emerge.

There was a sense of duty behind their witness statements and the evidence they gave, particularly the civil servants.

Gove however was the exception, he answered all the questions as if he was on a political show or at the despatch box in The Commons. That’s to say he didn’t really answer any questions and went into long explanations about or restatements of the issue before answering a subtly different question altogether. He was defensive throughout.

Where he did acknowledge failures, they were brief and collective failures of government and didn’t really involve him, who, Cummings-like, was always trying to get Johnson to do the right thing. This answer looked particularly rehearsed:

He was irritating most of the time and occasionally had both the barrister Hugo Keith KC and Baroness Hallett trying to get him back on the subject. Keith I think was close to losing his temper several times:

Watch the body language, the vigorous nodding of the head to emphasise certain words, the exaggerated hand gestures, the constant political point scoring, and the verbal jousting with Keith. The need to always have the last word in any exchange. He was described on Twitter using words like slimy and oleaginous and you can see why.

In typical Gove fashion, after he spent most of the time effectively heaping blame on the then-prime minister (look at the failures and guess who was at fault), he goes on to defend Johnson and says all the delays were because all the serious lockdown decisions went against Johnson's libertarian instincts. In other words, they weren't mistakes he (BoJo) could be ever held responsible for because they weren't deliberate:

I read accounts of those who have worked with him and maintain he’s very intelligent. In truth, he's too clever by half. You could never trust him, could you? In fact, even when he pledges his undying support in his usual flowery language, you would never be sure he isn't working against you.

Fiddling the figures

I see someone else has had a go at convincing us all that Brexit is going really well. Derrick Berthelsen has a piece in The Critic magazine in which he claims that: UK manufacturing is significantly outperforming as a result of Brexit, The doomsters are wrong about Brexit — again.

It’s fascinating to see Brexiteers arguing that erecting trade barriers with your largest overseas market and cutting yourself off from highly integrated European supply chains is somehow an advantage. Berthelsen says, “On the question of whether Brexit would be positive or negative for UK manufacturing and industrial production, though, the data seems unequivocal. The doomsayers are simply wrong. Overall Brexit has (so far) significantly boosted the sector.” (my emphasis)

There you have it, it’s not even as Catherine McBride at the IEA suggested last week, that Brexit hasn’t damaged UK-EU trade but it has actually boosted Britain’s manufacturing sector! Amazing. Well, amazing that anybody could not only think that’s possible but to go to the trouble of 'proving' it with figures and graphs.

McBride re-tweeted the article approvingly:

Of course, it didn't take very long for Twitter to do its thing and several people replied to point out he had misinterpreted OECD figures. An exchange with Nathan Dennis shows that manufacturing in GB has fallen by 9.998% between Q4 2020 and Q3 2022.

Using the same OECD table you can see manufacturing output in GB between Q4 2019 just before the pandemic and Q3 this year was basically static (107.171 to 107.346). Berthelsen didn't reply.

Some 'boost' eh?

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