Sunday 1 March 2020

Patel in the firing line

Barely two months after winning a huge majority the government already appears to be stumbling from one disaster to another. With almost five years to go, what's happening at the moment looks even worse than the dog days of John Major in 1997 and Gordon Brown in 2010. The shock resignation of Sir Phillip Rutnam, senior mandarin at the Home Office yesterday follows the loss of the Chancellor two weeks ago. Bombshells are exploding at the rate of two per month. Can this government survive the full term?  No.

The obnoxious Priti Patel, Brexit Johnson's disastrous choice as Home Secretary has forced Rutnam out. No doubt other mandarins at the Treasury and the Foreign Office are also getting nervous, although I assume they're safe for the moment. There's a limit to how many permanent secretaries a week you can lose.

Rutnam's remarkable and unprecedented statement is here:
The fact that he has refused to sell his silence should worry Patel. He will go to a tribunal and sue for constructive dismissal rather than accept a big pay-off, with the government, perhaps right up to Patel and Johnson, called to give evidence. What a show that would be. She surely cannot survive for very long.

Promoting a Brexiteer to head up a great office of state does not make Brexit easier. It simply shifts the interface between delusion and reality out of the cabinet office and into 2 Marsham Street SW1. It does not solve any of the problems. Making every permanent secretary a Brexiteer isn't about to change the nature of reality. Undeliverable promises are still just that, as the PM is finding out.

Downing Street used what is widely thought to be a distractive ploy by announcing the PM and his girlfriend are expecting a child this summer and are now engaged. It worked very well - for a day - but the Rutnam problem is not so easily solved.

David Gauke, one of the few serious and thoughtful Tory politicians we have at the moment has written a worrying piece for Conservative Home. While he does not believe a no deal outcome is "remotely in the national interest – what with the potential chaos at the ports and the factory closures and general economic malaise and so on", he argues, convincingly that this is in fact the logical thing for the government to do. 

Why?  Because the deal that Brexit Johnson is aiming for is in fact not much better than no deal anyway.

The fundamentalist position Brexit Johnson has adopted (no SM, CU, ECJ, etc) means whatever deal he eventually returns with, with whatever concessions he is forced to make, will be (a) seen as a betrayal by the ERG and many in the electorate and (b) will have his name engraved on it forever. It is in Gauke's words, "likely to have a significant political cost".  It is also going to be very disruptive.

But leaving without a deal - while adding not very much more to the disruption - comes with almost zero political cost IF he can convince a majority that it was the EU's fault for being intransigent and demanding too high a price for a trade deal. All at the expense of their own citizens, with the UK as collateral damage. It might even work.

I think this may well be or become the government's strategy. We will have to work hard to counter the narrative in whatever way we can.

Efforts have been made to create the impression that Johnson is mad enough to leave without a trade deal as Peter Foster suggested a few weeks ago. I am sure the EU are wise to it but it's not easy to see how they counter it.

Anyway, perhaps reinforcing the notion that the government as a whole, not just the PM, are mad the Mail on Sunday carries news of a 'leaked memo' claiming that Farming in this country is not 'critically important' which the Mail, in its usual incendiary fashion translates into a front page headline suggesting Britain doesn't need farmers. This will not play well in the shires.

Farmers are just the latest to be added to the groups that we can do without. They join car workers, civil servants, supply chains, manufacturing et al.  At this rate in a few years we will all have to become either waiters, pickers of wild berries or merchant bankers, with nothing in between.

The Mail on Sunday is also reporting that Heathrow might sue the government for £500 million unless they get last week's decision by the High Court reversed. Brexit Johnson has decided not to appeal - in case he had to lay down in front of the bulldozers - but may well find that will cost the taxpayer half a billion for nothing.

Never a dull or even a cheap moment while the 'manically disorganised' Johnson is in charge. Who would have thought it?
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