It probably seemed like a good idea at the time. A slam dunk of an urgent question on the enforcement of the ministerial code and publication of the register of ministers’ interests for Angela Rayner’s first outing at the despatch box since being given three promotions just hours after being sacked for her part in Labour’s poor results in the local elections? What better way to make a name for herself in her new jobs than by getting the opposition benches fully behind her with a nice bit of Tory sleaze?
Only it didn’t quite work out as planned. Not only were there just a handful of Labour MPs in the chamber, the Tory backbenchers had turned up – socially distanced – mob-handed to see off any potential threats to their party’s reputation. It turned out that the best way to unite the Conservatives was to accuse them of being on the take.
Rayner had started decently enough with a few well-timed jabs at the prime minister. Last year, Boris Johnson had declared a £15K holiday to Mustique; now we learned from a newspaper investigation that the real cost was double that and had been paid for by someone completely different to the person who had originally been named as the donor. Then there was the blocking of the independent commissioner’s report and the delay in the register of ministers’ interests. And how could the independent adviser be truly independent if the prime minister could prevent him from investigating?
That was merely for openers, though. Then the shadow chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster took aim at both Priti Patel and Matt Hancock for pushing forward mates for PPE contracts and Lord Lister, Johnson’s top adviser, who was taking money from a property developer for whom he approved a record-breaking taxpayer-backed loan. “When ministers and advisers use the public purse as a personal cashpoint,” she concluded, “the public has a right to know.”
Michael Gove declined to answer the urgent question in person. Mikey is a strange mixture of over-confidence and cowardice, so it was hard to tell if the reason he was avoiding Rayner – who can be a tricky opponent in the chamber – was because he couldn’t be bothered or was just too timid. So it was left to his deputy, Penny Mordaunt, to deal with the allegations.
Something she did all too easily, mainly by ignoring them. There were plenty of ongoing inquiries, she said, so it would be wrong to prejudge their findings that Boris Johnson might be the sort of person who was inclined to take as many freebies as possible. How very inconvenient. In any case, she added, all that Rayner had to offer was smear and innuendo. The charge she was making was that ministers had come into politics purely to see what they could get on the take, when the reality was that they had worked their socks off over the past year to protect the country from the pandemic. Given the UK is near the top of the global death lists, God knows how many more people would have died if ministers hadn’t been working so hard.
The few opposition MPs in the chamber looked understandably confused. The accusation that had been made had not been that the government had not been working hard – however ineffectually at times. Rather, that ministers had failed to do due diligence and been too quick to recommend mates and Tory donors with no track record in delivering PPE. You can still be any combination of careless, stupid and greedy and believe you are acting in the public good.
Thereafter the urgent question rather died on its feet. A few Tories did say it would be a nice idea if Christopher Geidt, the newly appointed independent adviser, could publish the list of ministerial interests by the end of the month, but most merely expressed outrage that anyone could imagine Johnson and others might have had some conflicts of interest. Opposition MPs were just swatted away with the same arguments as Rayner had been.
Come the end, Rayner was only too happy to get away. This hadn’t been the glorious debut she had hoped. She had had no smoking gun. There might well be a time after the inquiries had reported when sleaze would cut through to the electorate again. But now was not that time. Right now the public were more interested in the India variant, vaccines, foreign holidays and Brexit. Still, you win some, you lose some. And next time she would be a little more selective over the battles she chose to fight.
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