Nick Boles is normally one of the gentler and more polite ministers. One of those rare Tory politicians who has to ward off his natural liberal instincts. Peel away the Telegraph facade and you’ll almost find the beating heart of a Guardian reader. But even he has his limits and being hung out to dry by another department is way, way past them.
The Treasury had spent most of the morning trying to persuade the speaker that Chuka Umunna’s question about whether allegations about Sports Direct employees’ working conditions and contracts were going to be investigated was not in fact at all urgent and therefore shouldn’t be heard. John Bercow – along with millions of low-paid employees – thought otherwise and it was left to Boles, junior minister in the department for business and skills to try and pick up the pieces.
How urgent did the minister consider the question? “Um, I don’t think it is urgent,” said Boles. “But obviously it is important.” Though not so important, as he wouldn’t have much rather been anywhere other than the Commons to answer it. Realising he had just backed himself into a corner, Boles pleaded the fifth amendment. “It would be a career-limiting move to answer the question in any way other than the Treasury wants,” he admitted forlornly. Having previously suggested Sports Direct employees could always phone the Acas hotline if they were too scared of their boss to complain, Boles might just follow his own advice.
Obviously Sports Direct was a terribly bad business if all these allegations were true and his government was determined to be really, really tough in these cases. It just so happened that the toughest thing for him to do was to do nothing and see if HMRC could try and sort it out. Anyone might have thought Boles didn’t want to be too hard on the much maligned billionaire Mike Ashley.
“But you’ve cut its overall budget by 18%”, Umunna observed. “Yeah but no but yeah but no but the HMRC compliance budget has been doubled,” Boles stalled, quoting from some figures the Treasury had found down the back of a sofa. From £100 to £200. Just to make sure the government is itself paying the minimum wage, presumably. “There have been 705 cases taken out against employers in the last year and the government has clawed back a massive £934,000.” Go Nick! Stick it to the Man!
As there are an estimated 250,000 workers being paid less than the minimum wage, £934,000 didn’t sound particularly massive to anyone else in the house. But Boles was adamant: “It’s massive.” At which point it was gently pointed out to him that if the government couldn’t enforce the minimum wage brought in by Labour in 1998, then how did it plan to enforce the national living wage next April?
This was the tipping point for Boles. He’d tried, god knows he’d tried, to be civil when having nothing to say by way of an answer but this was too much. “The minimum wage was brought in by Tony Blair,” he yelled, the veins in his neck pulsing hard. “YES, TONY BLAIR! AND THERE ARE MORE ADMIRERS ON THIS SIDE OF THE HOUSE THAN ON THE LABOUR BENCHES!” That wasn’t necessarily the brightest of observations, given Blair’s record as a Middle East peacemaker and friend of unsavoury oligarchs the world over.
Sensing Boles had lost it completely, Tory James Cleverly tried to come to his rescue by pointing out that people being paid less than the minimum wage should change job to one where they were paid a bit more. Nothing or everything escapes James. Boles continued to boil.
“Get stuck in,” urged Dennis Skinner.
“I AM GETTING STUCK IN,” shouted Boles. Conviction politics at its best. Just a shame about the absence of convictions for companies not paying the minimum wage.
