It’s an ill wind … Sajid Javid inherited his Bromsgrove constituency after Julie Kirkbride stood down over criticism about her parliamentary expenses – and gained his job as culture secretary after Maria Miller was sacked for the very same reason.
Even a former banker like Javid is not entirely immune from the occasional downside though, and on Tuesday he had to face his department’s annual going over in front of the culture select committee knowing he would be obliged to take the hit for policies he hadn’t implemented and defend others he hadn’t even heard of.
Javid started confidently, easily rebutting Ben Bradshaw’s claim that the Institute of Fiscal Studies had calculated that, according to the chancellor’s autumn statement, his department would take a 30-40% hit in the next parliament.
“I don’t recognise those figures,” he said. How come? Because the autumn statement was based on coalition figures and he could assure the committee that the Tory figures were very different, that his department would have a lot more money than anyone thought.
The chancellor, who was, at that very moment, in the next door committee room facing questions about the Scottish tax system, might have been alarmed to hear his budget had now officially been consigned to landfill by one of his own ministers but the culture committee weren’t too perturbed. A week is a long time in politics and even autumn statements are now so very last year.
Javid has often given the impression he believes there’s a very good reason that sport comes last in his job description. It was sod’s law, then, that this was the subject that most of the committee members wanted to talk about. The Tory MP Tracey Crouch went first, asking him about the Olympic legacy and why participation in sport had risen so pitifully since. The culture secretary hastily referred to his briefing notes searching for a better answer than “the Olympics were nothing to do with me and I’m really not that bothered”, which was the only one that readily came to mind.
“The Olympics have been good for tourism,” he said on reaching the right page of his notes. Sensing he ought to mention the word sport at some point, he added as an afterthought that disabled sports were on the up.
Crouch corrected him. “They are actually in decline,” she said, turning his notes the right way up.
It didn’t help much as the next question was about football, with Labour’s Jim Sheridan asking about the Scottish FA. The culture secretary took a moment to realise he wasn’t being sworn at before saying he had only bothered to talk to the English FA. Sheridan looked aghast.
Things didn’t improve when Javid found himself winging an answer about standing at Premier league games. “I have seen evidence,” he said. The Lib Dems’ John Leech said his own evidence suggested the exact opposite.
The minister got some breathing space when bookies’ friend and Tory MP Philip Davies, who has received more than £10,000 from firms linked to the betting industry, tried to prove that fixed-odds betting terminals were actually a benign force of social equality.
But things got tricky again when the Tories’ Conor Burns asked why a DCMS official had approved an onshore windfarm for Dorset’s Jurassic coast, a Unesco world heritage site. “I wouldn’t know,” Javid said. “I wasn’t at the department then.” It was a different era. One when dinosaurs roamed through Whitehall. The residents of Broadchurch won’t be happy. There again, they never are.
