Rewarding a rare achievement

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Very few government ministers ever get sacked; they invariably ‘resign’, and almost never entirely of their own accord. Nods, winks, and outright threats combine to make it entirely clear when a letter of resignation is expected, and it would not be at all surprising to find that letters are sometimes written for doomed ministers and handed to them for them to append their signature. Gavin Williamson’s departure yesterday has been presented to the world as a resignation, but it is clear that the ‘resignation’ was preceded by a decision in Downing Street to withdraw the proposed defence of the Minister, making it clear what action was required of him.

Having been given a knighthood to reward his previous failures, this is a superb opportunity for another award of some sort. A lifetime achievement award is surely in order for a man who has succeeded – uniquely, as far as I’ve been able to ascertain – in getting sacked from three different cabinet jobs by three different Prime Ministers, and all in the space of less than four years. Perhaps Sunak’s successor, due to be appointed within the next few months, will give him an opportunity to add to his score. One might think that no PM could ever be so stupid as to appoint him again, but there were those who thought the same thing after his last two sackings. The previous peak of his career – before being elected to parliament in 2010 – was, apparently, to win Fireplace Salesman of the Year in two consecutive years in 2006 and 2007. A third award would look good on his mantlepiece, positioned nicely between the two of them.

Escalating incompetence doesn't make it go away.

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There is only one thing that surprises me about the suggestion that teachers and parents in England have lost confidence in the Education Secretary, Gavin Williamson, and that is the implicit presumption that they ever had any in the first place. I suffer from the rather old-fashioned prejudice that it’s impossible for anyone to lose anything that they didn’t first possess. What’s much more surprising than the lack of confidence in Williamson is the government’s proposed solution, which is that Boris Johnson should “…take the reins alongside Williamson…”. I cannot conceive of any rational conversation which concluded that the way to deal with the proven incompetence of the Education Secretary is to keep him in post and let another proven incompetent take the decisions for him. Apparently, according to a ‘source’ at Number 10, “There is barely an issue [the PM] has been more personally associated with…”. The implication that he has been less personally involved with other minor issues such as a pandemic and Brexit might tell us rather more than the ‘source’ intended. But anyone who concludes that the answer to a government foul-up is Boris Johnson should surely be wondering whether they’re asking the right question.

The rewards of disloyalty

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I don’t know whether Gavin Williamson actually leaked the story about Huawei to the media or not – he says no, Theresa May says yes.  Selecting which to believe when neither are famous for having more than a passing acquaintance with the truth isn’t the easiest of tasks.  I’d like to believe that the real culprit was the Chancellor, not on the basis of any evidence or facts, but simply because there would be a juicy irony involved.  It can’t have been completely unhelpful for the Chancellor’s trade mission to Beijing for it to emerge the day before that the UK Government was softening its position on using a Chinese supplier – and if he could finger the man who got his last trip to China scuttled by threatening to send an aircraft carrier to the Pacific, then all the better.  Sadly, that would require a degree of cunning and planning of which no current minister seems capable.

I also don’t know whether a crime has been committed or not; leaking information from a confidential meeting doesn’t necessarily mean a breach of the Official Secrets Act has been committed if the information leaked was not, in itself, an official secret.  It is, though, surely unrealistic for anyone to think that even Theresa May is going to be daft enough to allow a police investigation into the matter when such an investigation would inevitably reveal more about the dysfunctional nature of the UK Government.

I don’t think that the process followed has been entirely fair, let alone open and transparent.  On the one hand, the PM said in her letter that she had “compelling evidence” of his guilt, but on the other she said that “No other credible version of events to explain this leak has been identified”.  That’s a standard of ‘proof’ which no court or tribunal would ever be likely to accept.  Unless of course, she put Chris Grayling in charge of Justice, in which case anything would be possible.

What I do know, however, is that there is something very unusual about the idea that a person who has been subject to instant dismissal for gross misconduct should be awarded three months’ salary as a payoff, and that a man sacked for revealing details of one of the most secret of meetings should be allowed to remain a member of the Privy Council where secrets are routinely shared.  In what other walk of life would that happen?

Madness seems to be infectious

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The idea that the government thinks that increasing the country’s ‘lethality’ and willingness to use military force to impose its will on others isn’t exactly something to be welcomed.  And quite what it has to do with Brexit escapes me completely; there is nothing in our treaty commitments to the EU which in any way prevents us sending an aircraft carrier wherever we want (as long as it isn’t to threaten action against other EU member states, of course).  There is a negative Brexit effect in that the inevitable short term hit to Treasury revenues makes it harder to afford post-Brexit, but Theresa can always shake that tree in the garden at Downing Street.

There can be few things that quite underline the delusions of grandeur which have driven the Anglo-British not-nationalist-at-all project called Brexit than the idea that freed of the non-existent EU constraints on the UK we can return to the days of Empire and send our gunboats around the world threatening the unruly natives - like those upstart Chinese for instance.  I mean, who do they think they are with their mere 1.2 billion people to think that they could ever resist the demands of the UK?  And there can be few things which do more to reveal it as the fantasy which it is than the fact that the boat that is being sent isn’t planned to be fully operational until 2021, with only what’s called an “initial operational capacity” due to be available from some time in 2020.  That’ll put the wind up them, no?  When they stop laughing, maybe.  And predicting where the new boat might be needed two years hence is an amazing feat from a government who can’t tell us what’s going to happen next month.

In fairness, though, they really shouldn’t laugh.  Writing in the Guardian, Simon Jenkins says that the defence secretary’s brain has gone absent without leave.  I think he’s being unusually kind; a man who thinks the UK can simply tell Russia to “go away and shut up”, and that a half-operational boat with a few borrowed airplanes can threaten the largest full-time military forces in the world might just be as crazy as his leader, who is busily doing nothing whilst jobs and economic activity leach irreversibly out of the UK in an attempt to convince the world that she really would cause a major recession lasting for several years by leaving the UK without a deal if she can’t get her own way.

The whole concept of “Mutually Assured Destruction” might have had the apparently descriptive acronym MAD, but in reality it was always based on the assumption that those in charge would behave rationally when push came to shove.  What happens when a government really can’t be depended on to do that is an untested proposition to date.  I’m wondering, though, for how long that will remain true.

Mistaken messages

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The UK has a long and far from honourable tradition of ‘gunboat diplomacy’; sending warships to other countries as a visible demonstration of military power and the willingness to use it.  For ‘visible demonstration’ one can also read ‘sending a message’, which was the wording used by UK Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson to describe the despatch of HMS Echo to Ukraine.  The big problem with ‘sending messages’ however is that the message received may not be quite the one intended.  Whilst in theory sending a heavily-armed military vessel to a trouble spot might be intended to tell Putin not to further provoke Ukraine or else the UK might be willing to take action against him, sending a hydrographic survey vessel is more likely to be interpreted as ‘we haven’t actually got a proper military ship available at the moment’.  The effect on Putin is more likely to be laughing his socks off than quaking in his boots.

“…and then he said ‘any more nonsense from you and I’ll order the Royal Navy to undertake a hydrographic survey in the Black Sea’”