A tale of two honourable members

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Once upon a time, there were two ambitious Tory MPs, desperately trying to climb the greasy pole towards the top job. One got as far as being health secretary during a pandemic, during the course of which he managed to condemn thousands to an early death by sending them to unprepared and ill-equipped care homes, whilst doling out lucrative PPE contracts to mates and associates with no previous experience in the field. None of that could stop his inexorable rise which was, instead, halted by some CCTV footage of an illicit liaison with one of his staff. The other actually reached the very top job, and was responsible not only for appointing the first to a job for which he was woefully inadequate, but also advocated that even more bodies should be piled high in the streets. He was also partial to the occasional sexual peccadillo, and equally inadequate for the job in which he found himself, but was shameless and brazen enough to laugh, bluster and lie his way through his own failings. The last straw which brought him down was his inability to be honest about what he knew and when about the sexual peccadillos of another person whom he had appointed to a government job.

Whatever, both men, finding themselves prised out of the jobs which gave meaning to their existence, decided to bunk off from their other job – that of being an MP – and its expectation that they might serve their constituents as well as turning up for the occasional parliamentary vote, and seek their fortune elsewhere. The first signed up for reality TV (so called, apparently, because it bears no connection whatever with what 99.99% of the population would recognise as reality), whilst the other took himself off to give a lecture in the US before taking (another) luxury holiday in the Caribbean.

So far, so similar: but then observe the reaction. The first became the subject of much opprobrium from his former colleagues, even losing the whip, whilst over 100 of those same colleagues (allegedly – the counting skills of a man who appears less than entirely certain about the number of his own progeny must necessarily be treated with considerable caution) welcomed the second back with open arms as some sort of prodigal son. Given that the basic offence committed by both is the same (abandoning their constituents during term time to seek rewards elsewhere), the differing responses of their party seem rather strange. It could be, of course, that ‘Matt’* simply went to the wrong school, which failed to inculcate a sufficient sense of brazen indifference and/or allow him to make all the right connections. Alternatively, it could simply be that his colleagues look down on a man who accepted a few thousand for some pretty degrading activities and prefer the chutzpah of ‘Boris’* who apparently charged $150,000 for giving a 30 minute speech, the basic premise of which was that his chaotic period in office made him some sort of expert in global issues. Perhaps it was neither, and was all down to good old Tory values, under which milking one’s position to extract vast sums on false pretences from unsuspecting Americans is simply more acceptable than the public consumption of marsupial genitalia for a comparative pittance. About the only thing of which we can be certain is that neither response had much to do with lokking after the needs and interests of the men’s constituents.

(*Some names have not been changed to protect the guilty)

Getting to the top of the class

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One of the politer descriptions of yesterday’s ‘discussions’ between the UK Government and politicians in Manchester was ‘absolute sh*tshow’, as various details emerged. It seems that the government’s attempts to shift the blame for lockdown restrictions onto local politicians bully local politicians into accepting new restrictions failed mightily when those politicians – including all the city’s Tory MPs – pushed back. It was a strange type of unity with Tories opposing any restrictions on principle (apparently they’d prefer to allow more people to die of Covid than infringe the freedom of others to infect them) and Labour demanding proper financial support for businesses forced to close and their employees, but unity was had nevertheless.

It finally provoked the English Health Secretary into firm decisive action. But not to stop it being a sh*tshow, nor to prevent future sh*tshows from happening. No, instead of either of those things, he announced that he was setting up a leak inquiry, to find out who told the world about this particular sh*tshow. The problem, it seems, is not the government’s numerous and repeated failings, it’s that people are revealing them. We see the same regularly from his leader (a term which can only be applied very loosely to Boris Johnson), when he berates the opposition for drawing attention to the problems instead of wholeheartedly backing the government and taking their share of the blame for government actions. To the world king, the job of the opposition is not to scrutinise, let alone oppose, government actions and policies but to support them enthusiastically and heap world-beating praise upon him.

Meanwhile, the Secretary of State for Wales has thrown his own twopenn’orth into the debate about travel restrictions, claiming that it will cause confusion and division. He seems to be one of those Tories who fully support devolution and the right of the Welsh government to make its own decisions, subject only to the proviso that it makes the same decisions as the English government. I find it hard to see what can possibly be confusing or divisive about a simple requirement that people living in an area of high Covid prevalence subject to restrictions on what they can and can’t do should be temporarily prevented from travelling into an area of low prevalence, potentially carrying the infection with them. It’s what most of us would call ‘common sense’. Then I remembered that we are dealing with a politician who is easily confused. I seem to recall him having some difficulty understanding the difference between Al Qaeda and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. In fairness to Mark Drakeford, drawing up regulations which will not confuse even the wilfully obtuse is an impossible ask.

We do indeed have a world-class government in London at the moment, but it’s in the remedial class. It’s unrealistic to expect any government to be best at everything, so any government has to choose its specialist subject. Incompetence is a very brave choice, but it may not be as daft as it looks. It’s easier to come top if there's less competition.

Redefining the target

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Having spent many years working on IT projects, I’m well aware of the ways in which project managers can claim to have met the objectives by the target date. They include subtle changes to the objective, reducing the scope of the project, or implementing ‘phase 1’ of a project which no-one previously understood was to be delivered in phases. And they get away with things like this because it’s generally also in the interests of the clients who’ve spent £millions to appear to have been successful rather than to admit to failure.

After leaving university, the English Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, briefly worked for his family’s software company, and that may well be where he learned some of these tricks. A target of carrying out 100,000 tests a day has morphed into a target of carrying out 100,000 tests on one particular day, and ‘carrying out’ has been redefined as ‘carrying out or putting in the post’. Hey presto, target achieved! Having counted 40,000 tests which are ‘in the post’ as being completed may leave him with a slight problem or two: he can’t (although he might well try!) count the same tests a second time when (or even if – the return rate is unlikely to be 100%) they are returned, and it is doubtful if they can continue to despatch 40,000 by post every day.

Still, credit where credit is due – the number of tests being conducted has undoubtedly increased significantly, and the figure of 100,000 per day is and always was a wholly arbitrary target, which may or may not be adequate for the task in hand, set as a rough proxy for the underlying objective for the want of anything better. Focussing on the number to such an extent means that they’ve been more concerned with saving the Minister’s skin than with using the tests in the most useful way; as ever, managing by targets invariably encourages focus on the target rather than the objective. The more important question now is not an argument about whether the means by which the number was achieved were fair or foul, let alone about the next numerical target (the PM has previously talked about 250,000 per day), but about how the increased testing capacity can best be used to achieve the objective. I suspect the government will now find itself where innumerable IT project managers have found themselves over the years: concentrating on delivering ‘phase 1’ in a huge last minute panic means that they haven’t had the time to even think about what phase 2 might look like or how it might be delivered. And that leads me to also suspect that they will therefore end up setting another meaningless and arbitrary target anyway, not least as a way of diverting attention from the fact that they really haven’t got much of a clue otherwise.

The lessons of history, according to the Tories

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At first, I thought that the daily cabinet briefings on coronavirus were a good idea, an opportunity to provide information and answer concerns in an open and transparent fashion.  It hasn’t turned out like that, though.  It was clear that the PM was thoroughly bored with the whole thing within a few days – he probably saw catching the virus as a good opportunity to get out of doing something he didn’t really want to do anyway – and even when he did them, it was just another opportunity to lie and obfuscate.  To the extent that they were providing useful information, the fact that the data and some of the policy announcements don’t apply outside England is never made clear, leaving many people thinking that they’re getting ‘UK’ information when they are not.

As time has passed, however, they have come increasingly to look like auditions for the PM’s job (the Cabinet, at least, understand that his days are numbered, even if that hasn’t yet become clear to him, especially since even the Tory press turned on him yesterday for the government’s utter and obvious incompetence in the face of crisis), in which a succession of cabinet ministers show off their rhetorical skills and treat all questions as an opportunity to repeat propaganda rather than provide any information.  And when they come in for criticism for failing to answer, their response is not to provide better answers, but to hire an extra spin doctor to help them get better at avoiding answers.  There is, apparently, nothing wrong with their non-answers, merely the way they present them.

Yesterday, it was Matt Hancock’s turn to show that a spell of illness has not dented his ability to avoid questions, promise things that he has no idea how he will deliver, and add his own little rhetorical flourishes.  He even introduced the novel approach of allowing follow-up questions, giving him a second chance to avoid providing answers, setting a bar which others might well feel a need to emulate.  When his boss returns to the front line, he is not likely to thank young Matt for that particular ‘innovation’.

As part of his rhetorical flight of fancy yesterday, Hancock managed to tell us that “…history has shown that when the world unites together against a common foe then we will prevail”.  I’ve racked my brains to think about a single common foe against which “history has shown” that the world has both united and prevailed – and I’ve failed.  There’s no shortage of common foes which I can identify, mind – there’s poverty, hunger, and climate change for starters.  And what history actually shows in each case, just like in the current coronavirus crisis, is that many individual states prefer to compete with each other than co-operate, to grab more than their fair share of resources, and to resort to divisive rhetoric rather than united action.  In that sense at least, “history shows” that Matt Hancock and the government of which he is a part are responding in the same way governments have always responded.