The Prime Minister is having a difficult winter – environmental emergency, a pandemic, an imminent trade war, the Owen Paterson affair and then social care reform turning the backbenches up to a rolling boil. When Boris Johnson fluffed his lines at the CBI annual conference – quoting Lenin, comparing himself to Moses – his MPs were all but ready to cast him into the river too, with or without the basket. But the occasional Commons rebellion, the anonymous press briefing, these are tactics designed to nudge rather than topple. They talk up a leadership contest, but in a party where no one faction can be sure of victory, it’s safer to stick with the leader who belongs to none.
For the old boys, whether or not they like Johnson – and they don’t – the PM offers at least the prospect of keeping Workington Man onside and his oik MP on the outside: northern votes without northern control of the party. As for those red wallies sitting on their key marginals, they reckon they’ve got their PM’s ear – and his balls. They are sensitive to the party’s public image – as their jobs actually depend on it – but they’re high on self-importance and so couldn’t resist the siren song of scandal: Owen Paterson, Geoffrey Cox, these are their enemy too. By joining in the scandalising, the new Tories undermine the old guard and further their own conquest of the party – or so they hope. Here is Global Britain, all at sea, and those at the helm too busy squabbling and pilfering to see beyond the bow. Like Sinbad the Sailor, every voyage a shipwreck and still managing to get rich.
In October the Committee for Standards in Public Life found Owen Paterson didn’t have any. That needn’t have surprised anyone nor caused much of a stir. The former member for Hole-in-the-Wall faced a thirty-day suspension from parliament in which to reflect upon his conduct. That might’ve been the end of it – only his Prime Minister is heir to the brave and the bold: Hannibal, Caesar, Napoleon, Peter Mandelson. Like the great generals, Boris Johnson knows offence is the surest means of defence.
His government met the committee’s report with a Highland charge: skewer the commissioner, obscure the findings, attack the investigation. It once was a winning manoeuvre for Labour in government, but not for him. He’d neglected one other rule of war: the victorious army has unity in the ranks. Unbound by the omertà that governs social democrats, his men reacted poorly to being whipped into absolving Paterson on a Wednesday only to hang him on the Thursday. The round defence of Priti Patel was one thing – she was a Cabinet minister and supposed vote winner. But for the sake of a sometime backbencher – what was so special about him?
Owen Paterson: born in Shropshire, made in Belfast. Two years as Northern Ireland secretary followed three years shadowing the role. Time well spent. After a difficult spell at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs cost him his job in government – and his ministerial salary – he could rely on old Irish connections to break his fall. Peter Fitzgerald took Paterson on as consultant at his diagnostics outfit Randox – consulting him at £500 an hour. A Downpatrick pork merchant hired him for the same role at the same rate. As parliamentary investigators would later note, Paterson developed an ‘evident passion for food and farming matters.’ A passion most evident in a series of approaches to ministers and the Food Standard Agencies on matters concerning his private employers. He was less dependable when it came to declaring a personal interest as required by the MPs’ Code of Conduct. That personal interest came in at about three times his parliamentary salary. (The basic annual salary for an MP is £81,932 plus expenses.)
Fortuna Randox – making healthy returns
- Since entering government in 2010, the Conservative Party has received tens-of-thousands of pounds from Randox (records show £160,800 donated between April 2010 and September 2018 – a sizeable sum for a British party).
- Over the same period, Randox received hundreds-of-millions of pounds in government contracts (never mind the hundreds-of-thousands in government grants).
- These contracts include roughly half-a-billion pounds for Covid testing services – contracts for which Randox was the only company considered.
With the clarity and brevity for which she is not known, trade secretary Anne-Marie Trevelyan summed up the importance of giving politicians second jobs: ‘It brings a richness to our role as members of parliament.’ A case in point: Sir Geoffrey Cox-up at work. It’s not the first time he’s done that. His face in the papers, his arse in the Caymans. Or the Virgin Islands. Any island really, just not this one. The former attorney general and current MP for Torridge and West Devon is known for mixing work and pleasure, and he says, good for him. Good for government too: the English press gave the Paterson-Randox affair a week before reworking the thrust of the story – less about ministers handing out huge contracts to people whose relevant experience was limited to sniffing out public money and more about the rules governing ex-ministers like Cox with high-paying ‘second’ jobs.
‘I genuinely believe the UK is not remotely a corrupt country,’ says Boris Johnson. Of course he does not believe it, and nor is it true. Every dog and fool knows Britain is corrupt; every government minister knows it; every scandalising hack knows it too. Really the only people who don’t know it are the English liberals. Having convinced themselves alone of British democracy, British corruption is something they alone cannot grasp. They call it ‘sleaze’ instead, cry ‘shame’ and demand the resignation of the sleaziest. The English Tory, on the other hand, knows the precise score: politics is not cricket. Nor is cricket, we hear – but that’s another story.
Patrick Casey
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No 286, December 2021/January 2022
