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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Peter Oborne
Read between
May 1 - May 2, 2021
A more recent case concerns Estelle Morris, who resigned as education secretary in October 2002. Morris had promised to step down if targets for exam results were not met.VII When they were not, she resigned,
Ministers took credit they did not always deserve for work by civil servants, so they should take the blame as well.
Her conduct bears comparison with Boris Johnson’s education secretary, Gavin Williamson, who resisted pressure to go in the summer of 2020 when exam results were arbitrarily marked down in a fiasco
Williamson tried to lay off the responsibility on the exam regulator, Ofqual,
the permanent secretary at the Department for Education was being lined up to take the blame.
From the moment that Boris Johnson became prime minister, Sedwill was doomed.
The Cabinet secretary is – or at any rate was, until the arrival of the Johnson government – a momentous figure in British public life. The post embodies the qualities of discretion, intellectual scruple, honesty and impartiality which lie at the heart of the idea of British statecraft. Johnson and the coterie of advisers he brought with him into Downing Street either despised these qualities or simply did not understand them.
There have been only thirteen Cabinet secretaries since the post was invented in 1916. That in itself signals their importance within the British state.
In the elegant words of the late Guardian columnist Hugo Young, the civil service believes ‘that it represents and personifies the seamless integrity of past, present and future government rolled indistinguishably into one’.
The task of an official is, nevertheless, to carry out the lawful orders of elected politicians.
This is why impartiality matters.
This is important in Britain because (unlike in the United States) the machinery of state is supposed to be neutral.
For a civil servant such as Sedwill, facts should carry no partisan or party-political colour. They can be independently established, verified and assessed. For the Johnson government by contrast, truth has become a weapon.
Johnson did not sack the Cabinet secretary. That is impossible under civil service rules,
But the Cabinet secretary was pushed out after a media briefing campaign.
This is because it needs strong institutions including Parliament,
After the departure of Sedwill there was no longer any doubt that the Johnson government was set on the destruction of these institutions.
An early victim was Sir Philip Rutnam at the Home Office, after clashes with the hom...
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With Rutnam gone, attention turned to Sir Simon McDonald, permanent secretary at the Foreign Office, who announced his departure, reportedly ‘at the request’ of Boris Johnson, in June.XV
By September 2020, no less than six permanent secretaries – Whitehall’s most senior civil servants – were either gone or on their way out.XVI
Previous prime ministers had taken against senior civil servants, but never in such speed or on such a scale, nor accompanied by such merciless briefing.XVIII
By midsummer 2020, it was obvious that Boris Johnson and his clique were determined to dismantle the system of administrative integrity famously instigated by Stafford Northcote (later to be chancellor of the Exchequer) and C. E. Trevelyan (then permanent secretary to the Treasury) in the mid-nineteenth century.
Major (a moral giant compared to the current prime minister) adopted the only possible course of action. He commissioned a law lord, Michael Nolan, to launch an investigation. The resulting report was a model of clarity.XXXV
Lord Nolan unveiled seven principles which, so he said, should govern public life.
They are a magnificent statement of how a country (or any organisation) should be governed,
Nolan demanded selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership:
essence he reaffirmed Northcote–Trevelyan.
The Nolan principles are almost scriptural in their simplicity. It’s heart-breaking to read them today. Not one of them is being observed, and there is no serious attempt to enforce them.
Ministers can lie to Parliament but escape rebuke. They can bully and harass staff and get away with it. They can undermine civil servants and not pay the price. They can award contracts to cronies and nobody minds.
British newspapers have played a critical role in the production, authentication, dissemination and, most important of all, the normalisation of the lies, fabrications and smears issued by the Johnson political machine.
Fleet Street decided that Johnson’s lying was of little interest to readers.
The truth was that press barons were determined to install the troika of Johnson, Gove and Cummings in Downing Street.II
Michael Gove was the special protégé of the American tycoon Rupert Murdoch, owner of The Sun, The Times and Fox News, the most formidable media backer of Donald Trump.
Gove came eloquently to the defence of press freedom at the Leveson inquiry.
Murdoch did not forget: Gove and his wife Sarah Vine were invited to his wedding to the former model Jerry Hall.
Britain’s major newspaper groups made the careful and deliberate choice not to be vigilant when it came to Johnson. This was a double standard.VIII Had Corbyn been sacked twice for lying, newspaper readers would never have heard the end of it.
The mainstream British press bears a heavy culpability for the inexorable rise of Boris Johnson.
By mid-August, within a few weeks of Johnson taking office, Downing Street was mounting a virulent smear operation against Philip Hammond, who had stepped down as chancellor of the Exchequer when Johnson became leader, and was now seen as an enemy.
At the heart of the attack on Hammond was a lie, devised to discredit an opponent.
This strategy also needed senior journalists to play along by putting their own reputations (and those of the newspapers and media organisations they worked for) behind Downing Street’s falsehoods and smears.
The Hammond story began on 18 August 2019 after the Sunday Times leaked a Treasury dossier (‘Yellowhammer’) warning of the painful short-term disruption that would confront Britain in the event of a no-deal Brexit.IX
The government hit back, saying Yellowhammer was an ‘old document’.X This claim, it soon emerged, was false.
But this Downing Street ‘source’ added a second lie. This was the vicious twist that the dossier had been ‘deliberately leaked by a former minister to influence discussions with EU leaders’.
But no former minister could have been the leaker. The leaked document didn’t even exist until Johnson had taken over.XVII
The sorry story of the smear was therefore an example of how Boris Johnson’s media operation operates through deceit, and how it relies on a compliant media to cooperate with that deceit – even when it knows the allegations are false.
The anonymous Downing Street source who briefed the press about Yellowhammer was lying.
Johnson stays for the most part above the fray, allowing members of his team to lie and cheat on his behalf, enabling him to maintain a cheery public demeanour.XXI
In Johnson’s Downing Street there were two kinds of truth.
But when Boris Johnson became prime minister he brought with him a group of political advisers into Downing Street led by his ‘senior adviser’, Dominic Cummings.
For Cummings’s team, there is no such thing as objective facts. For them truth is whatever a ‘Downing Street source’ tells a political journalist.
