A Priti Good Day To Bury Bad News

We must start with the big news and congratulate Carrie Symonds who, it has been announced, is expecting her first child. We should also congratulate the Prime Minister who is expecting his…erm, well, who’s counting? Certainly not Boris anyway. The Sunday Times reported the news by saying that the baby “will be at least Boris Johnson’s sixth child”, the words “at least” doing an awful lot of work in that statement.

Despite the rumours that had been circulating on social media about the pregnancy for some time, what a fortunate coincidence it was that the announcement was made just when the rift between the civil service and the Home Office threatened to dominate the front pages of the Sunday newspapers.

There must have also been some relief in government this week when the courts ruled that plans for a third runway at Heathrow Airport were illegal because they did not adequately take into account the government’s own commitment to the climate crisis, namely being a signatory to the Paris climate agreement. The ruling will have spared the Prime Minister being in an awkward “Schrödinger's Airport” situation: simultaneously both supporting and opposing the third runway. The official government position was to support the runway, while Boris Johnson had previously memorably stated that he “would lie in front of the bulldozers and stop the construction”. Admittedly, he lies everywhere else he goes, so that wouldn’t have been a big surprise.

The government has previously been making a lot of noise about the judiciary overstepping their boundaries and interfering with the sovereignty of parliament, particularly when the supreme court ruled that proroguing parliament was unlawful. This time, they were quick to state that they would not be appealing and that they accepted the judgement. I guess the judges aren’t Enemies of the People for this week at least.

The Heathrow ruling was likewise greeted with enthusiasm by climate campaigners. Greta Thunberg has been in the UK in the last few days, addressing thousands of schoolchildren in Bristol about the crisis. Greta has taken a lot of criticism herself over the last year in the press and social media, with one of the main complaints being that she is “unqualified” to speak about the issue as she is not a climate scientist. I thought that’s what we wanted now, isn’t it? I seem to remember Michael Gove saying that we had had enough of experts. Still, Gove also said Boris Johnson was unfit to be the leader of the Conservatives back in the distant past when Brexit was just a glint in its father’s eye, and look how that’s turned out.

Boris has been mostly self-isolating for the last two weeks as a personal response to the Coronavirus problem, so it was left to Govid-19 to make a statement in the Commons about the Brexit situation. He announced that the chances of no deal being made with the EU were now about 50/50. It was only last year that Boris Johnson said that the chances of leaving with no deal were a million to one. But, as anyone who has read Terry Pratchett knows, million-to-one chances happen nine times out of ten, so it’s nice to know that the odds are now shortening as expected.

Anyway, I thought our deal with the EU was oven-ready. What happened? Did the microwave break down? Can we get a Polish workman to repair it? Oh.

Gove also stated that we needed to immediately recruit 50,000 new border security staff. I assume that’s like the 50,000 new nurses we’ve been promised: the government will “recruit” them by stopping 20,000 of the existing ones from retiring. That’s not too far-fetched, considering that the plan, revealed this week, to deal with the potential Coronavirus pandemic is to recruit a “Dad’s Army” of retired medical professionals.

Priti Patel had similarly already suggested that there were eight million “economically inactive” people who could plug the gaps in the economy that would open up after Brexit. That’s “economically inactive” as in “disabled”, “studying” or “caring for family”. I hope they don’t mind filling in their spare time by manning the borders to prevent people entering the country who could actually do the job. I wonder if Patel would class the PM as economically inactive at the moment. Or maybe he’s simply on a zero hours contract.

Poor Priti really hasn’t had the best time of it this week, what with also having to publicly deny claims that she is a bully. Sadly, when you’re having to deny something like that, it’s already too late: everyone already believes it’s true. You know the sort of thing: “I am not a crook,” or, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”

As the row between Patel and her most senior civil servant, Sir Philip Rutnam, escalated, one source pronounced the top of the Home Office to be “utterly dysfunctional”. Well, that’s certainly one way to describe her. Until Rutnam dramatically resigned, the government had been urging both sides to build bridges. Unfortunately, Boris doesn’t have much a track record with bridges. How’s that garden bridge coming along?

The government had tried to play down the extent of the row, insisting that the Home Office was fully focused on the immigration system and putting more police on the streets. Hmm. So, that’s more police, more border staff, as well as more nurses. Since the plan is to massively restrict immigration, I can see that the only way to deal with this is to increase the population. It’s good that Boris is doing his bit, but I don’t think even he can manage those sort of numbers on his own. Maybe we need a different sort of Dad’s Army.