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The lame blame game
Months before he became Labour leader, Keir Starmer last year tried to put his finger on Boris Johnson’s biggest political weakness: a lifetime of avoiding responsibility. Whenever things went wrong, somehow Johnson disappeared from the scene and others were left taking the blame. Westminster’s very own Shaggy, ‘it wasn’t me’ seemed to be the Bojo MO.
After he won his landslide election, it appeared that the PM was ready to accept that the buck stopped with him. With an 80-strong majority, the Commons was no longer an obstacle and his cabinet was reshaped to bend to his will. There could be no hiding place, and Johnson readily declared it was his duty to deliver on all his promises.
Coronavirus has of course swamped everything since. But as the political heat has intensified over his handling of the crisis, is the blame game that worked so effectively at the last election (Parliament’s ‘surrender’ Remainiacs, May and Cameron’s austerity) now being rolled out once more? Or will he finally have to own the errors on his watch?
Some ministers (and a fair few scientists) think that Therese Coffey yesterday tried to blame the medical and scientific advisers for supplying the ‘wrong’ advice early in the pandemic. And today, under fire from Starmer over care home deaths, Johnson himself highlighted that it was doctors who decided to discharge people into care homes, not his government.
Yet when the PM said “no one was discharged into a care home this year without the express authorisation of a clinician”, he was in fact not so much blaming medics as simply avoiding the question. He had been asked why there was insufficient testing of those discharged patients, not why doctors assessed them as well enough to go home.
The eventual public inquiry may well discover that those clinicians were under the impression that testing and infection control was indeed in place, when it wasn’t. And as MoD scientific adviser Prof Angela McLean pointed out yesterday, testing was a matter for ministers - and focusing on the NHS was a direct result of “the testing we had at the time” (ie not enough of it).
McLean’s other zinger was of course that easing the lockdown should be “based on observed measured of incidence [of Covid-19], not on a fixed date”. The biggest fixed date right now is June 1, the PM’s deadline for not just more school reopening but also a fully operational test and trace system. That was the big reveal in PMQs, as Johnson once again used the event to unveil a major new policy ambition. With 177,000 daily tests being carried out in the last 24 hours, some in No.10 are certainly more chipper than they have been for days.
After two weeks of being thrown about the ring by Starmer like a dazed WWF fall-guy, Johnson was more robust today. The needle between the pair was evident, not least when the PM mocked the Labour leader’s ”brilliant forensic mind” as he failed to see a question had already been answered. Starmer certainly sounded too wounded (when accused of being negative), and too timid (he was not putting his own view on care homes, simply citing experts in the field) at times.
But he was on stronger ground when he raised the issue of why NHS and care home staff from overseas were being hit by the ‘NHS surcharge’ hike imposed by the government. Johnson looked visibly uncomfortable, admitting he had “thought a great deal about this”, especially as two foreign-born nurses had “frankly saved my life”. Yet his subsequent justification - the NHS ‘needs funding’, the surcharge is raising ‘£900m’, it’s ‘very difficult to find alternative sources’ - was lame on several levels.
First, the cost of scrapping the fee for health and care staff is about a tenth of that figure. Second, the money is a tiny proportion of the overall NHS budget. Third, he has vowed to spend ‘whatever it takes’ (and borrow accordingly) to foot the bill for coronavirus. Fourth, most of the people who pay that surcharge have already paid for the NHS in their taxes - they are being effectively charged twice. The blame game is at its most tawdry when a government says the very people on the front line in this virus fight are the ones who ought to be paying more to use the health service when they need it.
There was at least some sense of shame in penalising some in the care sector when Priti Patel bowed to pressure (thanks to the Times’s excellent journalism) and extended the NHS leave to remain bereavement scheme to include staff such as porters, cleaners and care workers, and not just doctors and nurses.
When the PM returns for PMQs in a fortnight, there will be more Tory MPs around Westminster to cheer him on. No one can ignore that 80-strong majority, which today rammed through a return to a non-hybrid parliament, as well as the hand-picked chairman of the Liaison Committee.
But perhaps the words that linger most today are those of the ever-candid justice secretary Robert Buckland. When he said “I think pointing fingers and blaming people is extremely unproductive”, his target could have been fellow minister Coffey, or even Starmer. But maybe the most unproductive blamer-in-chief will prove to be the PM himself.
Quote Of The Day
“Staying alert, for the vast majority of people, still means staying at home as much as possible.”
Culture secretary Oliver Dowden tweaks the government’s message.
Wednesday Cheat Sheet
The number of UK people hospitalised with Covid-19 fell below 10,000 for the first time since March.
Boris Johnson pledged there “will” be a “world-beating” test, track and trace system in place by June 1, with 25,000 contact tracers ready to trace the contacts of 10,000 new cases per day.
Justice secretary Robert Buckland conceded there may not be a “uniform approach” to reopening England’s schools in the face of opposition from councils and unions.
The government has performed a U-turn on a policy which could have seen the families of some overseas NHS staff killed by Covid-19 deported.
Culture secretary Oliver Dowden said he hoped British tourism could be “up and running” by July.
Rolls-Royce has announced plans to slash at least 9,000 jobs, largely because of the aviation industry downturn.
Jacob Rees-Mogg has faced a backlash from MPs with young children and those with health conditions after he ordered the end of parliament’s remote working.
Michael Gove published plans for how Northern Ireland’s borders and revealed a post-Brexit trade border would indeed appear in the Irish Sea.
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