The Huawei 5G row took a very serious turn yesterday after Cabinet Secretary Sir Mark Sedwill (pictured above) wrote to all ministers, special advisers and officials to demand answers on who was responsible for the leak. In what looks like the inverse of Murder on the Orient Express - “none of us did it!” - all those Cabinet ministers who were said to have raised concerns at the Chinese firm’s role (Williamson, Javid, Hunt, Fox, Mordaunt) have now put out categoric denials that they were responsible for the breach of confidence.
We reported last night (the Sun had similar intel too) that Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson had been so irritated by the leak that he initially blamed the Cabinet Office secretariat, the civil servants who provide key support for National Security Council. It is claimed the first Williamson knew of the leak was when he heard it on the Today programme on Wednesday morning and confronted a senior Cabinet Office figure to make plain his views. On reading the Telegraph story, he quickly realised he had made an error in implicating officials.
But Williamson’s suggestion that the Cabinet Office secretariat was in anyway responsible for the leak in turn sparked fury among intelligence officials. On the old ‘cui bono’ principle that follows any leak, many government insiders suspect political sources were behind the leak. One thing is for sure: Sedwill is determined not to let this go unresolved. If anyone is identified, you can expect they will be out of a job pretty swiftly. (There’s a separate question as to why Sedwill still hasn’t appointed someone else to replace him as National Security Adviser, not least as he has very able deputies, but that’s for another day).
On the Today programme, former Cabinet Secretary Gus O’Donnell said it was “a complete outrage” and “beyond the pale” that any NSC deliberations had been leaked. Yet while many believe that the presence of senior intelligence officials at NSC meetings means they should be less leaky than Cabinet meetings, there is some manufactured outrage going on here. I remember when the topics of early NSC meetings were discussed by No.10, and it’s arguable nothing in the Telegraph breached state secrets. Media select committee chairman Damian Collins rightly warns that this row should not be used to crack down on journalists and their sources.
Critics of the decision to allow limited access to Huawei have a problem in that the clear message from our spooks is that any risk posed by the firm can be safely ‘managed’. But people like Tom Tugendhat and Bob Seely are making a wider point about the risk to our diplomatic and intelligence sharing with the US.
And with Philip Hammond in Beijing today trying to help the City of London grab a slice of the financial services element of China’s belt and road initiative, many Tory and Labour MPs worry about his suggestion that this is about value for money as much as security. The SNP made a valid point yesterday that the real issue is why we have allowed a Chinese firm such market dominance that it becomes somehow too expensive to avoid using them. One Tory MP told me the UK’s industrial strategy should now focus on how to help Huawei’s rivals like Nokia. Industrial strategy can be a national security strategy too.
There’s a pretty fierce backlash underway within Labour ranks over the party’s draft Euro elections leaflet, which was helpfully leaked to HuffPost UK last night. The leaflet, which is a FreePost mailshot for every household so matters hugely, makes no mention of the party’s latest policy position of pushing for a second referendum on any Brexit deal. Worse still (in the eyes of several MPs, MEPs and members we’ve talked to), the leaflet declares Labour would press ahead with Brexit, albeit with its own version rather than May’s.
One shadow minister tells me Keir Starmer is ‘absolutely furious’ and the literature’s content “will have to change” before it is sent to the printers for a mass mailshot. Neither Starmer, nor Tom Watson, nor Emily Thornberry were consulted. But the biggest sin for some in the party is that the MEPs were not consulted either about the content - and the leaflet is being sent out in their name.
“If this goes out as it is, it would be a gift to the smaller pro-referendum parties and to Nigel Farage. Labour members won’t campaign on this basis,” one MP told me. The LibDems and ChangeUK and Greens have already pounced on the draft. A Labour source told my colleague Rachel Wearmouth: “This is clearly a monumental and embarrassing fuck-up.” MEP candidates will just ‘go rogue’ and back a second referendum, they say.
Speaking of candidates, our story also reveals just why Andrew Adonis put out that new statement this week renouncing his previous line that Brexit voters should not vote Labour, and that he now backed Labour’s form of Brexit. The former minister was told in no uncertain terms that unless he signed the statement he would be blocked from running for the party’s MEP list in the South West.
One MP says the leaflet’s content, which was drafted by the Leader’s office and sent to party HQ at the last minute, is an attempt to ‘bounce’ the NEC ahead of its crunch meeting on the Euro manifesto setting meeting next Tuesday. Today, Labour’s trade unions gather to decide a joint stance on the manifesto. Robert Peston last night revealed the party’s national policy forum agreed to push for a second referendum. The battle has only just started.
When Commons leader Andrea Leadsom yesterday announced next week’s Commons business, the big omission was any reference to the Withdrawal Agreement Bill (WAB). No.10 informed us hacks that “we don’t usually announced the introduction of bills in the Business Statement” and insiders stressed that it could still be published next week. But back in the real world, I’m told there was a key meeting of No.10 aides on Wednesday night that made plain it would be too risky to bring the controversial legislation before MPs ahead of the local elections on May 2.
The real problem of course is that the bill would be heavily defeated without a substantial chunk of Labour MPs backing its sweeteners on workers’ and other rights. And if the bill is not introduced next week, it really has little chance of being pushed through all its stages in time to prevent the Euro elections on May 23. The FT quotes one ally of the PM saying the “next massive deadline” for her Brexit deal could slip to June 30, just before newly elected British MEPs would take their seats in Strasbourg. That really would be humiliating, given the cost of staging the elections, but if somehow May could get us out of the EU by then, some aides see that as a price worth paying.
1922 Committee chairman Sir Graham Brady has one whizzo way of getting the legislation passed: an amendment that strips out the Northern Irish backstop. “I have urged the Government to build on the success of my amendment by incorporating the necessary reassurance about the backstop on the face of the bill,” he tells the Sun. But No.10 has pretty quickly killed any such suggestion, given it would involve reopening negotiations that Brussels and London both say are closed. Meanwhile, Jeremy Hunt gave the Press Gallery lunch yesterday a clear signal he was ready to run for any vacancy. The Foreign Secretary said we would have to “wait and see”. “It’s not the time to be talking about Prime Minister Hunt”.
As for the PM, she yesterday shrugged off the 1922 Committee’s demand for more ‘clarity’ about her ‘timetable’ for departure. In a news-free interview with an ITV reporter on the local election campaign stump in Lancashire, May said: “Of course I listen to the party. What many in the party say to me, which is what I hear from a lot of people on the doorstep, is they want us to focus on delivering Brexit.” Which brings us back to the Brexit drift. So far, there just doesn’t seem to be any plan at all for getting that elusive Commons majority.
Watch the shocking moment, captured on CCTV, of an explosion at the Tata steel plant in South Wales. Two people were injured.
As Mark Twain famously said ‘denial ain’t just a river in Egypt’. And yesterday we had the curious incident of the Department for International Trade sending out a press release of Liam Fox’s words on climate change denial, words he had just said in the House of Commons. Headlined ‘Fox Urges MPs To See Economic Benefits Of Extinction Rebellion Protestors’ Demands’, it went on to relate this line: “Whether or not individuals accept the current scientific consensus on the causes of climate change, it is sensible for everyone to use finite resources in a responsible way.”
After a backlash from Labour and the Lib Dems over what they saw as succour for climate change deniers, Fox tweeted that he personally ‘fully respects’ the science. The Guardian says his office was unable to say whether ‘respects’ is the same as ‘agrees with’.
There was plenty of reaction yesterday after I revealed that Jeremy Corbyn’s aide Laura Murray had been officially appointed as Head of Complaints for the Labour Party. Murray was appointed quietly last week, having been seconded seven weeks ago to help with ‘admin’ in clearing the backlog of anti-semitism cases. Her appointment has sparked fresh division, with the Jewish Labour Movement saying it was a ‘shoddy quick fix’ and others suggesting it was a ‘factional’ move. But Rhea Wolfson, a Jewish Momentum activist, said the criticism was ‘disappointing rubbish’ not based on Murray’s work record.
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