All of which is fine. There is, however, just one tiny problem. She promoted to Defence Minister a Chief Whip who has been accused by the Daily Telegraph and the I Newspaper of knowing a great deal about the bad behaviour that was going on in the House and keeping quiet.
This is a serious allegation and I wouldn’t for one minute wish to suggest that it is a proven fact. I do however think we are entitled to some answers pretty quickly to some really important questions:
- Did anyone in the whips office know about any allegations of sexual misconduct before they were made public?
- If so why did they choose to keep quiet?
- Was any information held privately in the whips office that might have been of interest to voters in the MP’s constituency?
- If so why were voters kept in the dark?
- Were MPs ever encouraged to vote in a particular direction using privately held information about behaviour voters would not have approved of – either financial or sexual?
- If so what made the whips feel they were the best judges of what the voters needed to know and how best to prevent others from being exposed to the consequences of this bad behaviour?
- Did she ask the former Chief Whip what he knew before she promoted him to Defence Minister?
- Is she now making efforts to find out what he knew or hoping nothing will come out?
- Would she herself ever cover up information about who had knowledge of sexual scandals in order to gain political advantage?
- Would it be appropriate for someone to remain Defence Minister if they were shown to have been allegations that ought to have been properly investigated?
- How can we trust her to clean up Parliament if hard evidence emerges that she appointed someone who kept important information from employees and voters?
The UK government is lurching from crisis to crisis not just because of a small majority but because of poor judgements. May has shown a very dangerous tendency to put her trust in people who let her down. She brought Boris back into the cabinet and he has rewarded her by constantly conspiring to get rid of her accompanied by endless amateur mistakes. The latest one could result in an innocent woman spend years in an Iranian prison because a UK Foreign Minister can’t be bothered to master his brief. She allowed Pritti Patel to keep her job despite telling the Israeli government that the UK should be using its aid budget to help Israel’s ‘Defence’ Ministry to do its humanitarian work. In other words she suggested the people who fired enough rockets on Gaza to utterly flatten the major cities and killed hundreds of civilians in the process should be trusted to administer some of the UK’s aid money. Either Pritti Patel doesn’t know about what the Israeli army has done (and yes I do also condemn attempts to bomb Israel out of existence) or she doesn’t care. Either way as a Cabinet Member she had absolutely no business to arrive in Israel and invent her own bizarre policies, even less business lying about where she went and why, and still less the right to tell her colleagues deliberate untruths about who knew she was going. In any other government a person who displayed quite such a lack of intelligence, judgement and honesty would be instantly dismissed. If for no other reason than utter dis-respect for her own Prime Minister.
In May’s weak and disorganised government Patel got away with a reprimand. In May’s weak and divided government Johnson is allowed to carry on bumbling. We must surely be reaching the end game for this government. Because it looks highly likely that we haven’t reached the end of the scandals.
The only thing we have clearly reached is the end of her competence.