Diary of a nobody

Lady Heather Hallett was appointed to head up the goverment's Covid Inquiry in 2021. The Inquiry's terms of reference were agreed in 2022. Both things took place under Boris Johnson's premiership. Now Lady Hallett is engaged in a spat with the Cabinet Office over access to unredacted papers, WhatsApp messages and Johnson's official diary.

The Cabinet Office has responded helpfully: "It’s our position that the Inquiry does not have the power to compel the government to disclose unambiguously irrelevant material, given the precedent that this would set and its potential adverse impact on policy formulation in the future". Lady Hallett has replied that it is not for the government to decide what is relevant to her Inquiry and has threatened legal action in the face of continued Cabinet Office obduracy. Oo-er!

Meanwhile, Boris Johnson (from Las Vegas, where he was being handsomely remunerated as an after-dinner speaker), has reacted angrily to his legal team's disclosure to the police (as they were legally obliged to do) of details they have uncovered in his private papers relating to possible further Covid lockdown breaches. In a fit of pique he has sacked his team - appointed by the government to represent him and already paid a quarter of a million quid of public money to do so - but whoever takes over this thankless task will still be paid out of the public purse. Who said Legal Aid is being cut back?

Insofar as we are still capable of being shocked by anything this egregious narcissist does, it is pretty gob smacking that, after everything that's happened, he still feels entitled to behave in this high-handed manner. But, of course, entitlement is the whole point in his case. The main reason Lady Hallett wants to see the diary is a suspicion (surely well-founded?) that Johnson's eye was off the ball at the beginning of the pandemic and that lockdown breaches occurred not just in Downing Street but at Chequers, the Prime Ministerial country retreat, too. We all now know about Partygate in London but it appears it continued in the depths of rural Buckinghamshire. Fieldgate perhaps?

While some Tory right-wingers like Jacob Rees-Mogg and Nadine Dorries (the usual suspects in other words) are fulminating about Johnson being unfairly hounded and persecuted the majority opinion, amongst Tory MPs at least if not the party membership, seems to be that he is yesterday's man and effectively an irrelevance. Move along, nothing to see here. Well, they would say that, wouldn't they. Lady Hallett obviously begs to differ. 

Rishi Sunak and his front bench ministerial team might have welcomed this brief distraction but the spotlight was only momentarliy off them. For example, will Sunak find the balls to spike Johnson's resignation honours list? They do say revenge is a dish best served cold and scuppering Johnson's alleged plan to award his father a knighthood (having handed his brother, Joe, a peerage in a previous gong-giving exercise) would certainly piss on his chips - a northern expression I'm sure the MP for Richmond, Yorkshire is familiar with. (Then again, perhaps not.)

Suella Braverman must have breathed a sigh of relief to be let off lightly from the Pointsgate fiasco with the mildest of rebukes from the boss but if so her respite was short-lived. Today's embarrassing publication of the latest annual net migration figures (up to 606,000) will have spoiled her weekend. "Too high" says Sunak. Well, if he doesn't like it, he only need have a word in the ear of the woman sitting next to him on the government frontbench (though for how much longer only he knows).

What's that you say about her undeclared links to a Rwandan charity...?

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