Reflections on politics of the week

Quick comments on a few political stories which had caused ripples and may have longer term implications: worth monitoring at this stage

These hit-and-run analyses have been quite useful for me, and I hope of some interest to readers, so I will keep them going for those issues which might otherwise slip past without (my) scrutiny. It has been a busy week, from the aftermath of Sue Gray’s departure as Downing Street chief of staff, through the anniversary of the Hamas atrocities of 7 October, Boris Johnson’s promotion of his memoirs, Unleashed, the departure of James Cleverly from the Conservative leadership race and the controversy over Louise Haigh’s criticism of P&O, to the unexpected death of SNP legend and former first minister of Scotland Alex Salmond on Saturday.

And then there were two…

Conservative Members of Parliament voted twice this week as the selection of a new party leader grinds onwards. On Tuesday, they narrowed the field of four candidates to three: there was little surprise that shadow security minister Tom Tugendhat was eliminated, trailing badly with only 20 votes, but enormous surprise greeted the great leap taken by shadow home secretary James Cleverly into a clear lead, winning 39 votes, with Robert Jenrick on 31 and Kemi Badenoch on 30.

On Wednesday, however, there was another shock. Just as Westminster was recalibrating and expecting Jenrick and Badenoch to battle closely to join Cleverly in the final round—when the party membership at large will choose the winner—it was Cleverly who was eliminated, falling back to 37 votes, while Badenoch took the lead with 42 and Jenrick came close behind with 41. This means the party has a choice between two candidates both of whom are perceived as being on the right of the party, with the centrist, so-called One Nation element unrepresented.

I would make a number of observations here. The first is that I would counsel against easy classifications of centrist, right-wing and so on. I wrote in The Critic over the summer that the traditional left vs right paradigm simply doesn’t fit contemporary politics, either domestically or internationally, and in the United Kingdom, at least, that was exposed no later than the referendum on our membership of the European Union in 2016: many areas traditionally thought of as left-leaning Labour strongholds voted to leave the EU at least in part because of a desire to restore national sovereignty and restrict immigration, generally seen as right-wing preoccupations. I also don’t think the hallowed notion of a moderate, centrist “One Nation” Conservative Party really works any more and argued early last year that it is a theory which is full of holes.

It should also be observed that, while both Tuesday’s and Wednesday’s votes produced surprising results, we are dealing with numbers so small—there are only 121 Conservative MPs, remember—that a very slight tremor, the change of mind by a tiny handful of Members of Parliament, can have a dramatic and outsized effect. Cleverly only lost two votes between Tuesday and Wednesday, and even Badenoch gained a mere 12, but these are magnified into seismic shifts by the small size of the electorate. Of course, they still have their effect: however you calculate it, by whatever margin, Cleverly is out of the running and it is a head-to-head contest between Badenoch and Jenrick. But we should not necessarily read too much into these fluctuations beyond their immediate numerical and procedural consequences.

I’m still not sure what to make of the contest, which finally draws to a close when the winner is announced on Saturday 2 November. Obviously I had hoped that Penny Mordaunt would have been a candidate: I think she would have had a good chance of winning and, contingent on that, I’m sure she would have been an excellent party leader (and who knows what the future holds?). It is a masterpiece of understatement to say that I’m extremely disappointed she isn’t able to be a factor in this election, but the electors of Portsmouth North did not support her in sufficient numbers at the general election, and, as she said herself on election night, democracy is never wrong.

I am disappointed too that Cleverly is no longer in the running. I’ve always instinctively warmed to James Cleverly, who has an easy and engaging public manner, performed creditably as foreign secretary, and gave a very fine performance at the Conservative Party conference earlier this month, easily the strongest of the leadership contenders, in my view. Most importantly, because I think it’s an essential part of making a success of the leadership over the coming years and re-establishing a positive relationship with the electorate, Cleverly simply seems normal and unforced. I thought his light-hearted video commentary on the Netflix series The Diplomat last November was very strong, going beyond traditional politics in a warm and open way, retaining a degree of seriousness and purpose but acknowledging that for many people public affairs are not so very different from a television drama.

The best way I can express it is that, unlike many of his colleagues and opponents, he comes across as a human who happens to do politics rather than a member of some other species, and that would have been a potent weapon in a party leader. So too does Penny, and, I’d say, Angela Rayner and John Healey; Sir Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves absolutely do not. Rishi Sunak and Theresa May did not, David Cameron on balance did, while Boris Johnson is sui generis, a strange, non-conforming, maverick, pseudo-authentic, wholly confected character who succeeded for a while just because he was like no-one else.

Anyway, it is now for Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick to battle it out for the final fortnight. In August, when the field was more crowded, Badenoch was substantially ahead of Jenrick in the opinion of party members, but that gap had closed considerably by the beginning of this month. Both have made some missteps in recent days, and it is hard to predict the preference of an electorate of which we don’t know the size or composition: at the time of the last leadership election in September 2022, the total membership was just under 172,500, but it is hard to imagine that has stayed static, let alone increased, in the intervening two years. My best guess is that it is now between 150,000 and 160,000. If I had to make a call, at this stage, I’d say Badenoch will win, but I think it will be close, and each candidate had more than enough time to shine or to make some serious blunder.

In office, but not in power?

Louise Haigh, secretary of state for transport, has somewhat slipped under the radar in a political culture obsessed by youth, but she was only 36 when she became a cabinet minister in July (her birthday was a fortnight later) and was a mere 27 when first elected MP for Sheffield Heeley in 2015. She has spent almost her entire parliamentary career on the front bench, becoming spokesman on the civil service and digital reform when Jeremy Corbyn assumed the leadership and subsequently representing the Labour Party on the digital economy and policing before Sir Keir Starmer appointed her to the shadow cabinet as shadow Northern Ireland Secretary in April 2020. In November 2021, Haigh was reshuffled to be shadow transport secretary and, like almost all of Starmer’s shadow cabinet, carried the portfolio over into government in July this year.

On Wednesday, appearing on television to support the government’s Employment Rights Bill, she attacked P&O Ferries for its sacking of hundreds of workers in 2022 and their replacement by lower-paid agency staff. Calling the company a “rogue operator”, Haigh made her feelings very clear:

I’ve been boycotting P&O Ferries for two-and-a-half years and I would encourage consumers to do the same.

In a press release, she expanded on her theme:

The mass sacking by P&O Ferries was a national scandal which can never be allowed to happen again. These measures will make sure it doesn’t. Make no mistake—this is good for workers and good for business. Cowboy operators like P&O Ferries will no longer be able to act with impunity—undercutting good employers in the process.

It seemed at first that P&O’s parent company, Dubai-based DP World, had taken grave exception to this outspoken attack. It reportedly cancelled plans to spend £1 billion on two new berths at its London Gateway dock facility, which would have given it a greater capacity than Felixstowe and Southampton, and the chairman of chief executive, Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, was said to have decided not to attend the government’s much-vaunted International Investment Summit on Monday. It now seems that Sulayem will attend after all, and the state of play seems to be that no firm decision on the investment in London Gateway has been made. The government may have avoided a embarrassing debacle.

The extraordinary aspect of this story, however, is the prime minister’s handling of it. Interviewed by the BBC’s Newscast, and pressed on whether he supported Haigh’s call for a boycott of P&O Ferries, he responded, “Well, look, that’s not the view of the government”. Even if the immediate crisis with DP World has been resolved, that is an astonishing thing for a prime minister to say: that the secretary of state for transport does not share the view of “the government” on the conduct of a major transport operator, owned by logistics giant about to invest a 10-figure sum in a British port facility.

The Labour Party will brush this aside as a media confection and point to Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem’s attendance at the investment summit, as well as an announcement on London Gateway if one is made next week, as evidence that the reality is successful attraction of inward investment. In a sense, that is true, in terms of the financial decision by DP World and the attendance at the International Investment Summit. There may in the end be no significant disruption to either.

On the other hand, how can Haigh have any credibility or authority as transport secretary when she was effectively disowned and disregarded on an issue squarely within her brief? Let’s be very clear about this: the prime minister said her words were “not the view of the government”. The next time she makes any significant statement on transport, the opposition will be within their rights to ask whether what she is saying is “the view of the government” or merely a personal opinion with no official weight or status. And that question can legitimately be asked again and again. It is not that she broke or disregarded the principle of collective responsibility, more that she was expelled from its constraints.

Haigh will survive, and Starmer and his ministers will insist that words do not mean what they purport to mean or what they very obviously mean, but that a word means, to echo Humpty-Dumpty, “just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less”. But this is not just about the transport secretary. Every cabinet minister must now wonder, before he or she makes any public statement which might attract the merest hint of controversy, whether Downing Street’s support can be relied upon, or whether the same withering judgement will be issued in mitigation: they do not represent the view of the government.

If the transport secretary’s opinion on transport is not the view of the government, what is the point of her?

Desperate search for investment minister ends just in time

Another story connected to Monday’s investment summit is the last-gasp appointment on Thursday evening of a minister for investment. The post was created in March 2020 as a position shared between the Department for International Trade and the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, and Sir Gerry Grimstone, former chairman of Barclays Bank and Standard Life, was appointed. He was given a life peerage and became Lord Grimstone of Boscobel. As investment minister, he also had responsibility for the Office for Investment, which uses “the convening authority of the Prime Minister’s office in Number 10 Downing Street to work across government to break down barriers to landing top-tier investments”.

Grimstone was succeeded by Lord Johnson of Lainston, co-founder and CEO of Somerset Capital Management which he established with Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg. He was appointed by Liz Truss to work between the Cabinet Office and the Department for International Trade, dismissed in late October 2022 by Rishi Sunak and then reappointed a month later.

The role of the minister for investment is to devise an overall strategy for inward investment, to manage relations with investors and to promote the United Kingdom as a destination for investment, as a kind of sectoral ambassador. It is significant that both Grimstone and Johnson came from the financial services sector and had considerable reputations in their fields. However, when Sir Keir Starmer became prime minister in July 2024, he did not immediately appoint a successor to Johnson as minister for investment. While several ministerial appointments took far longer than might have been expected—Baroness Smith of Cluny was not named advocate general for Scotland until the end of August, and was only introduced to the House of Lords this week—the search for an investment minister took even longer. At the beginning of September, it was reported that the first choice of the chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, had been Benjamin Wegg-Prosser, the CEO and (with Lord Mandelson) of consultancy form Global Counsel, but that he had eventually turned down the role to remain in the private sector.

This setback was embarrassing given the approach of the investment summit on 14 October, and as the date drew closer, the lack of an appointment grew more glaring. City AM editor-in-chief Christian May was excoriating on the delay:

Why wasn’t this vital role among the first to be decided on, and announced? Unveiling such a figure early in the life of this government would have been a powerful symbol, a signal of intent. It would also have served a vital practical purpose, with the right person for the job helping to deliver a summit of weight and substance.

There was an implausible rumour during the week that the post would be offered to former cabinet secretary Lord O’Donnell. Although the erstwhile head of the civil service has been an active commentator on government policy and process in recent months, for example saying (in my view probably rightly) last weekend that his old job is “massively underpaid”, the idea of his joining the ministerial ranks seemed an unlikely one, not least as he went on to say that “I’ve been paid a lot more since, to do a lot less”.

Finally, on Thursday, with one working day left before Monday’s summit, the government announced that co-founder and former CEO of Cambridge-based cyber security firm Darktrace plc, Poppy Gustafsson, had accepted the role, which is now held jointly between HM Treasury and the Department for Business and Trade. In addition, the Office for Investment will be strengthened “to become a larger and better equipped organisation which will bring together HMT, DBT and No10 into a joint unit to streamline how the government approaches business and investment”. It will have a new board chaired by Gustafsson, with representatives from the Treasury, the Department for Business and Trade and 10 Downing Street, and an external advisory board recruited from the business sector.

My weekly City AM column tomorrow will look in detail at the International Investment Summit at the government’s approach to the subject, about which I have reservations. The appointment of Gustafsson, however, seems to have been well received in some quarters. Her predecessor, Lord Johnson of Lainston, described her as a “good choice. She has a strong brand and has clearly been a huge success in her field”. However, there has been criticism of Darktrace: it was listed on the London Stock Exchange in April 2021 but its value fluctuated significantly, and last year New York hedge fund Quintessential Capital Management published a report alleging accounting errors and potential irregularities in contracts with resellers and customers. Gustafsson issued a long rebuttal of these accusations in February 2023.

It is good that the post of minister for investment, an absolutely crucial if sometimes neglected one, has been filled. An appointment should have been made months before now, and, however much the government wanted Wegg-Prosser to take the job, negotiations with him should not have been allowed to obscure the looming deadline of the investment summit on 14 October: Starmer and Reeves seem to have let the best be the enemy of the good. Naming a minister on Thursday evening before a major international conference on Monday not only gives her virtually no time to prepare in any substantial way, but it gives a strong impression of carelessness, incompetence and a worrying suggestion that the role was not attractive. It is hard not to see it as an unforced error, and it raises the stakes for Monday’s summit, which has to go well.