Voters, not partisan panels, should decide the fate of politicians, says LEO MCKINSTRY
It is doubtful if any profound lessons will be learnt from the proceedings of the self-important Privileges Committee.
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On her election as a Labour MP in 1982, Harriet Harman could not conceal her loathing for Margaret Thatcher. One night at Westminster, when she had her six-week-old infant son with her, she was alarmed to see the Tory Prime Minister coming down a corridor towards her.
“I had this feeling that I did not want her eyes to fall on my perfect baby. That would be horrific,” she recalled. To avoid such a calamity, she hid in a room near the chamber of the Commons.
For most, such conduct would seem unhinged. To Left-wing activists it was an indicator of her devotion to their cause. Over the next 40 years, she was to reach the top rank of the Labour Party, but she remained a divisive, polarising figure.
Indeed, her long record of partisanship has raised profound concerns about her central role in deciding the fate of Boris Johnson in her position as chair of the Commons Privileges Committee, which is examining allegations of lockdown breaches in Downing Street during his premiership.
For Johnson’s supporters, Harman’s guiding influence is just one element of the bias that has turned the Committee’s operations into a “witch-hunt”. Other injustices, they claim, include the reliance on embittered former aide Dominic Cummings and the part played by senior civil servant Sue Gray, who investigated the so-called “Partygate” scandal shortly before she was appointed Sir Keir Starmer’s Chief of Staff.
But such complaints only add fuel to the flames of the lockdown controversy that has engulfed Parliament. The NHS might be in crisis, the public sector in turmoil and the economy in trouble.
But what has really excited the political class this week is Johnson’s appearance at the Privileges Committee. Far from seeking to move on from the Covid saga, the MPs and the metropolitan media want to wallow in its minutiae again.
The drama enabled them to retreat into their comfort zone of moral posturing, egocentric grandstanding, bureaucratic navel-gazing and political points-scoring in front of the nation’s cameras.
So much of the theatrics on Wednesday seemed pointless, reflecting little more than a determination to rake over the past to exact vengeance.
Terrible mistakes were made by Johnson during the height of the pandemic, which highlighted the lack of grip in his leadership and the culture of double standards in Downing Street.
Johnson’s defence that he was regularly told by his advisers that “all rules were followed” now looks pretty threadbare, given the testimony from former aides that this was not true.
Typical was the warning from one staffer in May 2020 about a gathering in the Downing Street garden which he described “as clearly social and in breach of Covid guidance”.
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But most of this is already known, while Johnson has repeatedly apologised for his errors and misleading statements. Moreover, he has paid a savage price as he was forced out of Downing Street last summer.
It is possible that Harman’s Committee will go even further when it decides its verdict, effectively ending his political career by driving him from the Commons.
But such an outcome would be unprecedented and an affront to democracy. The fate of politicians should be decided by voters, not self-appointed tribunals.
It is doubtful if any profound lessons will be learnt. The same is true of the official public inquiry on Covid, whose relevance diminishes with each revelation about its cumbersome procedures and soaring bills.
Chaired by the judge Baroness Heather Hallett, this inquiry has not even begun properly, yet it is on course to be the most costly investigation of its kind, exceeding the £210million spent on the Saville inquiry into the Bloody Sunday massacre in Derry in 1972.
Already Hallett’s Covid inquiry has dished out 37 contracts reportedly worth more than £114million and hired 150 lawyers, many of them on a rate of £220 an hour.
In the words of Labour MP Graham Stringer, it is “very expensive and very bloated”. Disturbingly, the inquiry could last seven years, ensuring that its final report will be a study in profligate emptiness.
Sweden and France have completed their Covid commissions.
The track record of most British public inquiries is unimpressive. They provide bonanzas for grasping lawyers and platforms for axe-grinding campaigners but rarely do much for our country. For all the attention they generate, the two present Covid investigations fit this pattern.