Look, we know we should have expected this, but we’re experiencing a bit of a post-election comedown.
There’s plenty of action in Parliament, of course, and it’s kind of mind-blowing to hear the man in the big hat reading out a list of broadly social-democratic laws, even if some of them are a bit arbitrary and possibly even cynical.
But in our favourite bit of politics: the parliamentary and government career of our MP, Sir Oliver Dowden, things have gone very quiet indeed. Let’s have a little look.
Runners and riders and fallers at the first fence
Last week we reported that Dowden was supporting Victoria Atkins for Conservative Party leader but he’s actually not said a word about that since Christmas so we suspect he’ll have moved his alliegance by now. He’s an important figure in the party, though, just behind the big beasts, and he always goes early with his endorsement (see this earlier post for more about Dowden’s habit of picking winners) so his opinion matters. Who do you think he’ll support when the time comes?
You can still get 25-1 on Atkins and a ridiculous range of odds on Dowden himself. 12 bookmakers are currently offering a median of 83-1 on the former Deputy Prime Minister and outlier Betfair will currently give you 342-1, which we reckon is crying out for a fiver if you’ve got one lying around.
Bagman forever
Oliver Dowden floating in some kind of dimensionless alternate reality
Oliver Dowden, as we’ve been saying on here for years, has been moving around the fringes of power for his whole political career. We’re not qualified to tell you why he’s not found his way to the top tier yet, although we have our theories. This historic Tory drubbing must represent his best opportunity yet, though. The field is much smaller (there are only 121 of them to choose from now after all), his nine years in parliament and six years in government must now put him somewhere in the top half of the table in term of experience – and many of the genuine big beasts have retired or been ejected.
For most of his less battle-hardened colleagues there’ll be a reluctance to go for the big job while everything’s so sad and broken. Suella Braverman, one of the more credible candidates, has already imploded – and will probably be a Reform MP by the time the conferences come around. The desperate antics on the opposition front bench last week – with two of the leadership frontrunners, er, losing their shit during a very boring ministerial statement – doesn’t bode well. This is going to get nasty. We can understand the attraction of a long caretaker period, even if only to allow everyone to calm down and for the new medication to kick in.
Leadership candidates Badenoch (13-8) and Atkins (25-1) in action
So a Dowden leadership bid is unlikely. He’s a realist. He knows he’s not charismatic enough, that his network is too thin, that his awkwardness and his reedy estuary voice won’t carry him through a gruelling period in opposition. It’s a very relateable dilemma, shared by so many of us – in our work and in our private lives. But Dowden’s great strength is that he knows his limits and is happy to stick to the second tier, managing situations, solving problems and providing back-rubs for the big beasts.
Our MP has been pretty quiet since he won in Hertsmere (against a 20% swing to Labour). On social media he’s made one appearance, looking a bit untidy, standing by a chainlink fence. Must have been a tough few weeks.
What’s he talking about over there by that fence? The green belt obvs. While he was in the government his room for manoeuvre was limited – he had to be seen to defend the interests of his constituents while sticking to the government’s line on planning reform and development. His solution then – on the Radlett aerodrome development, for instance – was to intervene only when he could identify someone else – like the county council – as the villain. But he’s off the chain now so we can presumably expect him to be much more robust in defence of farmland like the fields on Barnet Lane behind that fence. He might want to iron his shirt.
The only complete source for Hertsmere election results going back to when the constituency was created is our free spreadsheet, which also includes council and PCC results.
Voters are often called upon to solve problems for the political class
What a Labour landslide actually looks like
Especially in Britain, where governments can call elections whenever they fancy it within a five-year term (Fixed Term Parliament Act RIP), we’ll usually be asked to go to the polls when a government is in crisis or has an urgent problem to deal with. In 2017 we were called upon to help Theresa May break her Brexit impasse by giving her a big enough Parliamentary majority to push through a deal (nice work, Theresa). In 2019 we were asked to resolve Boris Johnson’s even more intractable Brexit dilemma (guess he did get Brexit done). But what problem was Rishi Sunak asking us to solve for him by calling an election six months before he had to, in the teeth of the lowest popularity ratings and the worst polling for decades?
We’ve updated our free spreadsheet of results from every general election in Hertsmere all the way back to the first one, in 1983.
It looks like Sunak was desperately hoping that the electorate would rescue him from the Reform insurgency, that Richard Tice wouldn’t have time to organise a national campaign, that Nigel Farage wouldn’t dream of giving up the glamour and the gilded corridors of Trump Tower and that, when forced to choose, unhappy Conservative voters would snap back to the Mother Party and send Reform packing. No such luck.
So who won?
Well, to state the obvious, here in Hertsmere the Conservative Party won, with a majority of 7,992 votes – not bad considering the national picture but almost two-thirds smaller than in 2019, when Oliver Dowden won by 21,313 (it’s the smallest majority he’s won in four general elections). This much-reduced majority compares pretty well with the other seats where Tories held on too. In fact Hertsmere is now the tenth safest Conservative seat in the UK – up from 43rd before the election (even allowing for the fact that there are now so few of them this is still a big improvement).
Polling isn’t recorded at the council-ward level so we can’t tell how different parts of the constituency voted. We’re going to go out on a limb, though, and guess that the issues that motivated prosperous parts of the constituency like ours were VAT on private school fees, capital gains tax and the risk of an update to the 1991 valuations used to calculate council tax. The investment managers among us might also have been worried about Labour’s plans for carried interest.
The average Tory majority at this election was 4,086, which is a number that must put the fear of God into the strategists at CCHQ. The median was 3,572 and the largest in the country was – guess where – Rishi Sunak’s Richmond and Northallerton, where the majority was 12,185.
Lay your bets
Let’s get the succession out of the way. Who will take over the dry husk of the Conservative Party? Who will be its William Hague? Its Michael Howard? The person to rebuild it after the earthquake? We’d assumed the jockeying for leadership of the soundly defeated Conservative Party – reduced to the smallest number of MPs in its history – was well under way before Thursday’s epic collapse but we were a bit surprised to learn that Oliver Dowden might well be supporting outsider Victoria Atkins for leader when the contest comes.
The fear for mainstream political parties in chaotic periods like this is that an ordinary electoral set-back might turn out to be a realignment, a permanent break – like the Tory catastrophe after the Great Reform Act or when the Liberals disappeared as a party of government in the twenties.Is it possible this is what just happened to the Conservative Party?
The Telegraph got excited about this two days before the election but on actually reading the source of their scoop – an article in The Independent – it seems that Dowden was really just buttering up a guest at a Xmas drinks party back in December. Atkins herself, on hearing Dowden say “…there’s only two people from my generation that I could see leading the Conservative Party: Rishi Sunak or Vicky Atkins…” is recorded as saying only ‘wow’.
We wouldn’t mention this bit of Tory Party gossip here if it weren’t for the fact that Dowden has a record of picking winners. If you’d like to make this a little more interesting you’ll currently get between 10-1 and 25-1 on Victoria Atkins for leader (with favourite Kemi Badenoch on 2-1 or even 6-4). We urge caution while things are so fluid, of course, but we’re wondering about a couple of quid on a wildly implausible come-back for Nadhim “Unsecured Loan” Zahawi at 66-1 (Dowden himself is presently at around 50-1 – although we’re about 90% sure that it’s once-a-bagman-always-a-bagman for our MP and that he wouldn’t dream of standing. Prove us wrong, Sir Oliver!).
The gang of three – all, remarkably, still in their seats
And when we say ‘picking winners’, we mean really pickingthem. Dowden was part of the ‘gang of three’ thrusting young MPs, along with Robert Jenrick and a junior Minister called Rishi Sunak who were first to endorse Boris Johson for leader in June 2019 (look at their happy little faces! Seems so long ago). Anyway, you know how that went.
Dowden was then among the very first to join #TeamRishi, although it was an idea whose time hadn’t quite come because we had to get through that weird Liz Truss bit before Sunak could assume power as some sort of saviour. “Unquestionably the best person to beat Labour…” you say?
(although there was a bit of a scare in the small hours, Dowden’s favourite for Tory Party leader Victoria Atkins was re-elected, so it’s still on…).
The two biggest parties – one of them two hundred years old (well over 300 if you count from the origin of the Tories) and the most successful political party in modern world history; and one of them well over a hundred years old and the most durable party of the working class anywhere in the world – are both
The voting
Labour. Of course, as we should have expected, the result here in Hertsmere was another win for incumbent Oliver Dowden. The swing against him was huge – over 20% – and the swing to Labour pretty good too but nowhere near enough. Josh Tapper’s share of the vote, 28%, is the fourth highest ever polled for Labour in Hertsmere, also the fourth largest number of votes, 13,459. But to win he’d have to have done better than Beth Kelly in 1997, whose 19,230 votes and 38.2% brought her to within 3,000 votes of a win. Even if Reform had not existed and every one of Darren Selkus’s 6,584 votes had gone to Tapper, we’d still have a Tory MP today.
This must have been an absolute rollercoaster for Josh Tapper. When selected by his local party back in March he’d presumably have had very limited expectations, in Britain’s 43rd safest Tory seat, but as Rishi’s catastrophic campaign ground on and the polls (so many polls!) began to pile up, he must have allowed himself to think the unthinkable once or twice. We noted some polls here that put Tapper over the line but they were very much outliers. It must be heartbreaking for him to watch the many new, young Labour MPs turning up at Parliament over the last few days. Better luck next time, Josh!
Of course, one of the more remarkable things about this Labour landslide is that it is the product of one of the lowest vote shares in recent political history – 34%. Commentators are calling this result ‘wide but shallow‘ or ‘distorted‘. Fraser Nelson in the Spectator calls it a Potemkin landslide, which is clever. Activists, of course, will say things like ‘that’s how politics works’, or ‘a win is a win’ but will be privately conscious of the fact that Starmer won three million votes fewer than Jeremy Corbyn in 2017 and, startlingly, over half a million fewer than the same bloke in the catastrophic 2019 election. Labour must govern – and quickly make a real impression on the lives of Britons – in the knowledge that Keir Starmer is less popular in electoral terms than the hated predecessor he has expended so much energy to delete from the national memory.
The counter-argument is that where the Labour win is wide but shallow – a ‘sandcastle landslide‘ that could be swept away when the tide comes back in – the Tory position now is narrow and shallow. It has to be a fear for the remains of the Tory leadership that a Parliamentary party with 122 MPs and an average majority of about 4,000 looks very fragile indeed and essentially only one more defeat from total irrelevance – especially when its next leader might well be from an extreme wing of the party and ready to essentially abandon the party’s historic base.
The Liberals. In Hertsmere, Labour remains the only viable opposition. The Liberals fell apart here – again – and there was a 3.2% swing against Emma Matanle. The ruthlessly effective Lib Dem campaign – which has produced 71 seats nationally – focused on harnessing the ‘efficiency’ of the electoral process by investing everything in winnable seats. It was always going to leave Matanle on the outside. In the 1980s the party – before the SDP merger – was the second-largest in the constituency. Matanle’s vote was less than a third of the party’s best performance here in 1983. It will be a long road back.
This list of Liberal and Lib Dem candidates, incidentally, includes Zerbanoo Gifford, the only Zoroastrian (we think) ever to have stood for election in Hertsmere; Laurence Brass, founder of an important Jewish-Palestinian peace settlement who is still serving as a Hertfordshire county councillor almost forty years on and Sophie Bowler, the Lib Dem candidate who won some press coverage in 2015 for being ‘too busy to do any campaigning‘and consequently won the smallest number of votes for her party in the history of the constituency.
Reform’s performance in Hertsmere was, in national terms, not remarkable. An outer-London green-belt settlement was never going to be a good prospect for the party so their investment here was probably small. Darren Selkus was essentially on his own (at least he was actually visible) and the fact that he was able to bring in 6,584 votes – more even than UKIP at their 2015 high-point (and, remarkably, more than UKIP’s entire national vote at this election) – probably bodes well if he wants to stand again (he stood for the Brexit Party in Epping Forest in 2019 too). His vote here was the largest for a populist party in the history of the constituency (easily enough to get his deposit back). The party took lumps out of the Tory vote this time round but all the parties are conscious that Reform UK will be the primary source of chaos in UK politics for some time yet – and the party really won’t want to stop at humiliating the Tories. Like UKIP before it, the party’s presence in the political landscape is going to focus minds and all parties will be thinking hard about how to make sure Reform can’t come for them in subsequent elections. Labour’s concern will be that Reform came second in 98 UK seats and in 89 of them Labour was the winner.
During the campaign Selkus promised to give the whole of his MP’s salary to charity, which suggests that his business – which sells wood veneers – is probably doing well. He’ll be able to give it 100% of his focus again now.
The Greens must be wondering what they have to do to have an impact in British politics. If any party should be disrupting UK politics from the margins then surely it ought to be the party of the climate crisis and of protecting the environment? But no, once again, the disruptive force – here as across Europe – is a reactionary populist party. A party, in fact, that explicitly opposes Net Zero and advances a kind of ‘la-la-la-not-listening’ approach to global warming. Reform UK Chairman Richard Tice explains that, because the UK’s economy is relatively small, cutting emissions here would “make zero difference to climate change”, so we should focus on adaptation (taller sea walls, flood-resistant crops, factor-50 and so on) rather than participating in the worldwide energy transition.
The Green Party put up a candidate in every seat in England and Wales this time and now has four MPs, one fewer than Reform – a big breakthrough. In Hertsmere, John Humphries, a veteran campaigner who stood here in 2019, continued the party’s steady growth in share. Where the party took seats this time they came from the major parties but it will be a long time before the Greens represent a threat to the Tories here.
One of the party’s challenges is that, once elected, Green MPs will be subject to the same local political pressures as everyone else. It’s already started: this Telegraph story is from two days after the election:
Would a Hertsmere Green MP be brave enough to support the construction of a thousand PassivHaus homes on the green belt? Or a big solar farm on agricultural land in the constituency?
The Independents. The other group that’s really boomed in the 2024 general election is the broad church of candidates with no party affiliation. We counted 487 candidates in the general election with the word ‘independent’ in their party name, the largest number ever in a UK election – most constituencies in Britain had five or six candidates, which is more than usual. Six Independents were elected to Parliament this time. One of them was Jeremy Corbyn, of course. Four of them were so-called ‘Gaza candidates’, standing against Labour in seats that have larger Muslim populations (and one is an independent Unionist in Northern Ireland). The press have been quick to suggest that these one-issue candidates are the thin end of an Islamist wedge or ‘a failure of integration’ but a quick look at their biographies suggests otherwise: one Lib Dem barrister, one solicitor, one IT consultant (and school governor) and the chair of a Muslim advocacy group. We’d suggest that standing for Parliament is about the best evidence of integration you’ll find.
Hertsmere’s Independent is Ray Bolster. Bolster kept us guessing by remaining entirely invisible for the first five weeks of the campaign – no web site, no social media, no leaflets. But in the few days before the poll he put his head above the parapet and put out a leaflet. We learnt that Bolster is a local man, an RAF veteran and a life-long peacenik. His 536 votes doesn’t look at all bad when you consider how elusive he was during the campaign.
No concerns about age here
The only other Independent in the history of Hertsmere was Ronald Parkinson, who stood as an Independent Communist in 1983 and polled a remarkable 1,116 votes (although the fact that he had the same surname as the winning Tory may have contributed to this total).
Detailed results for Hertsmere from the BBC (with nice charts) or from Wikipedia (with a simpler table of results).
We’ve updated our spreadsheet of results from every general election in Hertsmere all the way back to the first one, in 1983 (you’ll also find council and PCC results).
Since Oliver Dowden remains our MP we can continue keeping an eye on him. Follow the #DowdenLog tag here.
Why does Rishi Sunak want us to prepare for war? Why does Oliver Dowden want us to fill the cupboard under the stairs with tins of beans and bottled water?And what’s any of this got to do with a concrete shed in the middle of Radlett?
If you walk up Gills Hill towards the park you’ll pass a lovely bit of green called Scrubbitts Wood and if you look over the gate at the North East corner you’ll see a concrete structure that looks like an old garage or possibly an air-raid shelter. Everybody used to call it ‘the air-raid shelter’, in fact, but recently a handy sign has gone up by the gate explaining that it’s actually a World War Two ‘Report and Control Centre’.
It’s a communications node in the wartime civil defence system. There was probably a telephone line, quite possibly female volunteer despatch riders. It’s not easy to understand why you’d put such an important bit of infrastructure in Radlett but there it is, defying the passage of time, right in the middle of the village.
Structures like this were put up all over Britain during the war, and were part of a huge – and hugely-effective – collective effort to protect Britain during what was unarguably the country’s greatest crisis for over a hundred years. Civil defence during the war was a bureacratic-voluntary hybrid, of the kind Britain is famed for. It’s how we roll, how the whole Empire was run.
The cold war
After the war, of course, began another war. And a modernised, atomic-age version of the wartime civil defence structure came into being. One of its functions was to put the fear of God into us about nuclear armageddon. If you grew up in this period you’ll remember the public information films at the cinema and terrifying fictional visions like Threads and When the Wind Blows. Some of us are still haunted by the Protect and Survive booklets you could pick up in doctor’s surgeries and libraries right up until the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
The end of history
Amiable B-movie schlub saves world
But then amiable B-movie schlub Ronald Reagan implausibly won the cold war. The communist gerontocracy basically died. The long Soviet experiment collapsed. Things changed, of course, and there was that odd decade during which everybody felt they could breathe again. The booklets were pulped, they scrapped the sirens and Tony Blair’s New Labour won the biggest electoral landslide in modern British history. American political scientist Francis Fukuyama famously wrote a book called ‘The End of History and the Last Man‘, published in 1992, in which he proposed that the end of the cold war and the benign economic climate signalled a definitive end to the chaos and conflict of the twentieth century. Liberal democracy had won the battle of the ideologies and would become the unquestioned norm everywhere and forever. Oops. This dreamy mood lasted about ten minutes and was finally finished off by 9/11.
War without end
Americans
And we entered the era of the War on Terror (capital ‘W’, capital ‘T’). The Americans recruited a ‘coalition of the willing‘ (you might not remember this but you were definitely in it) and moved onto a war footing, invading Afghanistan and then Iraq. One of those wars became the longest in American history. Deaths in all of the post-9/11 wars, the wars we can classify as connected with the War on Terror, now amount to several million (including hundreds of British servicemen and women and thousands of Americans).
The USA is, in fact, legally and politically, still at war. A law passed in 2001, giving the President essentially unconstrained power to make war against enemies, real and perceived, is still in force, discussed periodically in the US Congress ever since but never repealed. Of course, here in Britain we just do as we’re told, so we’re effectively still at war too. The absence of a written constitution makes it much easier for UK governments to tag along with the Americans (as Tony Blair said to George Bush “I will be with you, whatever…”).
A century of emergencies
The happy optimists of the last decade of the last century could hardly have anticipated the drama of the first quarter of this one. A sequence of regional and world financial crises (including the biggest one since the great depression), dozens of popular uprisings brutally put down across the world, a hundred-year pandemic, a major European war, the populist turn; all overlaid on the building turmoil of the climate crisis. None of this was in the plan.
And the response of the major powers – including here in Britain – has been, in almost every case, to dial up the anxiety, to legislate, to militarise and to take a variety of increasingly authoritarian actions. Social and economic elites – even liberal and left-wing elites – almost everywhere turned to repression and away from democracy or other forms of popular deliberation.
In an emergency, all bets are off. A government may require us to stay indoors, allow us to protest but without being a nuisance or impose long prison sentences for non-violent action. Ancient rights are suspended and recently-acquired rights are reclassified and unwound. And we can expect more of this as the multi-dimensional crisis intensifies.
But hold on, what’s this got to do with tins of beans?
Well, Oliver Dowden, in his role as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, is in charge of resilience (in addition to a long list of other tasks, including ‘civil contingencies’, the COBRA committee and that portrait of the King…). Resilience in this case doesn’t mean bouncing back when your boss gives you a bollocking. It’s more about preparing for climate change, terrorism and war. Dowden’s brief includes flooding, heatwaves, cybercrime, sabotage by state actors and, for some reason, he’s chosen this moment to amp it all up, to dial up the anxiety and ask us to start hoarding pasta and toilet paper again.
Hardly anyone noticed this but in the morning on the day of Rishi Sunak’s surprise election announcement (do you remember it? It was raining) Oliver Dowden announced something else – he announced an inexplicable new web site and a campaign to persuade us all to prepare for disaster. The web site is called ‘Get Prepared for Emergencies’ and it’s a slightly uncanny throw-back to those cold war public information booklets. There are many exclamation marks and a guide to preparing for the worst. You’ll learn how many bottles of water you should buy (three litres per person, per day, FYI), how to prepare your house for a flood and what to keep in the boot in case you need to leave home in a hurry. There’s a checklist to download.
Geopolitical dread
And this all came about a fortnight after the Prime Minister’s oddly dystopian speech warning us about, well, everything. He spoke, at his lectern, of the threat from “…gender activists hijacking children’s sex education…”, “Iranian proxies firing on British ships in the Red Sea…”, “countries like Russia weaponising immigration for their own ends…”, “criminal gangs finding new routes across European borders.” Read the speech, it’s all there: artificial intelligence, trans ideology, small boats, cancel culture, Putin’s ambitions and… nuclear anihilation.” Sunak’s painting a picture here and it’s not a happy one. It doesn’t actually mention alien invasion but we suspect it’s on a checklist somewhere.
It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the Conservatives have decided their last chance against the inevitability of defeat in July is to weaponise dread, to trigger the entire voting-age population, to reduce us to a kind of quivering electoral jelly, waiting for the catastrophe and hoping against hope that Rishi can rescue us. The logic is that this dread will cause us to cling to the Tories when it comes to placing an X in the box, that we cannot imagine a better way out of this miserable, grinding, 14-year nightmare than to vote for the people who made it.
There’s a kind of contemporary horror movie-vibe to all this. These hollow men in suits, standing at lecterns, informing us in bloodless terms that our freedoms are to be suspended and that our larders and cellars must be filled in case of catastrophe. It’s grim.
Signing the pledge
Meanwhile, Labour, of course, in closely shadowing the Conservative policy offer, must carefully match the beligerance and dread Rishi’s bringing. Yesterday Keir Starmer made it clear that he’s not just going to retain Britain’s nuclear deterrent but double down (in fact the party’s calling it a ‘nuclear triple-lock’, which is catchy). Starmer’s promise is not new. In fact it’s consistent with the stance of all UK governments since 1962. In that year Harold Macmillan and JFK signed the Nassau Agreement, permanently cementing Britain’s dependence on the US military-industrial machine. To vary this relationship would be costly and almost certainly diplomatically impossible. Every Prime Minister since then has acknowledged the geopolitical realities of the North Atlantic compact and signed on.
Under this and most of the subsequent agreements the British nuclear deterrent is essentially a North European branch operation of the vast American one. You don’t need to be a peacenik to feel uncomfortable with this relationship, with the fact that important parts of the UK nuclear weapons system literally belong to the United States government, that Britain’s 58 warheads are considered part of a larger US-controlled pool of weapons, that targeting, maintenance and other aspects of deployment are decided by American generals and that although it might be technically possible for a British submarine captain to launch a Trident missile independently, it would be unthinkable in practical terms and could actually be stopped by a US government with a mind to do so. According to one academic, the UK’s nuclear arsenal doesn’t meet ‘the 1940 requirement‘, meaning it could not be used in a situation when the country stood alone as it did at the beginning of the second world war.
No UK government has ever had the courage to challenge this and the economics of operating an advanced nuclear weapons system – with cold-war levels of preparedness – independently of the USA is so scary that this is very unlikely to change. It’s almost certain that even if a unilateralist government were to come to power (as it nearly did in 2017, remember) it would quickly acknowledge the realities and renew the deal. This unequal relationship is a deeply entrenched aspect of the Atlantic hierarchy. It’s essentially impossible to imagine altering it, let alone abandoning it.
Fear wins again
Captain Dowden is ready for action
Oliver Dowden’s stock of tinned food, Sunak’s dead-eyed scare tactics and the UK’s unvarying committment to the nuclear status quo are all aspects of the same, rigid security orthodoxy and the same increasingly hysterical emergency politics that govern our lives in the developed economies. Fear is a political currency – and when politicians deliberately and cynically mobilise our anxieties it’s a sign of their fragility. It’s undemocratic and regressive and we’re probably stuck with it.
This is it. The big one. The last of our four guides to the parties standing in Hertsmere at the next general election, whenever that is. We’ve done the fringe parties, the Liberals and Labour so now it’s time to tackle the incumbents, the 800-pound gorillas of Hertsmere politics, the Conservative Party, winners in Hertsmere since the constituency was created, for the 1983 general election – the ‘Falklands election’. The Tories have never even come close to losing here, not even in 1997, when Labour won the largest number of Parliamentary seats in history and squeezed the margin in Hertsmere to six percent.
Cecil Parkinson (next to Thatcher), once MP for Herstmere and – in a competive field – probably the biggest heel in Conservative Party history
The history of the Tories in Hertsmere is essentially the history of the contituency so you’ll want to read our electoral history of Hertsmere, which covers the whole period since 1983 and its three MPs – including the ignominious departure of Margaret Thatcher’s favourite Cecil Parkinson in 1983 and of his successor James Clappison, dumped by the party for fast-track SPAD Oliver Dowden in 2015.
You might think that Hertsmere is one of those home counties contituencies that’s been approximately Tory since the battle of Hastings, or the end of the ice age. And you wouldn’t be wrong. A single county-wide constituency was first created over seven hundred years ago, in 1294, and it persisted until 1885. The Hertfordshire constituency returned – for most of that period – three MPs (the principal towns in the county also returned their own MPs). Before the franchise was expanded in the late 19th Century the electorate was tiny – In 1868, about 9,000 men in Hertfordshire (landowners and later the ‘ten-pound men‘) could vote. The first time they got a chance to vote for a candidate identified as a Tory was in 1727. He was a Jacobite noble called Charles Caesar, who was also Treasurer of the Navy. Between then and the seat’s final abolition in 1885 Tories dominated, with the occasional blip of Whig control. Between then and 1983 Radlett has bounced around between the constituencies of Watford, South West Hertfordshire and South Hertfordshire.
The odds
In a sea of disastrous polling data from the Sunak period, we’ve seen only one projection that suggests the Tories could lose in Hertsmere – and it’s a doozy. It’s the February 2023 MRP poll from the highly-reliable polling company Electoral Calculus. It gives Labour 509 seats and the Conservative Party 45. In this scenario the Tories aren’t even the official opposition. LOL.
Ouch
We know that even the slightly less extreme polling that’s been done since then has been causing panic bordering on hysteria in corridors and bars and meeting rooms in the SW1 area. Such an enormous swing is obviously unlikely and the most recent MRP polling gives Dowden a 1997-sized lead here in Hertsmere. That would bring Labour’s candidate Josh Tapper to within 3,000 votes of Oliver Dowden. We’ve noted before that Tapper must be praying the Gogglebox factor can get him a bit closer.
Vote shares in Hertsmere since 1983, showing swings to Labour in 1997 and 2017
Crown, church and land
They don’t call the Conservative Party the most successful political party in the world for nothing. This 300 year-old institution, which began life in the ferment after the English Civil War, is so wired into the constitution of middle England – especially rural and landowning England – that it seems almost to be part of the landscape.
The party’s various re-inventions, especially in the period since the industrial revolution, have seen it identified with business (which had previously been the domain of the Whigs), with the urban middle class and, much more recently, with working class voters, for whom the Tories came to stand for ambition, home ownership and the prospect of a better life for their children.
The fact that this last electoral coalition – the one assembled by Margaret Thatcher in the early 1980s that has seen the party running the country for 32 of the last 45 years – seems finally to be collapsing, in the wake of 15 years of flat wages, growing inequality and diminishing expectations – would, for any ordinary party, presumably mean the end. For the Tories it almost certainly means another re-invention – the Conservative Party is evidently indestructible and will still be with us on the other side of whatever apocalypse awaits us. Like cockroaches and the plague.
Our present Prime Minister – according to a polling firm one of the least popular party leaders in history – has made several increasingly desperate attempts at his own re-invention in the last year or two and, in his most recent effort, is trying to position his party as the ‘national security party’ or the party of geopolitical dread. It’s too early to say whether this relaunch will stick, of course, although the bookies aren’t convinced. At Radlett Wire we have a simple rule of thumb: when the Prime Minister puts a lectern outside Number 10 and makes a speech about nuclear annihilation it’s probably not his country’s security he’s worried about but his own.
The candidate
Oliver Dowden floating in some kind of dimensionless alternate reality
We remain, as we have essentially since his election in 2015, deeply impressed by Oliver Dowden. He’s an intriguing figure. Not charismatic, not possessed of any apparent vision or of a distinctive political identity, nor even of deep roots in the Tory party. He is, in his party’s terms, an outsider, but his tenacity and his political instincts have kept him in or near the action since his first election – through one of the most turbulent periods in his party’s (and the Parliament’s) history. He’s a pragmatist – entering politics via David Cameron’s upbeat, socially-liberal, modernising regime, when CCHQ was like the marketing department of a Plc – and he had no difficulty subsquently lodging himself in the government of each successor Prime Minister. Only Liz Truss could find no use for him.
For a second-tier politician, Dowden’s always been pretty close to the action (once a Number 10 staffer, always a Number 10 staffer). He was first to endorse Johnson to replace Theresa May but also first to resign as Johnson’s final crisis began. Joining #TeamRishi was another low-key masterstroke for our operator, although his return to the front bench was delayed by that weird 49-day Liz Truss thing, during which Dowden was very much on the outside…
Captain Dowden of the Winter of Discontent Taskforce
We’ve sometimes called Dowden a bagman here. We don’t mean this disdainfully. The bagman is vital to a successful political party. Some politicians are far too grand for this kind of thing but Dowden is always quite happy, as the moment requires, to get his hands dirty, to dispose of a body, to endorse even the silliest talking points – privet hedges, woke roadsigns, hoarding stolen artefacts – scolding Netflix and calling for Gary Lineker‘s dismissal on the regular. He’ll step up in defense of the indefensible on the Sunday morning programmes without complaint and he’ll take on the emptiest, gestural nonsense with gusto. For a while during the wave of industrial unrest of 2022 and 2023 he was put in charge of Rishi Sunak’s ‘Winter of Discontent taskforce’. We amused ourselves here trying to find any further trace of activity from the taskforce. None materialised. It was never more than an announcement – the kind of entirely hollow politics you need a strong stomach to pursue with enthusiasm. Dowden has a strong stomach.
Classic teflon
Oliver Dowden is as close to clean hands as you’ll get in the contemporary Conservative party, so-far unblemished by scandal. And even when he really ought to have got into trouble he’s somehow squeaked through, untouched. It was Dowden who appointed Boris Johnson’s friend and loan-arranger to be Chair of the BBC. Dowden who was in charge of propriety and ethics when the party was accused of covering up a rape. He’s never been close to the big money but he was one of ten Tory MPs who took paid jobs with party donors during 2022 and for some reason accepted a payment from the hedge fund that bankrolled Liz Truss’s experiment with credibility too.
Local hero
Dowden comes from up the road and went to a school a lot of Hertsmere kids attend. He knows the area and has been a diligent constituency representative. In our experience, he (almost always) answers letters from constituents (your mileage may vary). He’s never, as far as we know, phoned an elderly constituent in the middle of the night asking for money to give to ‘bad people’ and we’re pretty sure he doesn’t own a property portfolio. He’s always ready to make a speech about a car park next to a bin. For all this, as his constituents, we should be grateful.
There will be constituents who question his absolute committment to local concerns, though. The rail freight terminal on the old Radlett aerodrome land is one of those giant projects that will always present a problem for a government minister. He very much wants to be identified with the electors who are going to have an enormous warehouse blocking out their view or a busy new access road keeping them awake.
It’s a delicate business, though. Dowden has felt able to participate in the dispute but has reserved his full-throated criticism for the actions of the local authority, Hertfordshire County Council in this case, who say they were obliged to sell the land for the development. It’s always much easier for an MP to criticise the council than to criticise his own government or a major business that may well be a party donor.
We feel for Dowden on this. He doesn’t want to be seen too vocally opposing a development that will bring work to the area at a time when everyone’s fulminating about the sclerotic planning system. The sheer scale of the development and its likely impact on the households affected makes it hard to ignore for a local MP, though.
He’s ready
Dowden has been reselected by his local party (they do this sort of thing informally in the Conservative Party) but, as far as we know, he hasn’t actually lodged his nomination papers with the local authority so there’s still a slim chance he’ll run for the hills. We doubt it, though.
As a government minister he’ll evidently be able to draw on significant resources from his party during his campaign but Hertsmere is such a safe seat that it’s unlikely we’ll see many of the top brass here during the campaign. If he’s lucky he’ll be able to call on his friends at South Hertfordshire Business Club again, though. This is a club with no web site, no staff, no premises, no accounts and, apparently, no members (looks like it might share an address with the St Albans Conservative Association, though). According to the Electoral Commission the club gave £82,741.09 to Dowden’s office between 2017 and 2022, making use of a loophole that allows ‘unincorporated associations’ to give up to £25,000 per year to a political party or campaign without saying where the money comes from. Dowden’s not the only MP using this method of accessing anonymous money. There are a number of these secretive organisations, with names like The Portcullis Club and the Magna Carta Club (that one’s given £150,000 to Michael Gove since 2009). Interestingly, they seem to exist only to give money to Conservative politicians and campaigns. Details of the Dowden donations in this spreadsheet.
Dowden suffers from a very contemporary political problem. He’s from a nominally working-class background but he speaks and acts quite posh. The same problem afflicts Keir Starmer. But the iron rule is that neither will ever, no matter how much they protest, be accepted as working class. They both really ought to give up trying.
Oliver Dowden has had a few goes at the despatch box depping for the boss lately. We can’t say we’ve ever managed to get through a whole session. It’s too much. Watching him labour awkwardly through his scripted jokes is far too painful, like the nasty bit in a nature documentary about seals and killer whales.
It turns out that the dreadful Cecil Parkinson affair has not yet, over forty years on, been forgotten. A new documentary is in the works.
Here’s our big spreadsheet with all the Hertsmere election results going back to 1983 – the only place you’ll find all this information in one place (and we recently added Hertfordshire PCC results going back to 2012 for extra excitement).
We group together all our Oliver Dowden posts with the #DowdenLog tag and you can subscribe to these posts in an RSS reader if that’s your thing.
You can keep up with what Oliver Dowden does in Parliament at TheyWorkForYou and you can set up an email alert there too, should you be sad enough.
Right at the base of our democracy is the idea of representation. We send our MPs to Westminster to vote on our behalf. How they vote is our business.
Of course, once they get to Westminster they usually become ridiculous figures – and they quite soon join one of the two available categories. They’re either pompous, wounded egomaniacs or grasping, bitter kleptomaniacs. This seems harsh but there are really hardly any exceptions. The number of MPs who make it through even their first term without some kind of psychic damage is tiny. Our electoral system favours dweebs and maniacs. The system shrugs off the normies – they’re gone after their first term – back to accountancy or running a charity with a disease in its name. These are the sane ones.
Anyway, here at Radlett Wire we’ve been keeping an eye on our MP – The Rt Hon Oliver Dowden CBE, MP for Hertsmere – since he was elected in May 2015, displacing his predecessor James Clappison in one of those cold-blooded political assassinations the Tory Party is uniquely good at. It’s not clear yet to which category Dowden belongs. It sometimes takes decades for this to become obvious. We’ll keep you informed. Here’s how we keep up with him.
Oliver Dowden addresses the crowds after winning in 2017 by a majority of 16,951
Start here. Veteran social enterprise They Work ForYou maintains the best database of your MP’s voting record as well as a useful summary of their position on the most important issues. Over the years, the site has quietly become an integral part of the British electoral machine. MPs who initially resented it because it makes emailing your MP too easy have now adjusted to the flow of communications and take it for granted. You can sign up to get an email alert every time your MP does something interesting in Parliament.
Set up a Google alert. The absolute backbone of lazy Internet research. There must be a billion live alerts running worldwide. Search for what you’re interested in, turn it into an email alert, set the frequency and level of detail. Simple. Our daily alert for ‘Oliver Dowden‘ is vital to this blog and regularly produces unexpected gems. For instance, Dowden, in his role as a senior Cabinet Office Minister, is responsible for enforcing the rules on foreign investments in UK businesses. The system was set up to impede the Chinese takeover of swathes of British industry – mainly because this is a big policy priority for our American allies. It’s a total mess, of course, and entirely ineffective, so Dowden is now planning an embarrassing u-turn but we’d have known nothing about any of it without our trusty Google alert.
Captain Dowden
Pay attention to what they say. Dowden’s web site is pretty good. You can sign up for his ‘end of term report’ and read his columns for various local freesheets. None of this is very interesting, of course – in fact it’s almost the definition of paralysingly boring – but it’ll give you a sense of your MP’s priorities.
Socia media remains vital. Politicians are still active on X (formerly known as Twitter) and on Facebook. Some of the more adventurous have built audiences on Instagram and TikTok (do you remember Matt Hancock’s smartphone app, inventively called ‘Matt Hancock’, dating from back when he was just a figure of fun, before he became a Shakespearean farce?). You’ll often find politicians publishing statements, resignation letters and endorsements on social media without publishing them anywhere else. The platforms have become a proxy for a press office and the nearest we’ve got to an archive. During the Pincher affair we recorded over 70 resignation letters published on Twitter alone.
Subscribe. Most web sites still offer their content in a vintage format that many consider to be the last non-evil thing on the Internet. It’s called RSS and it allows to you add a feed to a simple reader app on your mobile or your computer and automatically get updates whenever new content is added. We’ve got one here at Radlett Wire and we’ve even got a niche feed for our MP. Add one or both to your RSS reader for ultimate convenience. RSS is still used extensively by journalists and researchers. It’s kind of a trade secret. Don’t tell anyone.
Our favourite RSS reader, now that Google Reader has gone, is a Mac app called Reeder. There are plenty of others – for all platforms.
There’s an election coming. We can feel the electricity in the air.
This is not Oliver Dowden, it’s the King in a sailor’s uniform. That’ll be £8 Million.
We haven’t posted here for seven months. We took a break and meanwhile, you may have noticed, the world got even more dark and weird. But Rishi Sunak says his ‘working assumption’ is that we’ll have a general election in the second half of this year so the politics is about to get a bit more interesting (and then there’s the polling). Maybe it’s time to start blogging again.
None of this is what you’d call inspiring is it? But this constant focus on the political nitty-gritty and selflessly stepping up to defend the indefensible when asked to has obviously served Dowden well. No detectable scandal (that 25 grand payment barely gets him into the top 50 MPs), no public shaming, he’s not been asked to leave via the back door of Number 10 once yet. Classic teflon.
The boss is back
A departure for the ages
It must be, er, bewildering (Upsetting? Galling?) for Oliver Dowden to see his first political boss David Cameron, who departed the scene like a thief in the night (humming) in 2016, actually re-entering government via the back door, though. In a just world Dowden would have eclipsed his sensei by now but, tragically, he finds himself down the table from the old Etonian again. It must be maddening, especially as Cameron didn’t even have to go to the trouble of getting elected this time – he just strolled into the House of Lords and picked up his ermine (and his £104,360 per year salary).
Perfectly normal
So, let’s get to that portrait of the King. Oliver Dowden has chosen a photograph of Charles III wearing the uniform of an Admiral of the Fleet, with the many medals and insignia he has earned in that role, taken in one of his castles. It’s A3-sized and comes in an oak frame1. If you represent a ‘public authority’ you can get one for nothing (you just have to send an email). What you’re required to do with it is not specified – although we assume you’re supposed to hang it on the wall in the lobby, like they do in Azerbaijan. The cost to tax-payers is expected to be £8 Million. And we’re all going to carry on acting like this is a perfectly normal thing for the government of a democracy to do in 2024.
For a Tory MP this is what gets you updating your LinkedIn in January 2024
In our next post we’ll look at the recent polling, including last week’s allegedly hyper-accurate MRP poll, commissioned by Lord David Frost and paid for by a shadowy group calling itself The Conservative Britain Alliance (the Electoral Commission wants to know who they are), that’s put the fear of God into Tory MPs and triggered this week’s frenzied (and highly entertaining) festival of recrimination and panic in the corridors and meeting rooms of the House of Commons and CCHQ.
Some people have raised concerns about the little camera at the top of the picture frame. We’re pretty sure you can just put a bit of tape or a Post-It Note over it, although we’re not sure if that’s actually allowed. ↩︎
As a Cabinet Office minister, Oliver Dowden remains responsible for the government’s 22-person propriety and ethics team – he’s this guy‘s boss. It’s still not clear what they actually do.
We’re urged to recognise Lord Cameron’s selfless devotion to duty. He’s promised not to collect his daily £342 House of Lords attendance allowance while collecting his £104,360 per year ministerial salary, for instance, and he’s had to give up the enormous sums he’s been earning as a consultant and adviser in the private sector. In every year since he resigned he’s claimed the allowance for former Prime Ministers – the Public Duty Costs Allowance (PDCA) – which runs to a maximum of £115,000 per year and it’s not known if he’ll continue to claim it now that he’s a minister. Meanwhile, the Serious Fraud Office hasn’t finished investigating the affairs of his former employer Greensill Capital, where Cameron’s salary was £720,000 per year (he was also given shares in the company and sold them just before it went bust for £3.3M)
At Radlett Wire we’re convinced that there’s some value in keeping an eye on the conduct of a local MP – especially in a constituency like ours that’s been dominated by one party since its creation forty years ago. It’s one of the worthwhile things that local blogs all over the country still do. We’ve grouped all the Dowden posts together with the tag #DowdenLog. You can use an RSS reader to subscribe to the blog or just to our gripping Oliver Dowden updates. If you follow Radlett Wire on Twitter/X, on Facebook and now in the Fediverse (search for @blog on Mastodon or your favourite ActivtyPub service) we’ll also share every Dowden post there.
For the Deputy Prime Minister, our MP, it’s time to become part of the story.
Oliver Dowden floating in some kind of dimensionless alternate reality
You’re a successful politician, you’ve played the game, moved with the populist times, you’ve gone to America and come back an anti-woke crusader. You’ve picked your allies carefully. More to the point, you’ve measured out your support for the big beasts cleverly and you’ve not really put a foot wrong. In a cabinet stuffed with chancers and bullies and weirdos you’re practically a saint. But you’re stuck in the second tier and the clock is ticking. What to do?
Oliver Dowden’s come a long way from speech-writer and trouble-shooter in David Cameron’s office while his party was in opposition. He’s developed a reputation for political savvy and good timing. He’s moved around the fringes of power, taking up various important bagman roles and he’s never disgraced himself. But there’s less than a year to go before the most likely date for the next general election and Dowden must get a move on if he’s to make an impact before he’s back on the opposition benches and kissing babies at the fair.
So it’s easy enough to understand why he’s decided now’s the time to pick sides in the war of succession between Johnson and Sunak. Johnson’s allies are briefing that Dowden is the source of the leaked diary entries that kicked off the latest chapter of Johnson’s unconscionable persecution. They’re calling Dowden a ‘compliant tool of the blob‘. It’s game on.
And if you’re going to step into history, to become more than a footnote in the big monographs that will be written about the period you need to act. Dowden’s fervent hope is that taking his opposition to the Johnson faction up a gear and cementing himself more firmly to Project Sunak, he’ll secure a bigger job and a more important role, closer to the elemental core of Britain’s crown-constitutional weirdness, when the wheel turns and the Tories are re-instated, as they surely will be, to their natural leadership position in the fullness of time.
Deputy Prime Ministers come and go. It’s a job title that’s in the gift of the Prime Minister and can be switched on and off at will (the first one was Clement Attlee during the war) It doesn’t attract a salary (Dowden will still be pulling down the £158,257 he makes for his current roles, though, so don’t worry) and usually has no office. Sometimes a deputy PM can have a more formal role. Nick Clegg, you’ll remember, led his half of the coalition from the Deputy’s office. Thérèse Coffey chaired two committees during her tenure as Deputy to Liz Truss last year (although it’s not recorded that they actually met – she wasn’t there for long). John “Two Jags” Prescott, a very visible (not to say pugilistic) Deputy, chaired nine.
Oliver Dowden floating in some kind of dimensionless alternate reality
It’s probably safe to assume that Dowden won’t be taking on any committees or formal tasks while in the new job. He’s got plenty to be getting on with in the Cabinet Office – he’s in charge of freaking us all out, for instance. He’s also got a track record for taking on empty or nominal roles as needed. He’s in charge of the government’s anti-woke activity, for instance and, as far as we can tell, his Industrial Action Taskforce, assembled in November last year, has never actually met – or done anything at all, in fact.
As for Dowden’s personal prospects, he must be wondering whether he’ll ever make the jump from the lower tiers into one of the big jobs. So far he’s managed one full-ministerial role: he was Culture Secretary between 2020 and 2021 but he’ll probably now be remembered only as the man who appointed Richard Sharp Chairman of the BBC (new revelations about that in the Sunday Times this weekend). Oops.
Ouch
And the clock is ticking, of course. The polling looks bad. No matter what you think of the competence or authenticity of the Starmer Labour Party, a Tory win in 2024 has to be a long shot. Electoral Calculus, a polling company, calculates a rolling poll-of-polls – an average of all the public opinion polls. As of 22 April 2023 it suggests the Tories might slump from 365 to 113 seats (and a 95% probability of a Labour majority). Their best case prediction is for 244 Conservative seats, which would be better than Labour’s 2019 performance (203 seats) but would still put the Tories in second place.
Double ouch
And that’s before you even get to the worst case. Electoral Calculus specialises in a clever statistical polling technique called MRP (multi-level regression and post stratification, since you asked) to calculate what are usually thought to be more accurate predictions – pundits and strategists always rush for the MRP projections. They did the last one in February (when the Tories were doing even worse than they are today, to be clear) and it suggests a grand total of 45 Conservative seats. In this scenario, the Tories aren’t even the official opposition and even Oliver Dowden loses his seat. Boom.
So if Dowden is to score one of the Great Offices of State he’ll need another fairly dramatic upset this side of the general election or he’ll need to bide his time. Really bide his time.
The Wikipedia entry for Deputy Prime Minister is fascinating – and goes into the various definitions of the role. Attlee, for instance, was de facto Deputy Prime Minister but never formally appointed. Michael Heseltine was the first to carry the formal title.
In the distant future, when archaeologists uncover this blog, buried under about forty feet of Thames silt, they’ll thank us.
Oliver Dowden floating in some kind of dimensionless alternate reality
What we do is keep a fastidious eye on what our MP gets up to. It’s not personal, he’s a pretty good MP. He pays attention when we write him whingey letters and he makes a decent effort to look after his constituents and their quotidien concerns.
However, Oliver Dowden is a minister in a disastrous government that’s visibly screwed everything up, over a period approaching 13 years. Latest catastrophic highlight: life expectancy in Britain has been flatlining for ten years and is now right at the bottom of the table for the big nations. For the poorest, it’s now falling. It’s worth dwelling on that: in the last ten years (it began long before Covid) our government has managed to reverse over a hundred years of steady improvement in the most basic of wellbeing measures – how long people live.
Anyway, in the last couple of weeks, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster has been pretty busy. Let’s catch up:
He banned TikTok. Okay, he banned it from government-owned devices. This is Dowden with his cybersecurity hat on (you’ll remember, he wears a lot of hats). Yes it’s pointless, yes it’s irrational, but it’s nice to see a government actually acting against a tech corporation instead of wringing their hands in a kind of supine, passive-aggressive way like they usually do.
Like this one
One may now obtain a portrait of the King, free of charge, paid for by H.M. Government. Hold on, though. Dowden says it’s not for everyone, just for ‘public authorities’. His announcement says the scheme, which will apparently cost £8M, includes councils, courts, schools, police forces and fire and rescue services but we’re not sure if it covers sarcastic local blogs.
Check your phone, it might be Oliver Dowden. On 23 April, the government is going to send everyone in Britain an urgent text message. They’re testing a new, nationwide alert system that some of the papers are obviously calling ‘armageddon alerts’. It will be used in the event of an emergency, like a war or a natural disaster. Given the scale of the collapse in Conservative support nationally we wouldn’t be at all surprised if the first message said ‘VOTE TORY ON 4 MAY’. This is actually an international system that’s been used in some countries for years. It’s built into your mobile and you can turn it off if you’d rather not have Oliver Dowden freaking you out when the balloon goes up. And do you think they chose Shakespeare’s birthday for a reason? If they did they missed a cast-iron opportunity to call it The Grim Alarm (sorry).
Oliver Dowden knew that the BBC was worriedabout the appointment of Boris Johnson’s pal as Chairman about five months before he gave Richard Sharp the job. He didn’t do anything about it, though. And, of course, it was only nominally Dowden’s decision – it was Boris Johnson’s and it had already been made.
Here in the constituency, we know that our MP opposes the sale of the old airport land for the construction of a rail freight terminal but it’s been his government’s policy to permit the development for over a decade now, so it must be awkward for a Cabinet Office Minister. Daisy Cooper, Liberal Democrat MP for St Albans has been asking questions in Parliament, though. The last time Dowden did so was in 2020.
Oh God, Partygate is back in the news. It’s going to be like the torrid Summer of 2022 all over again.
It’s Sue Gray
Oliver Dowden was Sue Gray’s boss until she stepped down last week.
In his role as Cabinet Office Minister responsible for propriety and ethics, Dowden will now investigate Gray’s conduct in taking up her new job at the Labour Party.
Our MP’s probably saying a little prayer of gratitude that he wasn’t in the Cabinet Office during #WhatsAppGate.
There’s great excitement in government this week, especially in the Cabinet Office. There can’t be anything more thrilling for a minister responsible for propriety and ethics than to get stuck into a case that might make life harder for His Majesty’s Oppostion. The Tory press is also excited. Starmer and Labour have been polling a steady 20 points ahead of the Tories so they’ve grabbed at this story with something resembling desperation.
And cases like this don’t come along very often: it was the Conservatives who invented the revolving door, after all. About 90% of MPs’ income from second jobs goes to Tories and the vast majority of submissions to the appointments watchdog are from Tories. They’ve had the game to themselves for a long time.
Of course, the irony is that making a fuss about Starmer’s frankly weird decision to appoint Sue Gray (is it possible that Starmer is not the strategy ninja we thought him to be?) might just function to remind the electorate about partygate and all the other hilarious pratfalls of the Johnson era. And the fact that the other prominent partygate civil servant, Simon “Wine Fridge” Case, is a main character in this story and in the very, very tawdry WhatsApp drama, can’t help. Apparently he’s thinking of resigning.
Oliver Dowden floating in some kind of dimensionless alternate reality
Oliver Dowden, as the most senior Cabinet Office Minister, sponsors ACOBA, the advisory committee that will now have to decide how long Sue Gray has to wait before taking up the Labour job. Remember, when Dowden was up before the beak himself last year he was required to wait the absolute minimum of three months before taking a handsome wedge from a hedge fund. They have it in their power, though, to ask Gray to wait up to two years – making her, presumably, useless to Labour.
In practice, though, long waits to take up appointments are rare and many think the committee is essentially an easy touch. Hardly anyone is ever forbidden from taking up a job. It would certainly look awkward if the first time ACOBA puts its foot down properly is over a Labour Party appointment.
We looked into how ACOBA (the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments) works late last year.
Back in 2017, when she was required to investigate the conduct of another Tory minister, BBC Radio 4 profiled Sue Gray.
