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.
And we promise we’ll stop going on about the Strikes Taskforce at some point. You’re bored hearing that it hasn’t done anything yet. We’ve got half a dozen Google alerts running in case it comes back to life with a jolt. You’d think it would be a pretty busy taskforce about now, what with all the strikes, but apparently they’re still in the barracks, waiting for their orders.
Some are surprised the Prime Minister didn’t take the opportunity to advance some of the loyalists who helped get him elected, though. It must be nerve-wracking for a second-tier figure like Dowden, scrabbling for relevance among the big beasts, to see members of the same 2015 Parliamentary entry whizzing past him and taking up full cabinet positions – Lucy Frazer just leapfrogged into the Culture role that Dowden himself was removed from by Boris Johnson in 2021.
The Tory Party may not have a conscience but it definitely has an id – and he is called Lee Anderson. That Anderson is getting closer to one of Dowden’s other previous jobs – Chairman of the Party – must also be causing dyspepsia in the Dowden household.
Meanwhile, one of Dowden’s decisions from back when he was still Culture Secretary, has come back to haunt him – although he’s been all ‘nothing to do with me, guv‘ since the story broke.
Richard Sharp
Nobody outside London knew anything about Richard Sharp until he was shoved into the role of Chairman of the BBC in 2021. He is, though, evidently a genius. A cast-iron financial savant – and from humble beginnings. His public school was tragically outside the top tier but through sheer grit he managed to get accepted at Oxford and completed a degree in PPE nonetheless. He went on to make hundreds of millions of pounds from moving money around in ways we don’t pretend to understand in the City (this 20-year-old article estimates his wealth at £125M). When Boris Johnson was Mayor of London, Sharp was an adviser.
So it’s bewildering that a man of his calibre would somehow manage to get himself mixed up in Boris Johnson’s personal financial affairs. Apparently, instead of saying “sod off, Boris, I’d rather stick my head in a wasps’ nest.” or just blocking his number, Sharp ignored all the red flags and offered to hook Johnson up with another millionaire who said he’d guarantee a loan for the PM.
The loan, we’re told, came off, and Johnson trousered a flexible sum of up to £800,000 (we don’t know who actually lent him the money, how much he drew down in the end or whether he’s paid any of it back yet).
Oliver Dowden floating in some kind of dimensionless alternate reality
This is where it gets complicated. At this point, Sharp was on the fast track for the BBC job – Johnson had announced he was the preferred candidate and insiders were saying it was a done deal – so it occured to Sharp that his proximity to the lethal spinning blade of the Prime Minister’s private life might cause him some difficulties when it came to the interview. We assume Oliver Dowden knew nothing about the festival of stupidity and venality going on in secret around him, although he was nominally the appointing minister (and his name is at the bottom of the appointment letter).
Cabinet Secretary Simon Case
Sharp decided to involve a civil servant. He chose Simon “Partygate” Case, Cabinet Secretary and head of the civil service. And – guess what – Case said the loan was cool and that Johnson wouldn’t even need to declare it because it was “family business”. That last bit is kind of perplexing because although Blyth and Johnson are related, they’re related in roughly the same way Danny Dyer is related to Edward III. They share a great-great-grandfather and apparently Johnson didn’t even know Blyth until Sharp introduced them.
So, bringing this up to date, Richard Sharp has now been censured by the House of Commons Culture select committee – ‘significant errors of judgement’ is the phrase – for not mentioning the loan in his application for the BBC job. He’s issued a non-apology of the “I’m sorry you’re upset” variety and is now hoping that the other inquiry – by a KC appointed by the independent commissioner for public appointments and one that will carry more weight – is kinder to him.
Oliver Dowden’s progress around the fringes of the Cabinet continues. This time he’s Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster
Oliver Dowden floating in some kind of dimensionless alternate reality
The new Prime Minister’s cabinet is coming together. Oliver Dowden has moved sideways. Bringing his sequence up to date: Parliamentary Secretary for the Cabinet Office (9 January 2018 – 24 July 2019), Paymaster General and Minister for the Cabinet Office (24 July 2019 – 13 February 2020), Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (13 February 2020 – 15 September 2021), Minister without Portfolio and Co-Chairman of the Conservative Party (15 September 2021 – 24 June 2022), Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (25 October 2022-)
So far the only full ministerial role on the list is the Culture job – a position created by John Major in 1992 and expanded along the way to accommodate media, sport, the Olympics, the amorphous ‘digital’ and, more recently, the Culture Wars. It was in this role that Dowden was first asked to take on woke street names and unisex toilets (our Culture Wars coverage is here). Also when he took up the cause of the British Museum and the stolen artefacts.
So now our MP is Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. It’s a sinecure. One of the roles used to accommodate ministers a leader might need later. To be honest we’re a bit disappointed. We thought Dowden was due a bigger role in a Sunak Cabinet – he was among the first MPs to come out in support of the new PM and he bust a gut campaigning for him the first time round.
But, because the role has no particular function, its holder can choose to focus on whatever they want – provided the boss is happy. A civil servant looks after the Duchy’s enormous property portfolio these days, so Dowden will be able to take up any cause he fancies. We’ll be interested to see if he returns to the fight to keep the stolen Benin Bronzes in London.
Is it possible that the Conservative Party is going to recycle its last Prime Minister, the one who was kicked out amidst multiple scandals after sixty of his ministers resigned in despair? Yes it is.
The Brotherhood of Party Animals
SATURDAY MORNING UPDATE. Sunak has achieved the 100 nominations he needs to go through to the members’ vote, according to his supporters, but he’s not said he’ll stand yet. Seems likely he will, though, since close allies, including Oliver Dowden, are tweeting their support. Johnson lags behind but, according to the lists kept by those in the know, he’s still in second place with MPs (and he’s back from the Dominican Republic). In a twist we probably should have anticipated, according to one reporter, Tory members are pressuring their MPs to support Johnson, in some cases threatening them with deselection. Penny Mordaunt, currently in a pretty poor third place, is the first to say she’s standing. A lot could change over the weekend, though.
FRIDAY’S POST. To be clear, after an early surge in support Thursday night, Boris Johnson has now settled to second-favourite to replace Liz Truss as leader with the bookmakers, behind his nemesis Rishi Sunak. The insiders tracking MPs’ support for the likely candidates also have Johnson second behind Sunak (Cautious Conservative Home, more gung-ho Guido Fawkes). Paul Goodman, grizzled observer of the party, says Johnson is unlikely to pass the nomination threshold. In case you were wondering, the best you’ll get on Oliver Dowden is 200-1 – and his odds are drifting. Save your money. He’s still firmly on #TeamRishi and is apparently busy surveying MPs about their support for the former Chancellor. Meanwhile, our conscientious MP still has his head down and has been asking technical questions of the DCMS. Always fascinating to note that the ordinary business of Parliament goes on, no matter what else is happening.
As we often say here, we’re not insiders. We’re not in the torrid WhatsApp groups. We just watch the news like you do. So we can’t be sure that the Tories will embrace full Bungafication and appoint Johnson again. Some red wall MPs have convinced themselves only Johnson can save their seats. Members, ever divorced from reality, are obviously up for it. Donors seem keen too.
Boris Johnson is obviously not Silvio Berlusconi. The Italian tycoon’s rap sheet is a yard long, he’s a fraud and a serial abuser. He’s been expelled from and re-entered politics half a dozen times but, remarkably, he’s returning to government and he’s embroiled in another potentially career-ending scandal as we write.
But Johnson’s debt to the original political party animal is evident. His resilience in the face of scandal, his flexibility with regard to the truth and his jaw-dropping readiness to brazen out catastrophes political, legal and parental is pure Berlusconi. As is his style of ‘governing-as-campaigning’ – for leaders of the Berlusconi-Johnson variety, there’s no steady period of heads-down government between campaigns. It’s all-campaigning-all-the-time.
We’re not the only ones to see the resemblance to Italian politics in the current crisis. The Economist’s latest cover is headed ‘Welcome to Britaly’ and the leader article finds a close resemblance to recent Italian history: “A country of political instability, low growth and subordination to the bond markets.” The Italians themselves are furious about the comparison, which they say is insulting (although it mostly seems to be the spaghetti they’re unhappy with). There are jokes about the insertion of a technocratic caretaker Prime Minister (remember when Merkel and the European Commission removed Berlusconi from power? Brexit took that option off the table). People are calling Jeremy Hunt ‘the British Mario Draghi‘.
Bringing Johnson back would surely complete the analogy. Buona fortuna Gran Bretagna!
In a fancy garden near here, the strange drama of the Conservative leadership contest approaches its climax
Last week, Rishi Sunak, currently trailing Liz Truss by 26 points in the contest that will produce a new leader of the Conservative Party (and, because of a mediaeval malfunction in the Parliamentary machinery, a Prime Minister too) was invited to visit the home of a wealthy Hertfordshire Conservative Councillor to speak to local party members.
Like a lot of what we’ve seen from around the country during the Tory leadership contest, the result is a kind of grim social comedy and very close to self-parody. The 100-odd Conservative members apparently present are out of shot. Artfully in shot is a sparkling swimming pool and, above it, a grand suburban villa.
But it’s worth watching the video closely. It has a kind of anthropological value. We’re deep in the heartland of the Home Counties Tory elite here. On Sunak’s side of the pool, milling around, there’s a group of comfortable-looking Tory alpha males, including local grandees who’ve already secured a clutch of gongs and are thus in the home straight for a peerage whoever wins (you’ll have read about some of these guys in Private Eye’s Rotten Boroughs column). There’s at least one of those white straw hats you see at cricket matches.
In this suburban garden we see a snapshot of the context for everything promised by the two candidates in the last couple of months. All the dog whistles about lazy workers, ‘our women‘, tax cuts, grammar schools, deporting refugees and so on are for this powerful audience of ultra-Tory comedy caricatures and not for the wider British electorate. At a more recent hustings, for instance, we learn that frontrunner – and serving Foreign Secretary – Liz Truss is happy to toss Britain’s historic alliance with our nearest continental neighbour into the wood-chipper to win their votes.
That’s not to say we shouldn’t expect some genuinely loopy policies once the winner is in place, of course, but what emerges in the Autumn will certainly bear little resemblance to what we’ve seen during the contest.
Anyway, back in the garden, the candidate is introduced by our own MP Oliver Dowden – also in line for a peerage, of course, for his service to a sequence of PMs – although we suspect he’s got a few more years in the trenches before he’s sent up (and perhaps some time in the wilderness of the back benches too, given his lamentable judgement in backing Sunak over Truss). Dowden says: “Rishi’s got the skills, he’s got the energy, he’s got the vision to fire up our economy and on to a brighter future…”
Sunak opens by connecting his own story to the aspirations of his audience:
And just as our country did something wonderful for my family I want to do the same for everyone, for your children and grandchildren and make sure they have the same fantastic opportunities too.
He has a three-part prescription:
But how are we going to do that? Well, we need to do three things. We need to restore trust, we need to rebuild the economy and we need to reunite our country.
Since this short video was made Sunak and Truss have surely both stood in front of at least half a dozen other sparkling pools. Any sign of the candidates getting together to plan a response to the Winter energy crisis yet? No. Just the Chancellor advising pensioners to turn the thermostat down a bit.
In the Tory leadership race, Team Rishi has deployed the ultimate THW (Tory Heartland Weapon) – the green belt – and Oliver Dowden is ready
Map of the London green belt
September 2022 update: turns out the green belt is still growing. The annual government numbers show that, after a break of about eight years, the green belt grew by 1.5% in the year 2021-22 (admittedly, all the growth was in the North of England). And, let’s be clear, if they were allowed, local authorities could build hundreds of thousands of decent, affordable homes in the green belt and it would make hardly any difference.
The green belt Is a 1930s invention – the product of Fabian paternalism and modern local government activism. It was a radical idea that limited speculative building, protected green space and parkland for working people and contributed to the dispersion of decent housing beyond the big cities. London is smaller as a result – the 20th Century sprawl that many thought inevitable was sharply foreclosed. London must one of the few capital cities in the world that looks roughly the same on a contemporary map as it did in the years after the First World War.
Communities on the both sides of the green belt continue to look out across fields and woods long after they might reasonably be expected to have been paved over. The London green belt is enormous – 135 square miles of land, substantially larger than London itself – and it’s got bigger over time. A big extension in the 1950s saw parts of the green belt pushed out to 35 miles from the centre of London.
It’s also, of course, an indefensible nonsense. An initially benign measure, intended to protect city dwellers from rampant development and small towns from being engulfed by the sprawl, has become a kind of Home Counties fortress – an impenetrable defensive shield for rural and suburban communities, almost exclusively in the South East of England (and almost exclusively Tory). It’s an irrational and uniquely selfish device, and almost unique in the world. The idea that valuable land, close to the economic centre of Britain, should be arbitrarily and permanently protected from use is eccentric at best, wicked at worst.
And as an idea it’s fantastically robust. In UK politics it’s essentially untouchable. Over the decades legislation has been reinforced, protections hardened. London’s green belt has grown (and there are now green belts around other English cities). Perfectly sane measures to shrink or amend the green belt have been blocked and politicians who embrace reform always come to regret it. Most won’t touch it with a barge pole.
And, of course, those of us who live by the Green Belt love it – and we’ll expend enormous amounts of energy to defend it – inventing justifications for its permanent protection, most perfectly valid. It’s a ‘green lung‘, it contributes to ‘ecosystem services‘, it’s a corridor for wildlife, it offers various magical protections for the health and happiness of both city dwellers and those on the other side of the moat. We put up signs in our front gardens, attend public meetings and sign petitions. And who can blame us? The green belt has underpinned the value of our homes for decades and contributes to the wellbeing of our families. We can’t think of a good reason to touch it.
An industry of well-funded think tanks, lobby groups, trusts and protest groups has emerged, especially since the 1950s. There’s a Parliamentary All-Party Group on the green belt, of course. A fabulously dense defensive architecture has been retrospectively erected around the idea of the green belt – connecting it with various other big issues – the agriculture lobby, rural landowners, the hospitality and leisure industries, the green lobby – all have joined the defense of the green belt from time to time. For columnists and conservative opinion formers it’s practically sacred.
The builders and developers who want to liberate the green belt don’t help their case much, either. What they put up in the places they are allowed to build is almost always horrible – opportunistic, lowest-common-denominator housing squeezed onto inappropriate plots, speculative commercial developments that blight town centres. Estates dumped in inaccessible locations (or on flood plains). And, inevitably, they take every opportunity to avoid their affordable housing obligations.
It’s hard to argue that rolling farmland, woodlands and parks are not worth defending – the green belt protects some of England’s most precious countryside: Epping Forest, the Surrey Hills, the Chilterns. As you’d expect, the largely suburban and rural electorate in the Conservative Party leadership contest is very much on-side. This explains why the collapsing NHS, booming child poverty and the climate emergency are barely on the policy agenda but the green belt very much is.
Oliver Dowden’s green belt intervention is a long piece in support of Rishi Sunak in the Telegraph. There’s nothing to see here, really. It’s what you’d expect from an MP with a track record of privet hedge bothering but it’s full of Tory membership dog whistles carefully calibrated for his electorate:
Mr Sunak said town halls will be encouraged to regenerate industrial land and he will strengthen policy to encourage the building of much denser housing in inner-city areas.
Oliver Dowden, Daily Telegraph, 27 July 2022
We’re sure the people of these inner-city areas (perhaps the same ones Rishi was cannily able to divert funds away from while Chancellor) will be thrilled to learn that his plan means the land around them will be built on at much higher density. The word ‘brownfield’, which, of course, is a euphemism for ‘not a Tory constituency’ is used ten times.
For my constituents in Hertfordshire and those in neighbouring seats, the fear of losing this belt of fresh air, open space and countryside is raw and real, and as party chairman I saw the Liberal Democrats constantly seek to play on that fear in Conservative held seats around the country.
As ‘raw and real’ as the prospect of falling into poverty or destitution when the energy bills come in this Winter?
Where communities do not want development, it must not be permitted to go ahead. Overzealous planning inspectors must have their wings clipped. It is local people, not bureaucrats, that should take decisions on the preservation of our countryside…
Planning inspectors must be fed up with the rollercoaster of affection and approbation they experience. They’re saints when they deny applications for green belt projects and unredeemable sinners when they permit them.
Mr Dowden has almost certainly picked the wrong side in this fight but he’s honourable enough not to have jumped ship and he has to hope that his track record as a muscular defender of single-sex toilets and colonial streetnames will win him favour in the Truss camp in September. Certainly jumping to the defence of the green belt can’t possibly have done him any harm.
Our MP was way out in front with his resignation from the Johnson government and may have been plotting against the PM for a while
It seems like a long time ago but it’s actually only a month since Oliver Dowden, MP for Hertsmere, resigned as Conservative Party Co-Chairman. And you’d be forgiven for forgetting that it wasn’t actually Pinchergate – the most recent crisis of Boris Johnson’s leadership – that induced his departure; it was the previous one – the catastrophic 23 June double byelection loss in Wakefield and Tiverton and Honiton.
Dowden’s resignation letter was a shock at the time and seemed out of character for such a loyal soldier: a short and blunt critique of the Prime Minister, out of the blue – “We cannot carry on with business as usual. Somebody must take responsibility…” A few weeks on it seems like a relatively mild intervention and, of course, it was only a preview of a flood of over 60 letters, sent by ministers and advisers and PPSs, in the three days between 5 and 7 July, once Johnson had provided the final push by trying to defend his terrible friend Pincher.
The flurry of letters – the largest number of resignations submitted in a single day in party history – was a hyper-modern, social media affair. Almost all of them were published exclusively on Twitter – and there was some entertainment. Some were unreadable, some weren’t even letters, just hurried tweets or Facebook posts (we do wonder who archives all this official correspondence). Some were written up by local reporters. Some came very very soon after their senders had replaced resigning ministers (Michelle Donelan was Education Minister for 35 hours and has promised to return her Ministerial redundancy money). Liam Fox managed to resign even though he hasn’t been a minister for years and recently appointed Chancellor Nadhim Zahawi hedged his bets by carefully sending a strongly-worded letter addressed to no one that wasn’t actually a resignation (and he’s consequently still in his job).
Meanwhile, Dowden came out for Rishi Sunak on 8 July, right at the beginning of the process, sharing the boilerplate social media endorsement given to him by Rishi’s team.
Oliver Dowden’s social media endorsement of Rishi Sunak
Dowden’s support for Sunak is not surprising. The former Chancellor seems to be the closest of the two surviving leadership candidates to the outlook of the pre-Johnson, pre-populist, pre-chaos administration of Theresa May – the panicky interregnum in which Sunak first saw office – and to the seemingly unending nightmare of the Cameron years in which Dowden did. Our MP’s journey – from Cameroonian moderniser to Johnsonite Culture Wars enforcer always seemed an uncomfortable one. Perhaps in supporting Sunak he is rejoining the Tory mainstream.
Along the way we got an insight into the deeply cynical art of campaign management when one of Rishi’s supporters shared the graphic without deleting the request from Rishi’s team (somebody get that man a social media manager).
And none of us were even slightly surprised when we learnt that Sunak registered his campaign domain name ready4rishi.comsixth months before his resignation.
The Prime Minister and Number 10 staff during the first national lockdown
UPDATE 13 April 2022. As expected, the Prime Minister’s fixed penalty notice has arrived (two in the letterbox in fact). Our MP was not the only loyalist to be dropped in it by the news, of course, although Oliver Dowden’s “…he is not going to be subject to a fixed-penalty notice because he is confident that he has not broken the law” from three weeks ago was more fulsome than most. Along with dozens of other Tory MPs, Dowden has now shared the official line:
Fixed penalties are starting to land on the doormats of Conservative Party staff, civil servants and, quite possibly, MPs and ministers. We don’t know how many have been issued but the BBC says it’ll be at least 15 but more likely 20 and there may be a second and subsequent batches. The investigation takes in 12 events, though, so it seems unlikely it’ll stop at 20.
From the Telegraph we get this complicated construction: “Downing Street said Boris Johnson has not been told by the Metropolitan Police that he is being fined over the ‘partygate’ scandal.” The Met won’t be providing a list of those fined (they don’t normally publish the names of people issued with fixed penalties) but we’re willing to bet you a tenner right now that there’ll soon be a list in the public domain. Still no word on the Prime Minister, although his promise to tell us if he is fined presumably still stands.
So, although as Co-Chairman of the Conservative Party and Minister without Portfolio his loyalty is obviously guaranteed, it’s possible that Oliver Dowden was going out on a limb a bit last week when he told James O’Brien on LBC:
The prime minister is actually absolutely resolutely clear that he is not going to be subject to a fixed-penalty notice because he is confident that he has not broken the law.
Oliver Dowden, LBC, 21 March 2022
The mood music this week suggests Johnson’s innocence is not quite such a sure thing, though. You’ll find a dozen news and opinion pieces since we learnt that fines were imminent, even in the Tory press, that suggest Johnson’s partygate woes are not over, even that his leadership may still be in peril. The Evening Standard, for instance, owned by the Prime Minister’s friend Evgeny Lebedev, is pretty sure that ‘a day of reckoning’ is coming, although the loyalists questioned are pretty sure that it won’t be till after the Ukraine crisis.
And then there’s the Sue Gray report (bet you’d forgotten about that), the final, unexpurgated, version of which is due after the Met’s investigation is finished.
