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What is the point of Oliver Dowden?
Politics is a cruel business Oliver Dowden has been overlooked. Rishi reshuffled but left his fixer out of the mix. Our MP remains Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Woke-Finder General and head of the government’s apparently entirely inactive (possibly fictitious?) Strikes Taskforce but is further than ever from a big job. And we promise…
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Minister for Flannel
Ministers are regularly required to show up and look credible before the various committees of the UK Parliament Do us a favour, watch this short clip from Oliver Dowden’s appearance before the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee yesterday and see if you can figure out what the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster’s ‘propriety…
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Job done
How do you turn a respectable, if old-fashioned, pillar of the post-war liberal establishment into a weak, discredited organ of the state in two years? Ask Oliver Dowden. To be fair, this isn’t really much to do with our MP, who was at the time Culture Secretary. He just signed the paperwork appointing Tory Party…
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When you’re 20 points behind in the polls…
Second jobs, woke nonsense, stolen artworks, a taskforce that’s done literally nothing – what your MP’s been up to since the new year Follow the money. Oliver Dowden features in this big Sky News exposé of payments to MPs, from which we learn that our legislators have taken £17.1 million from second jobs in this…
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Resilience schmesilience
Here in the suburbs we like to think we are not mugs. We know a distraction when we see it. We can tell the difference between a press release and a live policy. Still, we think we’ve been had. A couple of weeks ago it was announced that our MP, Oliver Dowden, a Cabinet Office…
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Dowden resolute
It looks like a compromise with the unions is available but it’s not clear the government wants to take it. Meanwhile The Minister for the Winter of Discontent is on manoeuvres – and the soldiers are preparing for action this Christmas It’s difficult to put your finger on Oliver Dowden’s charm. He doesn’t have the…
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Losing his marbles
Since he was Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden has opposed the return of stolen artworks to their owners. But it looks like they might be going home anyway In the last few years Dowden hasn’t missed an opportunity to assert that objects like the Parthenon marbles and the Benin bronzes ‘properly reside’ in the British museums…
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COBRA assembles
It has begun. Yesterday, Captain Dowden marched into the COBRA situation room – for there is a situation As we reported last week the PM has put Oliver Dowden in charge of his Winter of Discontent Task Force. Dowden assembled his first responders in the Cabinet Office Briefing Rooms to begin the fightback against the…
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Dowden’s Fusiliers
Our MP has been in his new job for six weeks. He’s the most senior minister in the Cabinet Office and he has an epic to-do list. His first big battle is with hundreds of thousands of striking workers The government’s website lists the many responsibilities of the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster: driving…
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Has Oliver Dowden finally joined the club?
When you resign as a Minister you have to wait three months before you can start to take money from a hedge fund Some might say that one of the good things about our MP, across the seven years since he was first elected, has been his apparent distance from the unsavoury cronyism and money-grubbing…