Tag: DCMS

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.

An official photograph of Oliver Dowden MP with a British Army captain's hat crudely photoshopped onto his head
Captain Dowden still ready for action

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.

Anyway, the Sunak reshuffle wasn’t a big one – most ministers stayed in place – but experts say it’s going to have a dramatic effect on the ‘machinery of government’ and that it will cost over £100M to implement the restructure of the business and culture ministries. There’s also an entirely new Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, to be led by Grant Shapps, responsible for boosting Britain’s energy supplies and the transition away from fossil fuels.

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, businessman and Chairman of the BBC
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).

A composite image of Conservative MP Oliver Dowden, wearing a surgical mask and floating against a virtual reality background
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).

A wine fridge that was kept in an office at number 10 Downing Street during the pandemic
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.

Dowden’s new vocation

Our MP has been grilling ministers about a new charities law – but it’s really all about the Culture Wars

The Parthenon Marbles in their current location the British Museum in London
Some of the Parthenon Marbles in their current location

The new Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster is now busy answering questions on behalf of the Cabinet Office but in his final days as a backbencher he was packing in the written questions. This time he was asking the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (his old gaff, of course) questions about the Charities Act 2022. As we reported a couple of weeks ago, his recent questions relate to the return of stolen artworks to their countries of origin. You’ll remember that, in a previous life, Oliver Dowden very publicly argued that artefacts brought to Britain during the colonial era should stay where they are and, in particular, in the UK’s national collections.

While Culture secretary, and in the midst of the row over statues of slavers and war criminals, he wrote to UK institutions asking them not to touch controversial items and famously threatened them with loss of funding if they considered removing or returning objects:

It is imperative that you continue to act impartially, in line with your publicly funded status, and not in a way that brings this into question. This is especially important as we enter a challenging Comprehensive Spending Review, in which all government spending will rightly be scrutinised.

Lines from Dowden’s ‘retain and explain’ letter, sent in September 2020

It looks like this is going to be an important cause for our MP – alongside the important local issues of yellow lines in Aldenham and building on the green belt. It’s not obvious why a home counties MP would want to invest much in the profoundly controversial argument between a former Imperial power and its once colonised territories. There are evidently some Culture Wars points to be won with the Tory base but it’s difficult to find a morally consistent defence for retaining the Benin Bronzes or the Parthenon sculptures. The risk of being very visibly on the wrong side of history is real.

So far Dowden has offered no positive defence for retaining the objects at all but has continued to make the odd case that returning stolen goods might be some kind of woke gesture and to repeat his demeaning statements about the fitness of the original owners of these artefacts to look after them. In the Commons two weeks ago he said “…those institutions risk facing a barrage of claims for restitution, some of which may be encouraged more by virtue signalling”, “I can assure you that if we allow this Pandora’s box to open, we will regret it for generations to come as we see those artefacts being removed to countries where they may be less safe.” (our emphasis).

Meanwhile it must be a colossal wind-up for the former Culture Minister that institutions – including his own alma mater – are busy shipping artefacts home or making agreements to do so (Oxford, Cambridge and Aberdeen Universities, The Horniman Museum, Glasgow City Council and the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter to name just the most recent). Governments are acting too – a huge agreement between the German and Nigerian governments links development funding and trade with the return of over a thousand bronzes.

The government’s stance is intriguing but also puzzling, not least because it obviously hasn’t occurred to anyone that clinging to colonial-era loot, talking down to allies and potential trading partners (and Commonwealth members) and using shallow legalistic defences to profoundly moral appeals is not very ‘Global Britain’ and might just contribute to Britain’s growing isolation.

Dowden’s questions to the DCMS relate to a new law regulating charities. The law itself is not concerned with stolen artworks directly but the Charities Act 2022 introduces a new freedom for charitable bodies to to seek authorisation if they feel compelled ‘by a moral obligation’ to make a transfer of charity property (called in the act an ‘ex-gratia payment’).

This was meant to allow charities more flexibility in dealing with awkward bequests and the law, passed back in February, has not yet come into force. In the meantime, though, it’s occurred to ministers that this new flexibility could allow museums (which are usually charities) to apply to return stolen artworks.

Dowden’s fear is obviously that we could see a flood of applications from woke charity trustees who want to return items to their countries of origin on spurious ‘moral’ grounds. Current legislation makes it illegal for the national collections to do this, so the government has already decided to delay the implementation of the new law while they think about “the implications for the national collections.”

Dowden asked the Minister “if she will make an assessment of the potential impact of the implementation of sections 15 and 16 of the Charities Act 2022 on the ability of trustees of national museums […] to return collection items if they are motivated by a moral obligation.” What’s fascinating – and a bit dispiriting – about all this is that, for our MP, ‘moral obligation’ is a euphemism for ‘shallow woke virtue signalling’.

Is this going to be a big story in the two years between now and the next general election? Probably not. Will it keep Oliver Dowden in the news for a hot-button Culture Wars issue? Quite possibly.