Oliver Dowden

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 and ethics’ team (22 people, we learn) actually does.

We’ve watched it half a dozen times (for we really do need to get out more) and can honestly say that we still have no idea. Grade-A flannel, almost perfect obfuscation (and much disingenuous use of the “I wouldn’t want to prejudice the ongoing inquiry…” defence).

Oliver Dowden – peak Parliamentary flannel

Dowden so effectively frustrates the efforts of the committee chair William Wragg and senior member John McDonnell to find out what that 22-person team would actually do in the event of a ‘flag’ being raised about a Minister’s conduct (like, for instance, if the HMRC alerted the previous Prime Minister to an incoming Minister’s off-shore tax arrangements) that they’re driven back to questions about ‘departmental efficiency’ in no time.

We’ve pointed out many times in the past what a good soldier Dowden is. He can be sent into a situation like this, fraught with political peril, and emerge unscathed, brushing down his suit and moving briskly on to the next messy situation.

We continue to think that a loyal consigliere like Dowden is not cut out for a role at the very top of politics but he could easily continue to circle around the leadership – cleaning up after ministerial indiscretions and digging metaphorical graves – indefinitely (or until the revolving door beckons). A survivor.

The rest of Dowden’s testimony to the committee concerned cost cutting in the civil service (yes to that, apparently), the declining happiness of civil servants (yes to that too). They’re miserable, mainly because their salaries have actually gone down in the last 11 years – strikes are planned. Karin Smyth grills the Minister and his Permanent Secretary on civil contingencies (disasters, terrorism etc.). It is claimed that there’s a new approach to risk so the next time the balloon goes up there’ll be less administrative panic.

The Coronation Claims Office comes up – someone has to be responsible for the comicbook anachronism of Crown ceremonial – and it is Oliver Dowden. He has some more flannel about the obligation of the state to fund the upcoming coronation, apparently forgetting that for almost the whole history of the British Monarchy coronations were not state affairs and required no government money.

The department’s annual report and accounts was scrutinised – and in particular a big increase in costs. Chisholm pins most of the extra cost on big events – Cop26 in Glasgow, a G7, the Grenfell Inquiry etc.

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

We learn that Dowden, on taking up his new role, led an ‘open session’ with civil servants at which he invited them to share their concerns about pay and conditions (just trying to imagine what it was like to attend that open session is making us twitch).

John McDonnell raises some pretty grim data about poverty amongst the lowest-paid civil servants (8% have used a foodbank). Dowden insists that there will be no improvement to this year’s 2% pay increase.

There’s an entertaining vignette illustrating the way the current government’s effort to push back against ‘woke culture’ in the civil service is failing. Ronnie Cowan (SNP) quotes one of Dowden’s predecessors in his role (Jacob Rees-Mogg no less) insisting that all training involving the words ‘diversity, wellness and inclusion’ be cancelled. Permanent Secretary Alex Chisholm responds: “the diversity and inclusion strategy is a core part of what the government does and has indeed been renewed twice by subsequent ministers.” The blob pushes back.

Useful Cabinet Office explainer from the Institute for Government.
The digital team inside Parliament is famously good. Their online coverage of Parliamentary debates, committees etc. is really exemplary. An important window on the operation of government and legislature.
The House of Commons Library has just published a fascinating research briefing about coronation history and ceremonial.

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.

Richard Sharp, Chairman of the BBC — Richard Sharp, once Rishi Sunak’s boss, now Chairman of the BBC

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 mega-donor Richard Sharp Chairman of the BBC – the choice of BBC Chair is made by the Prime Minister, there’s an ‘appointments panel’ involved and the formal responsibility actually belongs to the monarch.

And this is obviously not a new tactic. It would be wrong to give the Conservative government too much credit here. Packing the boards of state (and quasi-state) organisations with allies is best practice for governments in a hurry everywhere. It’s not even a particularly bad thing – we’ve got a list of people we’d like appointed to the boards of various institutions ourselves (let us know if you’re interested in seeing it, we can meet up at your club).

What’s new and interesting about this government is how closely connected all the players are and how apparently shameless they are about their intentions. The government is not appointing dull technocrats here. They’re appointing ambitious Flashman figures who they hope will briskly transform the institutions they’re inserted into. Sharp is son of an ennobled business titan himself, and a millionaire many times over (it seems almost redundant to add that he was once Rishi Sunak’s boss). He wasn’t put into the BBC to give the books a once-over, he’s meant to be turning the place upside-down. And his appointment was managed in a pretty single-minded way – Boris Johnson made sure everyone knew well in advance that Sharp was the preferred candidate.

Anyway, the story of the £800,000 loan guarantee, broken by The Times, is a complicated, dispiriting mess. We won’t try to summarise it in any detail here (you can read it yourself) but you won’t be surprised to learn that it’s got the grubby fingerprints of the Johnson era all over it. There’s the usual dense web of old friends and top jobs and undeclared relationships.

The phrase “…there is no known precedent of a prime minister selecting an individual [for the BBC job] who was simultaneously helping them with their personal finances.” really jumps out of the article.

The story involves Cabinet Secretary Simon “Partygate” Case (obvs); Sam Blyth, a distant cousin of Boris Johnson (who we learn was chasing a top job at the British Council himself); an enormous loan from an unknown source that the head of the civil service, when consulted, decided didn’t need to be declared. Lord Geidt, the independent adviser on ethics who later resigned over another scandal, was also involved.

A nice detail from the Times story involves Johnson, Sharp and Blyth (the man who guaranted the loan) sharing chop suey and wine at Chequers (chop suey?) before the loan was finalised, and a couple of months before Richard Sharp was appointed Chairman of the BBC. We don’t know what they talked about but Sharp says it wasn’t the Prime Minister’s financial difficulties, the loan or the BBC job.

The web of connections is dense – and goes back a long way. This post from the On London blog connects the dots.

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

Photograph of an empty meeting room with a flipchart and a large boardroom table — An empty meeting room like the one in which Oliver Dowden hasn’t been holding his strikes taskforce meetings

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 parliament and that almost 90% of it went to Tories. We already knew about Dowden’s extra income but it was interesting to learn that his twenty-five grand* barely gets him into the top 35% of all MPs – although, according to Byline Times, Dowden is also one of ten MPs – all Tories, of course – who have taken jobs with party donors in the last year.

It’s all culture wars all the time. Have you noticed that whenever things get bad for this Conservative government – strikes, small boats, sexual predators in the police, flatlining economy – they seem to develop a heightened interest in university radicals and unisex toilets? This time the Scottish Parliament has provided a handy opportunity for Sunak’s government to win some culture wars points. Oliver Dowden has a role here – he’s been asked by the Prime Minister to appoint an ‘Anti-Woke Czar’ to clamp down on political correctness in universities. Expect much more of this in coming weeks. It’s all they’ve got.

The strikes taskforce is apparently on strike. In December Dowden was appointed head of the government’s Winter of Discontent taskforce. There were a couple of TV appearances but since then it looks like he hasn’t actually done anything. We’ve continued to research this and we still can’t find any meetings, new policies, announcements or action of any kind, in fact (if you’ve spotted any activity from the taskforce do let us know in a comment. We’ll update this post). Our MP has also been out defending the government’s proposed new anti-strike legislation while the rest of us wonder how threatening nurses with the sack can possibly help resolve the deepest crisis in our public services in decades.

Clinging to the loot. Oliver Dowden opposes the return of stolen artworks – Benin bronzes, Acropolis friezes and so on – appearing on the telly, making it all part of his anti-woke campaign, writing stern letters to the museums and so on. Meanwhile, the museums are just getting on with it, finding clever ways around the government’s rules and sending artworks home anyway. There’s even been progress in the gnarliest of disagreements – the one between the Greeks and the British Museum. The new Culture Secretary, Michelle Donelan, has returned to the matter, and is also insisting that artworks must not be returned. This one is going to run and run.

* To clarify, as we reported here, some of Oliver Dowden’s money in this parliament has come from Caxton Associates, the Mayfair hedge fund known to have made money from shorting the pound and for bankrolling Liz Truss’s short-lived assault on rationality last year. Some has come from the slightly less notorious South Hertfordshire Business Club – a club with no web site, no staff, no premises, no accounts and, apparently, no members (looks like it shares an address with the St Albans Conservative Association). According to the Electoral Commission, though, the club has given £82,741.09 to Hertsmere Tories since 2017. Details in this spreadsheet. And more here about the very careful timing of Dowden’s second jobs.

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 minister with a roving brief, would be put in charge of the Prime Minister’s strikes task-force and that he’d be chairing meetings of the government’s COBRA emergency committee to work out a plan of action.

It’s not clear if Oliver Dowden has ever seen the inside of the Cabinet Office Briefing Room

Since then, we assume Westminster’s been quiet for Christmas and we understand he has chaired two or three meetings but it’s hard to tell. It’s always difficult to be absolutely certain about COBRA meetings, since they’re supposed to be secret and minutes won’t be released for decades. There was some minimal briefing about the first meeting and subsequently Dowden was said to be ‘resolute‘. Since then we’ve heard nothing. To summarise:

The only concrete action associated with Oliver Dowden’s role managing the government’s response to the strikes that we can find is the drafting in of the military – although that had actually been planned in detail weeks before Dowden got the job.
There have been no announcements of any further actions from Dowden’s COBRA meetings (we can’t be sure they’ve even happened).
The task-force has no formal status, no terms of reference. It doesn’t have a web page. There isn’t even a press release (nothing to link to at all). No detail of who attends has been published and we don’t know if it will meet again.
The strikes have continued. More are now planned for the new year. Dowden’s task-force hasn’t apparently done anything, either to advance negotiations or to mitigate the effects of strikes. It’s what the Americans would call a ‘nothing burger’, a pure publicity confection. In fact, we’re ready to bet that we’ll never hear another word about the strikes task-force.

So, the fact that Dowden, sole proprietor of the government’s non-existent response to Sunak’s Winter of Discontent, has also been put in charge of the government’s longer-term ‘resilience strategy’, is perhaps not as reassuring as the government would have hoped, although the fact that this task actually does have a web page might suggest that it’s a bit more than a nothing burger, that it might actually produce some action.

On the other hand, putting a Cabinet Office minister who has no formal portfolio but at least a dozen other jobs in charge of preparation for disaster instead of, say, a Minister of State, suggests a certain lack of seriousness. Are you reassured to learn that your MP, the part-time Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, is responsible for coordinating Britain’s response to, you know, super-volcanoes, drought, bird flu, state cyber-attacks, terrorism?

That this government has routinely cut or scrapped investment in preparation for unfortunate events – including flooding – sat on a 2016 report about pandemic preparedness and actually scrapped a Cabinet committee that was planning for a pandemic six months before the big one might also suggest that they’re not really concentrating.

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

Lance Corporal Michael Tweedie-Smith swaps his helmet for a Santa hat as he and his fellow Reservist soldiers from the 3rd & 4th Battalions of the Princess of Wales's Royal Regiment sit down to a treat of a Christmas lunch served in the cook house at Longmoor Camp. The festive fun marked the culmination of the units' final weekend of intensive training for 2022. Who: 3rd & 4th Battalion Princess of Wales's Royal Regiment What: Traditional Christmas lunch served by officers to troops Where: Longmoor Training Camp When: Sunday 4th December 2022 — They’re ready

It’s difficult to put your finger on Oliver Dowden’s charm. He doesn’t have the convincing military bearing of a Penny Mordaunt or the “do I look bothered?” insouciance of a David Cameron or the weird magnetism of a Michael Gove. If you were going to pick a Minister to put up against a million furious public service workers who haven’t had a pay rise in twelve years we suspect Dowden wouldn’t be your first choice.

On Laura Kuenssberg’s Sunday morning programme the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster didn’t offer any immediate explanation for how he got the job but we do know he’s a close friend of Rishi Sunak and has a reputation as a diligent ‘fixer’. “I have to say we will be resolute in response to this…” he said, resolutely.

Of course, Dowden won’t be fixing policy himself or negotiating with the unions directly. His job is to provide some kind of contingency response to the strikes – we understand he chaired another COBRA meeting this morning, his third. So far 1,200 troops have been assigned to cover for ambulance drivers and border guards over Christmas, although it looks like this was arranged before Dowden became involved. The Minister’s response to the emergency mostly involves showing up in TV studios on time.

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

Dowden’s main point in the Kuenssberg interview (and in others over the weekend) – that the government cannot move on wages because it must honour the independent pay review bodies’ various proposals – fell apart immediately. We know that the government regularly ignores statutory pay reviews. We can’t think of a good reason to make an exception of the nurses or the school teachers.

And, it turns out, the independent pay review bodies are not all that independent. They’re issued with detailed instructions by ministers for each annual pay round. The Health Secretary’s latest instructions to the NHS body are pretty clear, for instance: “it is particularly important that you also have regard to the government’s inflation target when forming recommendations.” On LBC Nick Ferrari was gobsmacked to learn that the members of the ‘independent’ pay review bodies are actually appointed by the Prime Minister or by the relevant Secretary of State.

More to the point, the government can and does impose hard limits on the pay increases that may be proposed. The current Conservative government did exactly this, in fact, in 2011 and 2012, as part of the austerity regime. This explains why real pay in the public services hasn’t risen since before the financial crisis.

In the interview Dowden also said that nurses on the lowest grades have been offered a 9.3% rise. It’s actually 5.5%. Other ministers and backbenchers have been using the bigger number too – it actually applies to non-nursing grades. It must be in some kind of briefing pack they’ve been given.

Meanwhile, Conservative backbenchers have noticed that the government seems to be painting itself into a corner on public service pay. Unions have been telegraphing for weeks that their members would probably accept offers somewhere between the current low-ball proposals and their published demands (in Scotland union members are already voting on offers). Jake Berry, like Oliver Dowden a former Chairman of the Party, says the government will have to “improve its offer“. It looks like there’s a political win on the table for the Tories – an affordable offer that acknowledges a decade of real-terms pay cuts and increasing hardship and lifts the threat of a new Winter of Discontent. Is Rishi a mature enough leader to take the opportunity? Does his fixer have the courage to tell him to?

The BBC has details of all the proposed December strikes.
This useful article from the Institute for Government explains the workings of the pay review bodies.

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

Some of the Parthenon marbles in their current location in the British Museum in London — The Parthenon marbles awaiting return to Greece

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 and galleries that currently hold them.

As Minister he refused appeals from institutions and governments who wanted their artefacts back and opposed all efforts by trustees and directors to open negotiations or to transfer artefacts. In a notorious letter sent to heads of national collections in September 2020 he carefully connected removing statues of slavers with returning stolen art – classifying both as ‘contested heritage’ and insisting that Government-funded bodies “should not be taking actions motivated by activism or politics.”

More recently, UK institutions have begun negotiations or have actually returned items. The Horniman museum in South London returned six Benin bronzes last month and Cambridge University has agreed to return 116. Both made use of a provision in a new charities law that allows institutions to ‘deaccession’ items when they perceive there is a ‘moral obligation’ to do so. Mr Dowden doesn’t like this provision and has been asking questions about it in Parliament. Dowden thinks that woke museums may be ‘virtue signalling’ when they agree to return looted items to places “…where they may be less safe.”

Meanwhile, national collections (like the British Museum and the V&A) can’t make use of this provision because they’re bound by another law, the British Museum Act of 1963, which explicitly prohibits return of artefacts. When Culture Secretary, Dowden hoped to suppress this kind of worthy posturing by packing boards of trustees and opposing the appointment of anyone with ‘decolonisation’ on their CVs.

One of his appointments was George Osborne, former Chancellor and the man who brought Britain nine years of austerity – including harsh cuts to museum funding – inserted as Chairman of the British Museum’s board in 2021. Everyone’s assumption was that this appointment would mark a change of direction for the museum – with more pride in the museum’s colonial history and less shame about the awkward provenance of its collection. The Guardian called it ‘a startling jolt‘ and wondered ‘can it it really have come to this?’ As recently as November George Osborne asserted that the great collections ‘would not be permanently broken up‘ but did acknowledge that loans of objects might be possible.

Things are obviously moving quickly now, though. Dowden’s been demoted, resigned and promoted again since then and Osborne is showing signs of having gone native at the BM. We learn, from a Greek report quoted by the Art Newspaper, that he’s actually been in secret discussions with the Greek Culture Ministry, which has long campaigned for the unconditional return of the Parthenon marbles. It looks like a permanent loan might see the marbles taken to the Acropolis Museum, where a specially-built, climate-controlled gallery has been waiting (a loan would allow the museum to get around the tricky provisions of the 1963 law). Experts say that the British Museum’s increasingly ramshackle accommodation risks damaging the marbles and a refurbishment means they’ll have to move soon anyway. Some galleries at the museum are in such poor condition that they’ve had to be closed and one of Osborne’s other priorities is to raise one billion pounds (yes, a billion) to fix the leaky roof and crumbling walls.

It’s safe to say that Dowden’s bluster in the media and public bullying of the institutions haven’t really paid off. The galleries don’t want to be recruited to the Culture Wars and the momentum for return is building. There’s a British campaign group working to return the Parthenon marbles, more museums are opening negotiations and influential Parliamentarians are applying pressure. Lord Vaizey, also a former Culture Secretary, is pursuing a campaign through the House of Lords. Let’s face it, it’s about time.

There’s an interesting episode of the Art Newspaper’s podcast about the secret negotiations. The world of galleries and museums is very excited about this story. It represents a breakthrough in a decades-long impasse.
On Nick Robinson’s Political Thinking podcast Dowden makes a passionate defence of keeping statues of slavers and murderous colonists on display (but stops short of Jimmy Savile).

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 wretched nurses and posties. The committee will meet once more this week.

Sounds like there wasn’t much to discuss. Dowden doesn’t have many options: how to deploy a maximum of 2,000 troops available to him and whether civil servants and agency workers might be persuaded to break strikes. Well over a million workers will strike or are balloting to strike in December and January – rail workers, ambulance drivers, Eurostar crews, bus drivers, highways workers, baggage handlers, postal workers, nurses, driving examiners and civil servants – so the government’s emergency measures will be mainly symbolic.

A photo of the secret UK government Cabinet Office Briefing Rooms beneath Whitehall, showing a large conference table and a wall of monitors. This is the only photo that exists of the facility - released by the government in response to a FOI request in 2010. — The only photo that exists of the secret Cabinet Office Briefing Rooms

We know that 600 military drivers have been asked to “familiarise themselves with vehicles” so they can drive ambulances for the 21 and 28 December strikes. 10,000 drivers will be on strike on those days and they have promised to continue to provide emergency cover so it’s not clear how much the troops will be able to help – probably mostly photo opportunities. Dowden’s press team has been sending out robust quotes, of course. He’s ‘straining every sinew’ apparently (in Scotland there’ll be no strike because nurses have accepted an average 7.5% pay increase).

We’re in the phase of the crisis when Ministers stamp their feet and talk tough. On the BBC’s Today programme this morning, Transport Minister Mark Harper insisted that rail workers must accept what he euphemistically calls ‘reform’ while also insisting that the negotiations are nothing to do with him, guv. Justin Webb tried to get Harper to confirm a Financial Times story that he’s been blocking a deal that was acceptable to the unions. The Minister flannelled manfully but essentially accepted the assertion (and used the word ‘reform’ 15 times as he did so). ‘Reform’ is a persistent theme across all the current disputes, of course – the Uberisation of postal services that Simon Thompson proposes, the privatisation of NHS services that Sunak and other Ministers continue to advocate. Pay and conditions are not the only things on the table this Winter.

Meanwhile, it might – or it might not – reassure you to know that, in his Cabinet Office role, Oliver Dowden is also responsible for the government’s wider resilience planning – you know, plagues, energy crises, Winter weather. He answers questions in Parliament on the subject and says things like: “The national resilience framework will be the first iteration of our new strategic approach. It will strengthen the systems, structures and capabilities that underpin the UK’s resilience to all risks.” The new framework was actually first announced back in August by the previous incumbent Kit Malthouse. It’s difficult to know how much confidence to invest in a new ‘resilience framework’ from the people who brought you over 200,000 Covid deaths, a near-death bond market crisis, Michelle Mone and an epidemic of child poverty. Perhaps we should wait and see.

A 15-minute profile of Oliver Dowden from BBC Radio 4.

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 delivery of the Government’s priorities, oversight of all Cabinet Office policy, oversight of civil contingencies and resilience (inc. COBR), national security including cyber security, oversight of Cabinet Office business planning, oversight of major events, propriety and ethics, oversight of cabinet work on science, technology, and innovation, including oversight of the Office of Science and Technology Strategy (OSTS), public appointments, honours and the GREAT campaign.

This long list will suit Oliver Dowden. It’s evident that he likes to be in the thick of it and, during his years in various bagman roles for his party, he’s developed a reputation as a ‘fixer’, an operator. He’s the new Michael Gove.

Now that the balloon’s gone up

Dowden’s first combat mission sees him taking command of the Prime Minister’s new industrial action taskforce. There’s nothing on the government’s website about the taskforce yet so we can’t be 100% sure what it’s called. The Daily Mail is calling it a Winter of Discontent Unit while trade paper Personnel Today has gone with Strike Response Unit. Either way, it’s obviously a high-risk job – and more evidence that Dowden is ready to get his hands dirty. You really don’t want to carry the ‘Minister for the Winter of Discontent’ label around with you for the rest of your career if it goes badly.

With union membership climbing, public support for strikes at its highest level for decades and the public service workers comfortably on the moral high ground, there’s a chance that Captain Dowden will find himself supervising a chaotic retreat. Remember, only one government in UK history has been brought down by industrial action and it was a Tory government during a cost-of-living crisis. Just saying.

A few ideas for how to deal with runaway strikes have emerged so far and there are some old chestnuts. What are Dowden’s options in his battle with the nurses, border guards, ambulance drivers and fire-fighters?

The military option

At any one time no more than a few thousand soldiers are available to cover for striking workers. Even fewer are qualified to do specialist jobs like driving ambulances or nursing the sick. There’s some hurried training going on but a lot of people are going on strike (at least 100,000 RCN nurses for a start). It’s hard to know what impact the soldiers can have across the whole public sector. History shows that bringing the army in is mostly about the symbolism. Incidentally, according to the Independent, the government’s crash course apparently takes in non-military volunteers, so if you’d like to add ‘strike-breaking’ to your CV, you might want to drop Oliver Dowden a line. Perhaps there’s a VIP lane.

The military option is risky. Nothing says ‘crisis’ better than pictures of soldiers fighting fires and staffing A&E departments on the TV news. And when they’re covering for workers who have high levels of public support there’s a strong chance it’ll make things worse, dialling up the tension and antagonising ordinary people. Captain Dowden might fancy himself at the head of a column of green goddesses, or saluting the troops as he strides purposefully into a hastily erected field hospital, but Britons don’t generally like to see the military on the streets unless it’s a parade.

Making it harder to strike

In this country we routinely talk about the right to strike – and it’s a meaningful phrase but in Britain there’s no such right. No law protects the right to withdraw your labour and, in the absence of a written constitution, there’s no resort to fundamental rights. This is why it’s so easy for governments to withdraw or diminish the ability to strike.

We think of the Thatcher era as the golden age of anti-worker legislation – between 1980 and 1993, Conservative governments passed six acts of Parliament limiting workers’ power to go on strike – but the last 100 years in Britain have seen an almost uninterrupted succession of efforts to contain and frustrate the freedom of workers to take action. From the 1927 Trade Disputes and Trade Union Act, which stopped ‘sympathy strikes’ (and also made it harder for unions to give money to the Labour Party), to Barbara Castle’s 1974 Trade Union and Labour Relations Act, which introduced compulsory strike ballots, to Tony Blair’s Employment Relations Act that was supposed to guarantee union recognition but actually did nothing of the sort.

More recently, the present government’s 2016 Act introduced new obstacles to calling strikes and was meant to make moments like this impossible. If these rules had existed during the original Winter of Discontent many of the strikes would have been illegal. An awkward fact for the government is that the unions have risen to the challenge – administering hundreds of votes across multiple employers, complying with all of the new rules to the letter and winning big majorities for action. In the most recent RMT vote the turnout was 71% and 89% voted to strike. The Royal College of Nursing had to run separate postal votes for over 200 NHS trusts plus other providers and even where votes did not reach the threshold for action huge numbers of nurses voted to strike. This was not supposed to happen and if decent wage offers are not forthcoming there’s every prospect of future strikes in areas that voted not to on this occasion.

The government’s response, of course, is more legislation. A bill to provide for ‘minimum service levels’ will reach Parliament in the new year and it may be expanded to ban ‘blue light strikes’ all together. The concern for Sunak must be that suppressing the expression of workers’ anger and desperation by banning strikes can do nothing to improve his electoral prospects. Unhappy workers are unhappy voters.

Agencies and strike-breakers

Legislation that allows employers to bring in agency workers to cover for strikers was hastily introduced earlier this year but the government has now said that commercial health companies will be invited to provide cover too. Both tricky, of course, especially in schools and the NHS, where there’s grass-roots support for strikers and where agency staff may find they’re unwelcome. Some agency suppliers have said they don’t want to be involved in strike-breaking and private hospitals may not want to see pickets in their leafy grounds. Strike breaking in Britain is part of the folk memory, of course. A ‘volunteer police force’ was got up to suppress strikes in Liverpool in 1911. During the General Strike The Times rallied volunteers to join an oddball group of toffs and fascists called The Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies, which sounds kind of like Dad’s Army in black shirts.

Anyway, in case the Minister is planning to make his name by recruiting a volunteer force of his own we’d like to put it on record now that it ought to be called ‘Dowden’s Fusiliers’.

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

Looking out through a revolving door at the entrance to an office building, the street visible outside - by Bradley Huchteman on Flickr — A revolving door – Bradley Huchteman

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 that many in his party enjoy. Perhaps it’s because he didn’t come into politics via the Eton -> Oxford -> City of London pipeline. He started without the thick address book of boardroom connections and pals in Belgravia investment funds that so many old-school Tory MPs rely on.

We won’t claim to have kept a very close eye on Mr Dowden’s entries in the register of members’ interests but we can’t recall any dodgy sources of funding or spectacular bungs or ‘dark money’ – and, of course, he entered Parliament years after the expenses scandal and decades after the torrid era of cash for questions and the golden age of Tory sleaze. Clean hands.

So Dowden’s constituents haven’t had to worry about all the mysterious payments, holidays on private islands, research trips to exotic locations or even the usual long list of directorships and advisory roles that other Tory MPs go in for. He’s been a hard-working representative for Hertsmere and he’s not been closely associated with any of the scandals and screw-ups that have ripped through his party and the government in the last few years. Perhaps it was naive to expect a rising home counties MP to stay out of all this indefinitely, though. The pressure on any MP, especially when you’ve just voluntarily given up your Ministerial salary, must be real.

Dowden’s latest entry in the register records what might be an important rite of passage – his first decent-sized payment from a hedge fund. £8,398 from Caxton Associates LP in Berkeley Square for twelve hours of ‘policy advice’ provided between 24 September and 24 October 2022 (that’s an hourly rate of £700).

The dates here are important. When a minister (or a senior civil servant) wants to take up a paying job or a role that might cause a conflict of interest, they first have to consult with the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments, ‘an advisory non-departmental public body’, sponsored by the Cabinet Office. Oliver Dowden evidently did this after his resignation as Co-Chairman of the Conservative Party and Minister without Portfolio on 24 June. The committee’s advice (a seven-page letter) makes it clear that there would have to be a clear three months between stepping down as a Minister and taking up the Caxton role. You won’t need us to calculate for you that 24 September is exactly three months after Dowden’s resignation.

Of course, this is also why Dowden’s contract with Caxton ended on 24 October, the day before he took up his present role as a Cabinet Office Minister in Rishi Sunak’s cabinet.

So why would a hedge fund want a back-bench MP on the payroll, even if only for a month? ‘Duh’, you might say. But, in this case, the answer’s in the kind of hedge fund we’re talking about. Caxton Associates is a ‘global macro hedge fund’, a fund whose job is closely connected to politics. Investopedia says:

Global macro hedge funds are actively managed funds that attempt to profit from broad market swings caused by political or economic events. Global macro hedge funds are market bets around economic events. Investors use financial instruments to create short or long positions based on the outcomes they predict as a result of their research. A market bet on an event can cover a wide variety of assets and instruments including options, futures, currencies, index funds, bonds, and commodities. The goal is to find the right mix of assets to maximize returns if the predicted outcome occurs.
Investopedia

All hedge funds protect investors from risk by making bets that will pay off if things go wrong. Macro hedge funds like Caxton protect their clients from the policies and actions of governments – particularly when they affect interest rates, currency movements, equity and bond markets – by making clever bets against them. Some hedge funds are said to have made enormous sums from betting against (‘shorting’) the pound and the UK economy after Kwasi Kwarteng threw everything in the air.

Caxton Associates’ boss, Andrew Law, is a major Tory donor who supported Liz Truss’s campaign for the leadership and happens also to have hosted the famous 23 September cocktail party – on the evening of the mini budget – that Kwarteng attended. It’s assumed that Dowden wasn’t invited to that party, of course, although his engagement with Law’s hedge fund began on the next day.

How all this works is a mystery to us. How Dowden, a card-carrying member of the anti-growth coalition, a Sunak supporter who vocally opposed Liz Truss, winds up advising a hedge fund that supported her campaign, literally the day after the catastrophic mini budget, is likely to remain mysterious. The ACOBA letter says it was ‘updated on 22 November’ but it’s not clear when Dowden informed the committee that he intended to take up the Caxton job. Perhaps he applied for the job after his resignation from Johnson’s cabinet but before he made his opposition to team Truss’s voodoo economics public. Perhaps hedge funds don’t care much about the political complexion of the politicians they pay for.

We’re tempted to speculate that a short period out of office like this – Dowden’s first since he was appointed Paymaster General in July 2019 – offers an opportunity for a generous supporter like Andrew Law to funnel some funds into an MP’s bank account in a way they haven’t been allowed to during his period in Ministerial office. It’s certainly hard to imagine Dowden sitting down to provide twelve hours of policy advice during that torrid month.

And this is before we even get to Pierce Protocols Limited, an interesting ‘art services’ firm founded in 2005 that provides publishing and technology services for artists and is also involved in the febrile world of NFTs (cryptographically unique artworks), employing 66 people and turning over £19.8M in 2021. Under the brand name Heni the firm publishes monographs and editions of prints by famous artists like Gerhard Richter, Gilbert & George and Sabine Moritz. Most of the company’s income comes from the editions. In 2021 there was a modest profit. The company has also provided the crypto technology behind Damien Hirst’s latest stunt The Currency.

According to the register, beginning on the same day as his payments from the hedge fund (remember the three-month rule?), Pierce Protocols began to pay Oliver Dowden £5,000 per month, for eight to ten hours of work (still a pretty decent hourly rate of between £500 and £625), ‘until further notice’, although the payments also stopped when our MP was appointed to the Sunak cabinet (there’s an ACOBA letter about this job too). We’re inclined to use the word ‘mysterious’ again here because, well, to be honest, the Damien Hirst-Oliver Dowden connection is not one we expected to be writing about right now. We certainly would not have guessed, back when Dowden was walking the leafy streets of his constituency, eulogising privet hedges, that a role in the trendy art world was in his future. But perhaps getting a former Culture Secretary on the books might be considered a win for any business at the cutting edge of the art business and shouldn’t be considered mysterious at all.

The Guardian has run with the story of Oliver Dowden’s relationship with Caxton – another rite of passage for squeaky clean Dowden
The register of members’ interests is an interesting beast – evolving since it was first set up in 1974, especially after the cash for questions scandal and the Nolan Report that followed it. This article from the Institute for Government explains its function.
The register itself is on the Parliament web site and is updated twice per month. It’s interesting that in an era of openness and transparency, the register has been kept as a complicated tree of chronologically-organised documents that’s not easy to interrogate.
ACOBA, the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments, is the body that advises Ministers on appointments like Dowden’s jobs with Caxton and Pierce. In principle the committee is meant to police the ‘revolving door’ between government and business. Some think that in practice they mainly politely hold the door.

Defending the indefensible

Media training for Ministers of the Crown must now include excusing the indiscretions of people you probably think are beneath contempt

Sir Gavin Williamson MP behind a big desk with a union flag behind him — Boris Johnson literally knighted this man

In the past, when ministers broke the rules, made egregious errors or just royally embarrassed themselves, the routine was fairly simple. You resigned sharpish and – depending on the severity of your offence – were cast into outer darkness (the House of Lords), left politics all together or, in the fullness of time were rehabilitated and reinserted to the cabinet as if nothing had happened (sometimes more than once).

More recently, in the period, roughly speaking, between the beginning of the coalition government in 2010 and the chaos of Brexit, the routine changed. Something about the rise of populism, the bracing free-for-all of the new politics, means the norms have been rewritten. Now, when disgraced, a politician can be expected to cling to power – sometimes for months on end, sometimes indefinitely – with the petulance of a haughty toddler. The honourable resignation, the dignified retreat from public life – these are now thought to be signs of political weakness, hopelessly outdated remnants of a prissier political era. Only wimps resign.

For the muscular populists of the post-political era, the polite traditions of 20th Century politics are not just an inconvenience, they’re part of the problem. Decorum, sobriety, propriety – all are no longer sources of legitimacy but evidence of establishment paralysis. Trashing political norms is not incidental to the project – it’s fundamental. And it’s a self-reproducing behaviour. Once a majority of pols are responding to crises in this way it becomes essentially impossible to do so in the old way. When politics shifts and everyone around you is shameless, resigning when found out becomes essentially unpolitical, unstrategic. You’d look like a mug so you hang on until the storm passes (or you’re literally forced onto a plane home to be publicly fired).

So a necessary part of the new routine is the ritual interrogation of the miscreant’s colleagues. It’s an accepted part of the job. Whoever shows up in the studio to answer questions about that day’s big story will, as a matter of routine, be asked to justify the errant minister’s continued presence in the cabinet. There’s a fairly static repertoire of responses – “it would be wrong to pre-judge the official inquiry”, “the minister has apologised and is now 100% focused on delivery of the government’s ambitious programme”, “the minister has the full support of the Prime Minister.”

UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's cabinet, seated around the cabinet table in Number 10 in October 2022

Given the size of a modern cabinet – (31 ministers attend Rishi Sunak’s cabinet) – there’s always at least one minister in disgrace. In recent times it’s regularly been two or three and, in the remarkable period that came to a close in August, it was often the Prime Minister himself. So the likelihood you’ll be grilled about a colleague’s indiscretions is high. You need to be across the story. In the official car on the way to the studio the minister is reading papers about their own brief, about wider policy and about the antisocial behaviour of a fellow minister. It’s all in a day’s work.

Oliver Dowden is thrilled to be asked about Gavin Williamson

So when our MP Oliver Dowden showed up in Laura Kuenssberg’s studio on Sunday he had to have the Gavin Williamson story down pat. The timing of his appointment to his current role, the status of the inquiry launched when Wendy Morton made her complaint, whether or not the Prime Minister had seen the screenshots of Williamson’s latest outburst. All committed to memory – the man’s a pro. Williamson, who was knighted by Boris Johnson after an earlier sequence of screw-ups (remember the lockdown exam chaos, the one-sided row with Marcus Rashford over feeding poor kids – and the Maro Itoje mix-up, of course – and that Department of Defence leak?), at least nominally reports to Dowden, so that must make it all a bit more real. In the interview Dowden made use of a fairly flimsy ‘heat of the moment’ defence and made the slightly ungracious implication that nobody liked Wendy Morton anyway (“it was no secret that Gavin Williamson, and others indeed, didn’t enjoy a good relationship with the Chief Whip at the time…”).

Williamson’s texts to the Chief Whip, of course, are probably a blessed relief for the government, keeping the Home Secretary’s more consequential string of cock-ups off the front page for a day or two. But the clock is ticking.