The hot dog suited hordes: MPs and media alike are pretending they didn’t smash up the place
Owen Paterson is being turned into a victim by hacks across the spectrum and 'professionals' once again reveal they don't understand the Prime Minister's moral emptiness...
In the Bugsy Malone-style creamy splurge following Owen Paterson’s resignation, hacks from across the spectrum lined up to make him the victim not of his own actions but of the Prime Minister’s machinations and what the MP himself called the “cruel world of politics”.
Jayne Merrick, the i newspaper’s Policy Editor, tweeted:
Owen Paterson’s lobbying was wrong but if No 10/Tory Party had left this standards shenanigans alone he would’ve had his suspension and that would be that. They’ve made it 10x worse, having thrown their arms around him and u-turned. Huge duty of care issue. What a mess.
… and the Mirror’s Pippa Crerar piggybacked on her message with a quote-tweet saying:
Absolutely this. He was in the wrong but No 10 has failed abysmally in its duty of care to a distressed man.
That’s the same man who was crowing in victory across the pages of The Daily Telegraph this morning, having thought that Boris Johnson had succeded in getting him off the hook while also throwing a veil of fog over investigations about his own dubious financial dealings and the still emerging corruption around Covid contracts.1
Yesterday, Laura Kuenssberg called the vote to defend Paterson “a proper Westminster village story, but it's really important if you care about how MPs' actions and behaviour is monitored”. It was a hugely embarrassing bit of analysis from a BBC Political Editor with vast back catalogue of embarassments.
But things last night’s narrative unravelled this morning after the government, having seen the three-line whip imposed by the frontpage of The Daily Mail (its headline howled Shameless MPs Sink Back Into Sleaze), dispatched Jacob Reess Mogg in fright wig, red nose, and flapping shoes to execute a clown car u-turn in the middle of the House of Commons.
It was the Mail headline and its many pages dedicated to picking at the scab of last night’s vote that spooked the government into a rubber-burning retreat. It knew that it had The Daily Telegraph — the once and future home of Boris Johnson — on side, with angry editorials and soapy interviews in defence of Paterson.
And the Murdoch papers treated the story with kid gloves (“Made with real kids!”). It was relegated to The Sun’s page 2 graveyard behind a front page dedicated to ‘scoops’ about Countdown and Geoff Hurst’s pacemaker, while The Times went for a deceptive headline that focused on a still minor Tory rebellion rather than the bulk of the party rowing in behind the fix (“Tories rebel over vote to block MP’s suspension”)
In his ‘Waugh on Politics’ email newsletter this evening, Merrick’s colleague Paul Waugh takes a similarly sympathetic line on Paterson and accepts the spin drifting out of Number 10 writing:
Boris Johnson’s short tribute to Owen Paterson laid bare just why the Prime Minister had blundered into one of the biggest misjudgements of his political career. He said Paterson had been a “friend and colleague of mine for decades”, “an early and powerful champion of Brexit” who was now putting his “family first” after his wife’s suicide.
A misguided sense of loyalty to a fellow Leaver, plus the tragic backdrop to the finding of sleaze against the former minister, had driven Johnson into a botched attempt to change the rules that backfired spectacularly yesterday.
Allies say he acted “as a human behing” to the Paterson case, but the real problem was that he forgot he also needed to act as a statesman to uphold the principles of public life.
There are few groups of people as wallet inspected as the Westminster press pack but Waugh’s analysis is still strikingly naive for a ‘veteran’ of the game. That we are this far into Boris Johnson’s premiership and, indeed, his political career and still have senior political journalists writing as if he even remotely cares about such archaic words as “statesman” and “principles” is clown school stuff.
The analysis offered by British politics’ most consistently unreliable narrator Dom ‘the Mekon’ Cummings — rendered in his usual ‘a wonkish spider wanders over a keyboard’-style — is worth considering this time. He wrote prior to Paterson’s resignation that:
Part of the point of yesterday is the removal of K Stone. Most media ignored S Walters stories re Carrie's wallpaper/PM's illegal donations cos Carrie hands out so many leaks/exclusives. Yesterday was really about the PM & his own lies re illegal £ not OP
Geidt cd only do coverup by NOT interviewing those who know what actually happened in 2020 with the fake 'blind trust', secret illegal donations etc. If EC interviews ppl with perjury charges hanging, PM screwed
One simple thing even the dud Starmer shd be able to manage today: write to the Electoral Commission demanding that THEY interview those in No10 with knowledge of PM's illegal donations, incl the infamous wallpaper whatsapp group, with perjury charges for those shown to lie
Yesterday was a preemptive strike by PM on EC & Stone. Tory MPs are just expendable cannon fodder. This is about trying to keep secret the coverup earlier this year on his illegal donations & lies to Geidt and the Cabinet Secretary about it all #FOLLOWTHEMONEY
Parsing that through my patented Cummings decoder ring boils it down to this:
Boris Johnson was cynically — he rarely does anything without a dollop of cynicism in the mix — trying to exploit the unrighteous anger on the Tory backbenches about Paterson’s punishment and the emotion around the death of the MP’s wife to rid himself of a troublesome priest.
The Standards Commissioner, Katherine Stone, has repeatedly investigated the actions of the Prime Minister and he was using the Paterson case as a pretext to go after her. But The Daily Mail — which loves high horses and high dudgeon more than any other paper — went for him. Starmer, himself the recepient of several large donations that may not pass the sniff test, did not take decisive action but instead penned a wet wipe editorial in The Guardian.
For all the dramatic talk from over-caffeinated, under brain-celled hacks, about “cut through” and how yesterday was “the day standards in public life died” (they’ve had more deaths than Kenny from South Park, most of them as cartoonish and bad taste), the Paterson story will fade pretty quickly. The Daily Mail is outraged at Boris Johnson today, because it “loves the drama, Mick”, but it will rapidly row in behind the Tories the minute an election is called.
In a piece rushed online by The Times to capitalise on that ‘drama’ in parliament, Hobbiton’s least popular resident (even the Sackville-Bagginses won’t give him the time of day) and dreadful doyen of sketchwriters, Quentin Letts, writes:
Around two o’clock, Paterson quit. Labour delight. An hour or so later came the Claudia Webbe verdict. Labour’s glee evaporated and the Tories felt less glum, though they still ached for their friend Owen.
A cruel world? It’s that, all right. I can’t understand why anyone ever wants to enter it.
“Ached for their friend Owen”: That’s the man using his wife’s suicide as a means of discrediting a report into his own sleazy, pocket-lining behaviour. And for Letts, a man whose columns are a relentless stream of unkindness, misogyny, and cant, to talk about cruelty not only tortures irony but takes it out into the back garden and puts it out of its misery.
The phrase “one of these things is not like the other” comes to mind when hacks — and Letts is far from alone in making the elision — force together the cases of Paterson and Webbe. Paterson was found to have repeatedly and unrepentently exploited his role as an MP for personal gain.
Webbe has been found guilty of a crime outside parliament — harrassment — and given a suspended sentence, which has resulted in her expulsion from the Labour Party, a recall petition, and a call from the leadership to resign as an MP. She will not avoid punishment nor has Labour tried to protect or defend her.
Meanwhile, over at The Times, close friend of Lawrence Fox, heridary journalist and young pretender to Letts’ most disagreeable sketchwriter crown, Madeline Grant, concludes her piece by saying:
By mid-afternoon, Owen Paterson had fallen on his sword, triggering precisely the by-election the Government had wished to avoid, and with no end in sight for questions about standards in public life.
The omnishambles was complete. Who knows, it might even dent the Tories by half a percentage point in the opinion polls.
The implication of ‘honour’ on Paterson’s part further strips another word of meaning. But Grant’s chuckling denoument is honest: Tories think Johnson has screwed up but that the public won’t care. With Paterson resigned, the story will quickly fade from the headlines and the memory — aided by wet hacks talking about Johnson’s “loyalty” — will be that the Prime Minister tried to help a friend.
Paterson’s claim in his resignation letter that “…people, including MPs, publicly [mocked] and [derided] Rose’s death” is repeated in most of the news reports on his resignation. He is, I suspect, in part pointing to the derision shown by some opposition MPs when Boris Johnson made an exploitative reference to Rose Paterson’s death during PMQs. They were not mocking her death but responding angrily to Johnson’s typical opportunism.
Since the standards committee’s ruling against him, Paterson has used his wife’s death as a shield against criticism. It is grim, cheap, and dishonourable. But the British political media will fall for it.
Paterson will continue to be rehabilitated and the line taken by Crerar and Merrick — that he is a “distressed man owed a duty of care” — will become the common one. In a few months, Sunday supplement profiles will go heavy on his “work on suicide prevention” and make little, if any, mention of the money he’s making free from all that inconvenient scrutiny.
In his resignation statement, Paterson said, “I will remain a public servant but outside the cruel world of politics.” That line is being treated seriously by most hacks rather than with the spluttering derision it deserves. The ‘cruel’ world of politics did its best to protect Paterson from the mildest of sanctions while its actual cruelty is turned on ‘normal’ people all the time.
Priti Patel and Boris Johnson proposed the return of high-vis wearing chain gangs a few months ago but the idea that one of their own might be suspended from the House of Parliament for 30 days was enough to attempt to dismantle the already pitiful standards regime.
Practically all of the newspapers carried a story today about a drug addict with 210 convictions to his name who just happens to look slightly like Boris Johnson, in so far as they are both haggard looking men with a blonde mop of hair. The Sun’s report says:
Drug addict [Jason] Watson, 43, has 210 convictions to his name — but Boris Johnson, 57, has a much better record at No 10.
That’s Boris Johnson who has talked about taking cocaine in the past, colluded with his friend Darius Guppy — later convicted of fraud — in a plot to have a journalist beaten up, and associates with a wide range of suspect associates from sinister Lord Snooty cosplayer Jacob Rees-Mogg, billionaire phone hacking settlement funder Rupert Murdoch, and his many Russian donor tennis partners.
In I Think You Should Leave, Tim Robinson plays a character dressed in a hot dog suit driving a hot dog-shaped car who, having crashed through the front of a store, shouts that, “We're all trying to find the guy who did this and give him a spanking!” The British political establishment and the media figures who enable them are all dressed in hot dog suits today, all trying to find the guys who did this but conspring to ensure it’s never them who get the spanking.
Paterson has not suggested once that he will repay the money he made from his many egregious breaches of the lobbying laws. He is unrepentent and, when he thought he was winning yesterday, turned his guns on everyone else he thought should get the blame. Fully hot dog suited up, he’ll now be allowed to get away with it, allowed to rebrand as a victim and not a perpetrator.
Randox, which kept Paterson on a six-figure retainer, won a £133 million contract to produce Covid testing kits without having to bid. It later received a further £374 million government contract.