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For obvious reasons why it has been the coronavirus and Brexit that have been dominating the news agenda in recent months. But No. 10 has been concerned that the public may get the impression that it is only the Department of Health and Welfare and the Brexit negotiating wing of the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster that are incompetent. So to further the idea that he is running an all-talentless government, Boris Johnson is now willing to make it clear that the Home Office and the Foreign Office are capable of being equally misled.
This week we learned that the Ministry of the Interior had submitted proposals to establish an asylum seeker detention center on Ascension Island. Worried that people might think that sending people by boat to the South Atlantic was actually a sensible idea, the government hastily leaked a bunch of other even more stupid ideas that were being considered.
First, there was the possibility of detention centers in Morocco, Moldova and Papua New Guinea, despite the fact that none of the three countries had expressed any enthusiasm for the idea. Morocco had already rejected the offer years ago when the EU had proposed it; Moldova, in case nobody noticed, is a war zone; and Papua New Guinea, in addition to not having direct flights to the UK, has already been set on fire by Australia after it built its own detention center on Manus Island. In a parallel world, the EU and Micronesia could be conspiring to use the UK as a landfill for all their coronavirus victims. After all, we are a global disease center.
If this weren’t enough, the Home Office leaked the coup de grace of filling abandoned ferries and oil rigs with asylum seekers and building a wave machine that would push ships back to France. That or drown everyone in them. They didn’t care which one. Anyone would do.
So it was unlucky that Matthew Rycroft, the permanent secretary of the Home Office, had an appointment with the public accounts committee to explain his department’s plans to process asylum applications. Committee chair Meg Hillier cut to the chase. Did you know that no aircraft had landed on Ascension Island since 2017 and that the runway at St. Helena, another South Atlantic island in the frame, was unusable?
“The civil service is here to give independent advice,” Rycroft said, buying time. It would be completely wrong for you to comment on private discussions that have been leaked to the media. All that had happened was that the ministers and public officials had indulged in a blue sky thought in which all options were up for discussion.
What other kinds of things had been discussed? Hillier asked. Rycroft thought that now was probably not the time to mention the reintroduction of child labor, the international space station, or the appointment of Chris Grayling as the new czar of asylum seekers.
And he was too loyal to make it clear that the whole brainstorming exercise had been a bit of fun – no one had ever intended to take a day off with magic mushrooms as a policy – with public officials competing with each other to think of the kind of of ideas Dominic Cummings or Tony Abbott might come up with, and it had never occurred to anyone that Number 10 could take any of this nonsense even remotely seriously. Although that was the impression he was determined to give.
“We looked at all kinds of things,” he was going to go as far as he would go. And were all the ideas compatible with the European convention on human rights? Of course. Although most of it obviously wasn’t. Rycroft made a mental note to give a promotion to whoever had leaked all this stuff. If Boris was upset enough to go through with any of this, it was vital that his department be seen to have as little connection to it as possible.
Back in the Commons, Matt Hancock had managed to avoid an urgent question about the 10pm curfew in pubs by translating it into a ministerial statement on new closings in Liverpool. Still, he didn’t seem at all happy to be dragged back on camera for his third appearance in a week. Like Boris, he has reached a point where he can no longer tolerate any criticism.
So when the shadow health secretary Jon Ashworth reminded the house that the main problem with the government’s strategy was the failure of its test and trace system, and that the 10 p.m. curfew had created as many problems as he had solved them by kicking them all. Angry on public transportation at the same time, Matt had a little hissing attack. The curfew was fine, testing and tracing was fine, and it was fine for Deloitte to sell information to the public sector. Agree?
There wasn’t much sympathy for Hancock on either side of the house. Many conservative MPs are receiving it on the neck of the hotel companies in their constituencies. Philip Davies was fed up with the state of babysitters and thought that people should be able to choose whether or not to contract the coronavirus, and that increasingly self-parodic pubs felt that Desmond Swayne should be able to determine their own opening hours. Presumably, if people regularly drink until they pass out and are left where they are, there is little chance that they will transmit the virus.
The questions quickly became more difficult. Did Hancock think that people stopped obeying the rules after Dominic Cummings did what he liked? Absolutely not. “I will not allow this,” he snapped, when asked a perfectly reasonable question about an incorrect answer he had given two weeks ago. “I just won’t allow it.” But it will. Because Hancock doesn’t have the self-esteem to admit the mistakes of his government. Once a Door Matt, always a Door Matt.
