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ORUnless you were one of the two who believe Alex Salmond sexually harassed them, this was a good day for women. With Nicola Sturgeon found not to have violated the ministerial code, nor misled parliament, on any of the four counts of Hamilton’s independent inquiry, the Scottish prime minister was effectively free and free to lead the SNP in the upcoming campaign. electoral.
Not that Sturgeon was particularly in the mood to celebrate during his brief press conference shortly after the investigation report was released. That could come later. For now, despite an understandable hint of relief, she still seemed almost numb from stress. Her delivery was flat, her frame of mind fragile as she welcomed the findings. “I have been at peace with my own conscience,” he said. Although the last few months had certainly taken their toll.
She had made a few mistakes, Sturgeon said. Others may have acted differently or remembered different things in her situation, but she had not violated the ministerial code. But he was asked if he had broken the spirit of the code. No, it hadn’t. He regretted that some people found it disappointing, he added sarcastically, before repeating that the report had been clear. There have been no violations of the ministerial code.
But what about the Scottish government’s own report on his conduct that was due to be published the next day? Oh that one. Sturgeon shrugged. That really didn’t count for anything because the committee was divided along partisan lines, and the conservatives had already concluded that she was guilty before they even started hearing the evidence. What counted was the independent report. And she was safe. To independence and beyond!
Back in Westminster, Priti Patel was also having a good day. But every day should feel like a good day for the Home Secretary, as Boris Johnson decided that breaking the ministerial code on harassment was not a crime that could be dislodged. But Patel’s day was significantly better because he did not have anything difficult on the departmental questions.
The potential for embarrassment had been high. On the night of Sarah Everard’s vigil on Clapham Common, Priti Vacant tweeted about the “disturbing scenes” of the police restraining women by force, and had forgotten that the police had been acting on her instructions. But no one thought to bring this up.
They also did not think to mention the interior secretary’s strange plan to arrest illegal immigrants and asylum seekers on the beaches and send them to Gibraltar, the Isle of Man, Morocco and Denmark. Patel had insisted that it was the most humane thing to do, because the best thing was that the UK left them before they had a chance to discover how unpleasant life there was going to be. It also later turned out that he hadn’t even gone so far as to ask Gibraltar and others if they would even accept asylum seekers, but had simply chosen all four destinations at random.
In fact, Patel was so easy to ask questions from the Home Office that he managed without barely opening his mouth. Call that a win-win. Instead, his junior ministers did all the heavy lifting. In particular Chris Philp, who you would imagine had undergone a personality transplant, if he had had a personality to transplant. In the Cameron years, Philp was one of the wettest Tories – someone who would hug a husky or whatever else leadership demanded. But now he’s caught Johnson’s zeitgeist and morphed into a “chain and whip” Tory. He is as unconvincing in his new personality as he was in his last one.
In a nice symmetrical twist, it had been Theresa May who had fired Patel when the then secretary for international development had started working independently as foreign secretary by conducting secret diplomatic talks with Israel. And it was May who completed the trio of women who have one of the best days of their political careers.
Since resigning as prime minister, Maybot has often seemed a distant figure. Unloved and ignored, a shadow of his former shadowy self, by fellow Conservative MPs for whom he is an unwelcome reminder of how close the party came to destroying itself over Brexit. But now he was before the national security committee, whose members were mostly old stragglers who remembered when politics was an almost honorable profession and were actually delighted to see it.
May didn’t have anything very interesting to say, of course. Some things do not change. But that was not the point. The point was, she was there. And that people cared about her. The closest he got to the news was his observation that it didn’t take long for members of the National Security Council to regain confidence in the process after he fired Gavin Williamson for leaking details of a meeting. Again, most people would probably feel safer without Gavin. And it was a gentle reminder that not long ago, the ministerial code meant more or less the same thing both north and south of the Scottish Borders.
