Conservative leadership hustings finally arrived in Northern Ireland, where issues of Brexit and the border made the unfortunate quality of the contest particularly apparent.
Candidates Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt are dramatically different personalities, yet their promises are essentially the same and look equally undeliverable. So the decision facing party members appears to be between a fool and a knave.
In a further complication, some soft-Brexit and Remain Tories are actively hoping Johnson is misleading them.
This hope is not unreasonable. At the hustings, Johnson said: “Under no circumstances, whatever happens, will I allow the EU or anyone else to create any kind of division down the Irish Sea.”
Johnson voted for the EU withdrawal agreement, including the backstop, three months ago. Last November, it emerged he had accepted a sea border while foreign secretary earlier that year.
**
Let us not pretend Hunt is above suspicion. Asked about abortion he said he would want the law changed if he was from Northern Ireland but respects the matter is devolved.
Hunt is the most pro-life MP in front-line British politics and wants the law changed in England to halve the termination limit.
While UK health secretary, he refused to provide NHS abortions in England to women from Northern Ireland, even going to court to block a move that would have been entirely within his remit.
Yet he is now boasting to hustings events in England that he “authorised funding” for the policy.
Funding was only authorised after Labour MP Stella Creasy embarrassed the government into ignoring DUP objections. The money came from the Government Equalities Office, not from Hunt’s budget at health.
**
The most senior civil servant at the Department for Communities says she has no power to extend the Fresh Start welfare reform mitigation package, due to run out early next year. Without devolution or direct rule, thousands of benefit claimants will inevitably fall over the ensuing ‘cliff edge’.
Or will they? Mitigation costs £150 million a year - peanuts compared to the fortune chucked into Northern Ireland down the decades to shore up social and political stability. It is implausible this would be jeopardised for the want of one more indirect rule fudge.
In the meantime, the threat of the cliff edge supplies useful political pressure for restoring Stormont. A conundrum for the government and the DUP is whether addressing the subject through their renewed confidence and supply deal would increase or reduce the pressure on Sinn Féin.
**
As problems mount over the MOT backlog, the Department for Infrastructure has taken urgent steps to place the blame where officialdom always prefers it to lie - with the public. The BBC has been advised that 3,200 motorists missed their appointments last month and should be tut-tutted at accordingly. This is a no-show rate of under 3 per cent, which is hardly excessive for a pointless and inflexible bureaucratic exercise inflicted primarily in working hours on the working population.
**
It has been evident for some time that indirect rule has caused the Department of Health’s media operation to lose the run of itself but this week it has crossed the line. Statistics have been compiled for the first time on ‘compliments received’ by NHS trusts. Nearly 17,000 were received last year, almost all from feedback cards and forms left in hospitals and surgeries. Most praised friendly and helpful staff. Compiling this data is fair enough, although of little meaning in itself. But the department has decided to present it in contrast to the 4,500 complaints received last year, the majority for serious failings, while crowing that compliments “far outnumber complaints received.”
This comparison is invalid, to put it mildly. To imply it is in achievement in healthcare to have more compliments than complaints is grotesque.
**
On Monday, secretary of state Karen Bradley said Stormont parties needed “time and space” to reach a deal so she did not want to place an “artificial deadline” on talks. On Thursday, the government published a bill to extend the statutory talks deadline of August 26.
Bradley passed the law last year that created a March deadline everyone knew to be unattainable, plus the August deadline as a one-off extension.
When her predecessor James Brokenshire moved deadlines he simply moved them. Bradley’s phrasing has taken slippage into the realm of philosophy. Aren’t all political deadlines artificial?
