Opinion

Newton Emerson: Mystery as to why Boris Johnson picked Raab over Gove to deputise in time of crisis

Newton Emerson

Newton Emerson

Newton Emerson writes a twice-weekly column for The Irish News and is a regular commentator on current affairs on radio and television.

British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab during a media briefing in Downing Street. Photo: Pippa Fowles/Crown Copyright/10 Downing Street/PA Wire 
British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab during a media briefing in Downing Street. Photo: Pippa Fowles/Crown Copyright/10 Downing Street/PA Wire  British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab during a media briefing in Downing Street. Photo: Pippa Fowles/Crown Copyright/10 Downing Street/PA Wire 

There is increasing hope that Prime Minister Boris Johnson will make a full recovery from coronavirus but he is unlikely to return to work for one or two months, after which he had planned as recently as last month to take paternity leave. So though the peak of the epidemic the UK will be in the hands of foreign secretary Dominic Raab, a man a Dutch newspaper recently described as “Britain’s Dan Quayle” - the former US vice president who could not spell ‘potato’.

It might seem odd, particularly on this side of the water, for Johnson not to have deputised Michael Gove, the chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. The holder of this office is always described as the ‘de facto deputy prime minister’. They have represented the UK government at all Good Friday Agreement British-Irish institutions since prime ministers stopped bothering to attend them after the St Andrews agreement. However, newspapers in London now judge Gove to be fifth in succession, after the chancellor of the exchequer and the home secretary.

It all seems like such a crude power-play compared to Stormont’s sophisticated disagreement over whether deputy first ministers need a capital D.

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Stormont and Westminster have had something in common over the past five years, apart from the DUP thinking it was in charge. While Jeremy Corbyn was Labour leader, a change in government was only theoretically possible. Corbyn’s replacement by Keir Starmer means Labour could actually win an election. Although the next election could be five years away, British politics will be transformed by the return of a credible opposition.

Starmer was the human rights adviser to the Northern Ireland Policing Board from 2003 to 2008. In 2015, when he was the UK’s director of public prosecutions, he published a highly critical report into how Northern Ireland’s Public Prosecution Service had let down Mairia Cahill and two other alleged victims of IRA rape and cover-up.

Where Corbyn had a one-dimensional view of the state versus the republican movement, Starmer has seen it from a more revealing height.

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It is no surprise the coronavirus lockdown is now projected to last throughout May. UUP health minister Robin Swann has warned measures could be tightened in Northern Ireland if social distancing is not observed. Stormont could also face a challenging question on lifting restrictions earlier than parts of Britain. Significant differences have opened up in the progression and severity of the epidemic around the UK, starting a debate on lockdowns being eased on a regional basis. No doubt another debate will then follow on how the virus does not recognise the M25. Perhaps Britain can learn from Ireland’s 2km travel restriction, which effectively imposes a border wherever you need it.

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New research published in UK medical journal The Lancet has found the impact of school closures is of marginal use in controlling coronavirus and governments should consider reopening schools as soon as possible. Other scientists disagree, but a consensus is building that closures should be among the first lockdown measures lifted before the summer.

Unlike the British and Irish governments, Stormont made it clear even before schools were shut that once it happened they would not reopen until September. That should help avoid a school reopening row on the scale of last month’s closure row. However, a public debate on the issue looks difficult to avoid, especially if it appears children are being kept off school merely to avoid a row.

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Let us not pretend there are not still unique problems with Northern Ireland’s coronavirus response. Among the worst is Stormont’s failure to let supermarkets know who is in lockdown for 12 weeks due to underlying health conditions, in order to prioritise them for home delivery slots. Supermarkets are “high risk sites of infection”, according a report this week from Irish academics. In England, the government simply handed its database of vulnerable patients to supermarket chains. In Northern Ireland, this is apparently impossible because there are several databases across the departments of health and communities.

Exporting and merging database files is a job that could be outsourced to most 10-year-olds. In extremis, with only 40,000 people here on the lists, they could be printed out and re-entered in a matter of days. It must be presumed the bureaucracy is refusing to budge over ‘data protection’, or some other legal or contractual technicality it lacks the gumption to set aside.

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Another political problem hiding behind a technological excuse is the extension of abortion services to Northern Ireland. Consultations for self-medication are being conducted remotely in Britain due to coronavirus but unionists on the executive are blocking this approach, known as telemedicine. Ironically, the DUP has long been an enthusiastic proponent of telemedicine in general, both for use in Northern Ireland and as a specialisation for export. Edwin Poots, now Stormont’s agriculture minister, was a tireless promoter of the technology at home and abroad when he was health minister a decade ago. Arlene Foster, then enterprise minister, launched a telemedicine research centre with a £5m Invest NI grant.