Red Box - Wednesday July 29 2020

PLUS: MPs' summer reading

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Wednesday July 29 2020

By Esther Webber

Good morning,

The government has launched its search for a spokesman to front its new press conferences from the autumn, the Daily Telegraph reports. Personally I am still holding out hope that the honour falls to Lorraine Kelly, after her standout performance in the Conservative Party leadership contest last year.

Esther Webber

Red Box reporter

@estwebber

After informing readers for 235 years, we now bring the stories of the day to life with the same warmth, wit and expertise from 5am weekdays and 6am on weekends until the small hours. Listen free on DAB radio, via your smart speaker, online at times.radio, and through the Times Radio app.

The briefing

Boris Johnson has warned Europe is at the outset of a second wave of coronavirus, with travellers to Belgium, Luxembourg and Croatia next in line for quarantine measures on their return to England.

Tom Whipple, science editor, has a must-read guide to how those comments should be interpreted, steeling us for the prospect of continuous "ripples" of higher infection rates throughout the year rather than huge, separate surges.

Never mind Mallorca: Oldham is the latest area of England facing local lockdown. Residents have been told not to invite visitors into their homes after coronavirus rates more than quadrupled in a week.

The government is torn over how to handle the rest of the summer, with Michael Gove, the Cabinet Office minister, pushing for a blanket country-by-country approach to new quarantine measures, while Baroness Vere of Norbiton , a transport minister, argues it could be handled regionally.

If we can't go on holiday, how's the back to work drive going? Not so brilliantly. Britain’s biggest employers report they are struggling to convince their workers that it is safe to return to the office.

Meg Hillier, chairwoman of the public accounts committee, told Times Radio this morning the government should apologise for the way it has dealt with care homes in the coronavirus pandemic after her committee accused ministers of negligence.

The Lords rises later today, joining the Commons for recess - but not before bringing a minister to the House at about 12.30pm to answer an urgent question on trade agreements between the UK and the EU.

In a tale of two Labour leaders, Sir Keir Starmer is in Falmouth today, using the holiday season to highlight the plight of coastal communities, while Jeremy Corbyn returns to his main interest of taking part in Stop the War events.

Trivia question: Of the 21 Tory MPs who had the whip removed by Boris Johnson, can you name the four still in the Commons? Answer at the bottom of today's email

Trad or rad?

The forthcoming Dissolution Honours has been hyped more than a Marvel film prequel and contains a similarly expanding cast list.

So far we have heard about Ruth Davidson, Gisela Stuart, Sir Ian Botham, Sir Eddie Lister, Daniel Hannan, Charles Moore, Ken Clarke, Philip Hammond, Ian Austin, John Woodcock, Frank Field and (courtesy of today's Times) Dame Helena Morrissey.

The chosen ones are a bit too male for some in the party's liking, with the equality campaigner Baroness Jenkin of Kennington warning today she will be "very disappointed" if there aren't more women in the eventual line-up.

Baroness Evans, the leader of the Lords, faces questions from the constitution committee this morning - and this will be just one of a barrage of complaints we can expect to be put to her, with several peers griping that she has been conspicuous by her absence so far this year.

No 10 has also missed a trick in not electing to ennoble the heroes of the coronavirus age in a Pandemic Peers' list. This would have given us Lord Wicks of Epsom, sports minister, Lord Whitty of Gloucester, health minister, and Baron Monroe of Southend, minister for food and nutrition.

The 30-strong list seems, on the face of it, like a contradiction of Boris Johnson's pledge to be "the people's government" and of his most trusted adviser's lifelong war against "the blob".

It's certainly wound up some of his most prominent antagonists on the red benches. Baroness Smith of Basildon, Labour's leader in the Lords, writes in Red Box today: "It's a new way of ruling the roost from a prime minister whose style of government owes less to his hero Winston Churchill than the ‘rebuff at all costs’ playbook of Donald Trump."

Lord Fowler, the Lord Speaker, has taken to attacking the government in a weekly email in which he despairs of their latest plans, like the person in the neighbourhood Facebook group who is constantly at war with the council over bins.

In particular, he is cross that Downing Street is not even paying lip service to the informal cross-party agreement on a "one-in-one out" policy to keep the size of the Lords under control, like the worst nightclub in the world.

So should No 10 be seen as more trad than it is rad? There is both a narrow version of events and a further-reaching one. On one level, the mass ennoblement is pragmatic and political.

The Conservatives feel there are not enough of them in the Lords. Even though they outnumber any other single grouping, they have not had a majority there since the last Labour government. It might have been unseemly for Theresa May to go around generating peers at will given her wobbly mandate, but at least Johnson can point to his support among the electorate.

More broadly speaking, it fits in with the government's general indifference to parliament. As one insider puts it: "I don’t think they think about parliament very often at all. It's an afterthought."

This source linked it to their inability to control the parliamentary party, which is manifesting in restiveness among the 2019 intake and the old guard alike. The government is not especially interested in playing the archaic corridor games which keep the show running, and don't really care if their whipping tactics are not really cricket.

I wrote about this phenomenon last month, when the loose relationship between newer MPs and party discipline owed something to lockdown and the absence of normal working practices (if what goes on in the Commons can ever be described as such).

Much like the reopening of schools, it feels like it never really came back and now MPs have been turned out into summer recess, if anything emboldened in their demands by the government's change of stance on China and free school meals.

"A lot of 2019 intake think they are better than ‘putting a shift in’ on the floor of the House," one government adviser tells me. "They want to be select committee members and PPSs. They are ever so important, as they keep reminding us, because they got us our majority."

An ambivalence towards parliament is also evident in the dismantling of the restoration project, and some even more insider-y goings-on which have reached the ears of Red Box. Ian Ailes, the director-general of the Commons, is going part-time and having his role downgraded, an apparent winding-down of the Straw reforms of 2015 designed to make the running of parliament more transparent and accountable.

An email to parliamentary staff last week from Ailes and John Benger, clerk of the House, informed them the restructure was part of a return to the "primary focus of delivering core functions and enabling Members to participate", which many have interpreted as a throwback to a more traditional age where the House moved in mysterious ways and underlings were expected just to go along with it.

It's going to be a long five years if this is only the beginning of strident red wall MPs on one side and true blue walruses beating their chest on the other while the whole place falls down.

But it is just that, only the beginning, and a pretty unusual one at that, played out in the midst of a global emergency. The government has it all to play for if it can come up with a strategy for keeping their ducks in a more cohesive row.

Boris Johnson under attack for lack of new female peers

Chart of the day

Numbers-wise, you might say the Conservatives don't have much to complain about. But they are heavily outweighed overall by peers from other groupings.

RED BOX: COMMENT

The only thing stopping a smaller House of Lords is No 10

Baroness Smith of Basildon – Labour leader in the Lords

What are MPs reading this summer?

I don't know if the backbench book club is just following the hottest trends in literature but when I asked around about what MPs are reading this summer, two Conservatives - Andrew Bowie and William Wragg - independently told me they're getting stuck into Barchester Towers, Anthony Trollope's 1857 novel about High Anglican and Evangelical rivalries in a fictional cathedral city.

One of its main characters is the domineering Mrs Proudie, who rules with a rod of iron over her husband, the new bishop, and makes herself and him deeply unpopular with the clergy of the Barchester diocese. Can't think who that reminds me of.

What other books are MPs packing - to take upstairs with them, if not to the beach?

Jacob Rees-Mogg, Commons leader: Third volume of Charles Moore’s biography of Margaret Thatcher and Glastonbury Her Saints AD 37-1539 by the Rev Lionel Smithett Lewis.

Michael Gove, the chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster: Second Sleep by Robert Harris, a biography of Haldane by John Campbell and Pilgrims by Matthew Kneale.

Gavin Williamson, the education secretary: Our Bodies, Their Battlefield: What War Does to Women by Christina Lamb.

Jesse Norman, the financial secretary to the Treasury: Michael Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit, Paul Collier and John Kay's Greed is Dead and George Higgins' Friends of Eddie Coyle. Plus the new life of Sir Thomas Cantilupe.

Mims Davies, the employment minister: Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - which she points out is courtesy of the East Grinstead Bookshop.

David Lammy, shadow justice secretary: David Nichols' Sweet Sorrow, because "I wanted something bittersweet and easy to absorb - nothing to do with pandemic or BLM". The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, and Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams. "My wife is hiding under the bedcovers with this at the moment. I can’t wait to steal it off her," he says.

Bridget Phillipson, the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury: Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo and Choose Freedom by Roy Hattersley.

Jess Phillips, the shadow safeguarding minister: Caitlin Moran's new book More Than A Woman and The Actress by Anne Enright.

I'll update with more of MPs' choices as they come in.

RED BOX: COMMENT

Governments must act to solve the global education crisis

Gertrude Musuruve Inimah and Harriett Baldwin – Kenyan Senator and Conservative MP

Need to know

SAFE SPACE: HGVs and delivery vans could be banned from city centres under government plans to create more road space for cyclists. (The Times)

SEEMS FINE: Lord Callanan, a minister with ties to an anonymously controlled energy firm linked to Russia, has been given a role promoting transparency and anti-corruption. (The Times)

HOME TRUTHS: Senior Conservative MPs are campaigning for the return of British Islamic State brides and their children from Kurdish detention camps, arguing that some are victims of trafficking. (The Times)

RISING SUN: Britain will sign the first post-Brexit trade deal within weeks after talks with Japan after a "significant breakthrough". (The Sun)

IGNOBLE CONDUCT: A peer suspended by Labour over sexual harassment allegations will have to undergo further "bespoke training and behaviour coaching sessions” after more complaints were made against him. (PoliticsHome)

RED BOX: COMMENT

Domestic Abuse Bill will be seen as a landmark achievement

Will Quince – Welfare minister

Apologies for the incorrect link in yesterday's poll. Let's try again.

Have your say

Yesterday I asked which member of the cabinet you'd keep in a cull.

Karen Davies: "Only Rishi Sunak but ban him from using Instagram!"

Carolyn Cawood: "Rishi Sunak of course! He is the only one capable of implementing plans to replace all the money he has donated over the last few months."

Adrian Webster: "I honestly cannot think of a single frontline secretary of state or senior minister (with the possible exception of the unproven Sunak), whose job would not be more competently done by any number of MPs from the ranks of Labour, the Lib Dems, and recently fired or defeated members of May’s cabinet."

Bill Giles: "In my management training a long time ago I was told that it is difficult to manage more than five or six people directly. So most of them should go. But keep Robert Jenrick as a lightning rod for criticism."

Sati McKenzie: "Jacob Rees-Mogg and Priti Patel. They will make him look reasonably human in comparison."

Ian Chard: "Cull Boris Johnson and then the cabinet and replace them with the Conservatives they expelled!"

Graeme Morrison: "Who should Boris retain? Well, first is Larry the cat, obvs."

TODAY: What book should Boris Johnson read this summer? Email redbox@thetimes.co.uk and we'll use some of the best tomorrow.

The best comment

Tories can’t put off new property tax forever

James Kirkup – The Times

Europe’s last tyrant is fighting for survival

Roger Boyes – The Times

Meghan is the royal family’s Scarlett O’Hara

Alice Thomson – The Times

Government’s obesity plan ignores the factors that mean body weight is not a choice

Giles Yeo - The i

The astonishing complacency of Starmer’s supporters

Patrick O'Flynn - The Spectator

The cartoon

Today's cartoon from The Times by Peter Schrank

RED BOX: COMMENT

How the UK can stand up for open societies at home and abroad

Alex Thier – Obama administration official

Now listen to this

Actually jetting off anywhere is a bit tricky at the moment, so join us on Times Radio Airways as we fly around the world in eight correspondents, getting the latest on the fight against coronavirus from colleagues dotted across the globe.

We will also tour the UK in our regular feature, Disunited Kingdom, asking political reporters in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland what is happening outside the Westminster bubble.

Andrew Gwynne, the Labour MP, tells me how he is still struggling to recover from Covid-19; a new study shows how the cannabis plant could help kick the weee habit; and we go back to the hotel owner who gave his rooms over to the homeless in the lockdown to find out what happened when they left.

If you want to take part in our daily general knowledge quiz - Can You Get To No 10? - email me now matt.chorley@times.radio.

And I’ll see you from 10am on Times Radio. Listen on DAB, app, smart speaker and at times.radio

TMS

From the diary

By Patrick Kidd

More cock-up than come on

The broadcaster Iain Dale is aiming for the Nobel prize double of peace and literature with a new book called Why Can’t We All Just Get Along. Worth a try, I suppose. In it, he writes about standing as a Tory in North Norfolk in 2005. He knew he had a tough task when he visited a Conservative member who had a large poster for his opponent in her garden. She claimed that the Lib Dems had put it up without asking.

“Why not take it down?” Dale asked. “I don’t want to cause any trouble,” she replied. She then asked Dale if he would fix her clock, which hadn’t ticked in a long time. “I’ll just fetch the Durex from the cupboard,” she said after he agreed. To his relief it turned out that she meant Duracell.