Red Box - Wednesday July 22 2020

PLUS: Rishi Sunak brings us the cheque

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Wednesday July 22 2020

By Esther Webber

Good morning,

Today will see MPs take part in the traditional end-of-term debate, a form of parliamentary free association. Caravans, the African continental free trade area, smoking, the Lord-Lieutenant of Banffshire, gin and tonics, bus speed regulation and Ulster Scots are the topics to beat from 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 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

Plenty of opportunity for awkward questions to Boris Johnson when he goes up against Sir Keir Starmer in the wake of a damning report from the intelligence and security committee and the first hint of public sector spending cuts.

Priti Patel, the home secretary will be forced to the House for an urgent question at 12.30pm from Labour on the Russia report.

If Johnson survives that, he can breathe a sigh of relief. The Commons rises later today for the long summer recess. The Lords, inexplicably, will keep going for another week.

Two must-watch select committees in the meantime: Robert Jenrick, the housing secretary, gets a grilling at 9.30am, and Oliver Dowden, theculture secretary, faces questions on Huawei and telecoms from 3.30pm.

Former Labour employees who spoke out about the handling of antisemitism allegations should have their defamation case against the party settled in the High Court later.

We've got used to Rishi Sunak serving us lunch recently - and now he's returned with the bill. The chancellor signalled a return to public sector austerity yesterday as he ripped up government spending plans in the wake of the pandemic.

Mike Pompeo, the US secretary of state, used his visit to London to attack the WHO in the strongest terms - accusing it of complicity in British deaths - and to ramp up the pressure yet again on uniting in a harsher stance against China.

Jeremy Hunt, chairman of the health and social care committee, got a rise out of mild-mannered Professor Chris Whitty yesterday as he forced the chief medical officer for England to insist there was no “switch which could have suddenly been switched on” to prevent a worse outcome.

A Conservative MP is being investigated for alleged inappropriate behaviour towards two junior parliamentary workers. The Times reveals concerns about Rob Roberts were raised with senior party figures at least six weeks ago.

Trivia question: Which member of the 2019 intake has yet to make their maiden speech? Answer at the bottom of today's email.

Un-suspicious minds

Short of the intelligence and security committee's report on Russia concluding that Vladimir Putin had been stowed away in the hold of that boat which Nigel Farage sailed down the Thames during the referendum campaign, it's hard to see how it could have lived up to the hype.

Still, it came pretty close. The ISC's inquiry found the UK was a "top target" for Russian interference, that London estate agents played a role in (literally) accommodating oligarchs, and that financial links between members of the Lords and Russia need to be investigated further.

It concluded that Russia attempted to interfered in the Scottish referendum, without providing details of how, and that there was no credible evidence of foul play in the EU referendum.

More disturbingly, the report said that the reason we don't know more about the nature of any malfeasance is because the government didn't bother to ask, and the intelligence agencies didn't bother to look.

Choicest of all is the charge that the government "took its eye off the ball" - a phrase more commonly associated with letting the pasta boil over or forgetting to renew your railcard, and not, you know, Russian cyber-warfare.

Boris Johnson signalled yesterday there would be no further post-mortem, but he will push ahead with new counter-espionage legislation to make Britain a “harder environment for adversaries to operate in”. A welcome move if you're starting to suspect that deploying Gavin Williamson to tell hostile actors to go away and shut up didn't have the desired effect after all.

For GCHQ, MI5 and MI6, it is uncomfortable reading. As Fiona Hamilton, the crime and security editor, highlights in her analysis, MI5 gave only six lines of text in response to the ISC's inquiry request for written evidence on whether the EU referendum was targeted. They could have just done a tweet thread instead.

From a political point of view, it's handy for Labour. Nick Thomas-Symonds, the shadow home secretary, fulminated last night at "the scale of the shortcomings of the government’s response to maintaining our national security in the face of what is clearly a growing and significant threat from Russia".

The report offers an opportunity for Labour to park the tanks on a corner of the Conservatives' lawn, and to draw a line between the new regime and the approach to Russia under Jeremy Corbyn, which drove even some of his sympathetic colleagues to despair.

Even though Labour backs the report's call for a review of what happened in 2016, expect them to focus on the above, and not any demand that we assemble a crack team of investigators - Mrs Marple, Johnny English, Carol Cadwalladr - and commission them to uncover whether the Russians did in fact sway the outcome of the EU referendum.

That's because the Labour Party, in common with just about everyone else on the planet, is not in a rush to revisit the Brexit vote. They will fight the government on the preparations (or lack of) the end of the transition period and its economic impact, but they're not about to relitigate a battle in which their leader was very much not on the same page as a lot of the voters they need to win back.

At the same time, the Conservatives - while condemning Russian meddling - seem unable to summon up quite the same level of full-throated moralistic disapproval for Moscow as they have done for Beijing in recent months. There are notable exceptions - Julian Lewis, the ISC chairman, and Bob Seely, both in the ascendant at the moment - but it hasn't captured their collective imagination in the same way.

It's a bit difficult to take the high ground when individual Russians have been more generous to the Conservatives than Rishi Sunak when it's his round. Tory sources have pointed out they're not the only ones who have accepted donations, and some of the benefactors in question are themselves enemies of Putin.

But it's also because of a perception that Russia is a basket case, a dying superpower, still lashing out painfully and dreadfully but on an ultimate downward trajectory, while China goes from strength to strength.

Both sides might want to resist identifying Russian influence with their opposite number's politics as they go forward and, let's hope, pursue a more robust security regime. As Calder Walton, a Harvard historian, and Jonathan Eyal, of the Royal United Services Institute, said, the aim is to inflict chaos and to poke fun at us.

Let's remember the year of the referendum saw the pound driven off a cliff by events in Sunderland, Lindsay Lohan offer to turn on the Christmas lights in Kettering, Lord Heseltine deny he'd killed his mum's dog, David Cameron singing a song to himself after resigning, supporters of Andrea Leadsom march on Whitehall and Theresa May become prime minister.

If the ultimate aim was to make a mockery of British politics, someone could have pointed out we were doing that perfectly well by ourselves.

Chart of the day

Disappointingly the Pew survey hasn't reached 2020 yet, when you might expect to see some very different results, but it still shows a big leap in China's unpopularity. Russia, however, is far, far more disliked.

The Sketch

Signal failures mash up a sensational hot potato

Quentin Letts

What a British affair it was, parliament’s delayed intelligence report into Russian jiggery-pokery. Julian Lewis and two fellow MPs made their announcement virtually, not from the Commons but from the library of the Army & Navy Club on Pall Mall. Founded in 1837, it has an in-house tailor and its own grooming parlour. Mr Lewis had drawn the pea-green curtains to deter peeping toms. Much of the report addressed cyberwarfare. Inevitably, the event was repeatedly rendered inaudible by a dodgy Zoom connection. Or Kremlin electronic jamming? What we could not hear, we could not read, either. Great tracts of this democratic document were redacted, being too secret for the electorate to be told.

Read the full sketch

RED BOX: COMMENT

Conservatives worthy of the name cannot be cavalier with civil liberties

Steve Baker – Conservative MP

Need to know

TRAINING DAY: Priti Patel, the home secretary, promised Home Office officials will attend reconciliation meetings with Windrush victims and undergo mandatory training in the history of race and migration as recommended by a review into the scandal. (The Times)

GRAVY TRAIN: HS2’s chief executive was paid more than £659,000 last year, it has been disclosed, adding pressure on the project’s leaders to rein in salaries. (The Times)

TOXIC WASTE: Almost half of a £75 million fund to cut pollution on motorways has not been spent because officials failed to identify “effective solutions”, according to an official review. (The Times)

BOXED IN: Property developers have used new freedoms to avoid planning permission to create flats that are no bigger than garden sheds, a government-sponsored report has concluded. (The Times)

TRADE, OFF: Ministers now believe that Britain and the EU will fail to sign a post-Brexit trade deal, with just days to go until Boris Johnson’s July deadline for an outline agreement passes. (Daily Telegraph)

THEM AGAIN: Jeremy Corbyn, Jennie Formby and Seumas Milne have instructed lawyers to complain to the Labour Party about the party's proposed settlement of its libel suit from whistleblowers. (Jewish Chronicle)

RED BOX: COMMENT

Local lockdowns require local furlough schemes

Judith Cummins – Labour MP

Yesterday most of you thought Boris Johnson will be prime minister for two more years, and it tailed off gradually after that.

RED BOX: COMMENT

Northern Ireland is key to UK’s future as a science superpower

Gavin Robinson – DUP MP

Moving the civil service out of London is about more than the economy

Ben Houchen – mayor of Tees Valley

Have your say

Yesterday I asked what you would call the House of Commons cat.

Michael Jack: "Erskine after Erskine May whose book on Commons Procedure would mean that cat would never get out of order."

Carolyn Cawood: "Winnie as in Churchill. Boris’s hero, and would work for either sex."

Tony Yates: "Bastet after the ancient Egyptian goddess - that's modern Egyptian for JRM. Or Mr Twink, the cat detective after the '50s children's novels, a suitable read for the rest of them."

Jonathan Peel: "It has to be 'Barnier' - that would keep every rodent in the Palace of Westminster on its toes!"

Dave Maunder: "C.A.T 1000, a shape-changing terminator that would replace abstainers at crucial votes and get things moving."

Ryan Dixon: "I would name the cat Bercow. Self-aggrandising? Check. Incessant interruptions? Check. Half a day's work and then resting on laurels? Check. Most people have an allergy to them? Check. Long sleepy days only interrupted when they want to do something? Check."

Chez: "We already have Larry and Palmerston so it is time for a female cat. She will need positivity, honesty, decisiveness, sharp claws and be fleet of paw, therefore I would name her Yvette."

Phil Parkin: "Purrrdah, for those sensitive pre-election times."

Guy Fawkes and Moggy were also popular choices.

TODAY: What would you use today's end-of-term debate to talk about? Email redbox@thetimes.co.uk and we'll use some of the best tomorrow.

The best comment

Labour’s return to sanity will goad the left

First Last –

Britain doesn’t need a Cold War with China

Roger Boyes – The Times

Celebrities are overdue 15 minutes of shame

Alice Thomson – The Times

Surging support for an independent Scotland could be Boris Johnson’s downfall

Katy Balls - The i

It’s time for Remainers like me to stop focusing on Russia

Nick Tyrone - Spectator

The cartoon

Today's cartoon from The Times by Peter Schrank

Now listen to this

It is four months since the lockdown began. And a month since the government ended the daily Downing Street press conferences.

So today we are holding our own. Tom Calver, from The Times data team, will update is on the latest statistics in “Next Slide Please”.

Then I’ll be joined by The Times’ very own Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance - Chris Smyth, the Whitehall editor, and Tom Whipple, the science editor - to ask what went wrong, what comes next, and should we ever shake hands again.

It’s Wednesday so at midday I’ll be joined by Tim Shipman for PMQs Unpacked, when we pause the action to explain what’s going on between Johnson and Starmer. And in Disunited Kingdom we get the latest political analysis from the four corners of the UK.

If you want to take part in our daily 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

And in the red corner, a blue

As their club receives the Premier League trophy tonight, Liverpool fans will be surprised and perhaps appalled to be reminded they owe it all to a Tory. “It was actually a Conservative [mayor] who founded Liverpool football club,” says Thérèse Coffey, the work and pensions secretary and a keen Red, in this one instance. On the BBC’s Political Thinking, she was able to give some comfort, for now, to her host, Nick Robinson, a grieving Manchester United fan. “I have rejected the advice to rebrand DWP to being the Department for Winning the Premiership,” she told him. “But if we do it again next season . . .”