Skip to main contentSkip to navigationSkip to navigation
A Lib Dem placard in Witney on byelection day
A Lib Dem placard in Witney on byelection day. Photograph: Matt Cardy/Getty Images
A Lib Dem placard in Witney on byelection day. Photograph: Matt Cardy/Getty Images

Money well spent in Witney as Lib Dems celebrate a swing

This article is more than 7 years old
John Crace

Amber Rudd avoids blaming the boss for the abuse inquiry mess, and Boris Johnson’s Brexit comments grow ever more gnomic

Monday

Fourth time lucky. The home secretary, Amber Rudd, has been doing her best to explain how the fact that the child sex abuse inquiry is now on its fourth chair before it has done much real work is merely a sign of the lengths she is prepared to go to find the right person. The last chair, Dame Lowell Goddard, was sent back to New Zealand with an £80,000 goody bag and lifetime subscription to Guardian Soulmates after she told Rudd she was feeling a bit lonely and hadn’t realised she was going to have to conduct the inquiry in the UK. Understandably, given that other members of the inquiry have accused Goddard of racism and high-handedness, Rudd’s explanations for her department’s failures have been treated with some scepticism. (Goddard has rejected the claims, calling them “false” and “malicious”.) Rudd’s biggest problem, though, is that she cannot mention the person really responsible for the mess, as she doesn’t want to land her boss in it. Throughout an urgent question to the house, Rudd never mentioned Theresa May by name, preferring – through gritted teeth – merely to refer to her predecessor.

Tuesday

Boris Johnson’s comments on Brexit are becoming ever more gnomic because no one can tell whether what he is saying is something that is accurate or merely clarification of something that he now believes to be untrue. At Foreign Office questions, the SNP’s Alex Salmond chose to press Johnson on an article he wrote after the referendum in which he argued that Britain should remain a member of the single market. “As far as I know there was only one version of this particular article,” he said. This wasn’t quite true. A year ago Boris had written a Spectator diary of a trip to Japan – when he crushed a 10-year old boy while playing rugby – in which he said: “What was the one question that no one bothered to ask, in three solid days of talking to Japanese businesspeople? No one seems worried about the UK’s EU referendum. They are smart enough to know that Britain will remain, whatever happens, in a European free-trade zone.” It seems as if the foreign secretary now has to write several copies of the same article to clarify the things in which he doesn’t believe. What’s more, he gets paid for some of them.

Wednesday

Much of the most interesting work in the House of Commons gets done in select committees, so the elections for the vacant chairs of some of the more important committees were keenly contested. Labour’s Hilary Benn got the nod as head of the newly created Brexit committee – an appointment that was greeted with more enthusiasm by the Europhiles than the Eurosceptics. Benn had been up against leave campaigner Kate Hoey, who would have been likely to give Boris, David Davis and Liam Fox a rather easier ride. The vacancy for home affairs, created by Keith Vaz’s decision to stand down, went to Yvette Cooper. It had been expected that Cooper would be run close by Labour’s Chuka Umunna but, as it turned out, he was well beaten into third place. You might have thought he might not want to draw too much attention to his failure, but within minutes his press aides were saying the only reason he had done so badly was because the Tories saw him as a serious leadership threat. It was his story and he was sticking to it.

Thursday

The £82,000 that Nadine Dorries got for appearing in I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here turns out to be just a drop in the ocean compared with her other earnings. The register of members’ financial interests shows that as well as getting regular payments of £13,000 a month from her publishers, she also earned an extra £210,000 in royalties, advances and the occasional unspecified handout. In total, Dorries is pulling in about £340,000 from her writing per year – a figure that will come as some surprise to anyone who has ever read one of her books.

Friday

At the end of each Lib Dem conference, every delegate is turned upside down and any cash – and the odd plastic duck – that falls out of their pockets goes to the party coffers. This year the party treasurer was hoping for £10,000, all of which would be going to fight the Witney byelection. In politics, the definition of money well spent is not quite the same as that applied in the real world. The Lib Dems were thrilled with a 23% swing that would make them a national force were it repeated elsewhere, which it certainly wouldn’t be, while the Tories weighed their 6,000 majority. The biggest talk of the byelection was the split in the Monster Raving Loony party, which saw Lord Toby Jug of the breakaway Eccentric party stand against the Mad Hatter of the Real Monster Raving Loonies. It’s not just the main parties that have their divisions. The Mad Hatter said he only stood for the Loony party in England because he thought there was no other decent party. But if he was in Scotland, he’d want to stand for the SNP.

Digested week, digested: show us your teeth.

Most viewed

Most viewed