OH, to have a nosey at Boris Johnson’s texts. We’ve been hearing a lot in recent weeks about his very personal communications (bleurgh), and today the focus has shifted to how he responded to pals in business who were seeking big-money contracts at the start of the pandemic.
Keir Starmer wants answers about the exchanges between the PM and James Dyson, after it was revealed that the latter asked for a change to tax rules when demand for ventilators was acute and the former promised “I will fix it” … then did so.
The Leader of the Opposition does a good job of setting out the details of this scandal but opts to ask a series of rhetorical questions about it, allowing Johnson to go off on his standard rants and rambles. How many other people the PM has given preferential treatment to? Well, how long have you got? PMQs only last half an hour or so. How would he have responded had one of the excluded three million sent him a text asking for the rules to be changed in their favour? Well obviously he would have immediately changed his number and launched a probe into how a pleb had got hold of it.
READ MORE: Boris Johnson told Sir James Dyson he would ‘fix’ tax issue in text
Of course, the PM’s default position is to suggest the end justified the means, that he rightly “shifted Heaven and Earth” to get ventilators produced and “took the tough decisions to protect the people of this country”. Absurdly, he claims that by asking these questions Starmer is now “attacking the ventilator challenge”, just like he “opposed the vaccine taskforce” before. Nonsense, of course.
It’s left to Ian Blackford to really put the Prime Minister on the spot, stressing that these latest sleaze revelations are par for the course for Tory governments and asking if the PM will reveal how many Covid contracts he personally fixed and – if he has nothing to hide – whether he will publish all personal exchanges on these contracts before the end of the day.
Surprisingly, the PM replies that he is happy to share all the details, but cracks in his confident demeanour start to show as he stumbles over references to the “vaccinator” challenge before returning to his script about “acting decisively to get things done”.
Having got the answer he wanted the SNP’s Westminster leader should perhaps have quit while he was ahead, but instead he argues that the UK Government had “all the time in the world” to fix contracts for their friends. The lack of time and the need to act urgently will, of course, be the Tories’ main defence against cronyism claims, so Blackford was already on to a weak line of attack before his dog decided to bark over the rest of the question.
READ MORE: Boris Johnson claims Ian Blackford's dog is 'more sensible' than he is
Back-to-back references to the George Floyd verdict and the European Super League felt awkward at the start of PMQs – yes, football is a huge part of life in the UK, but it’s not a matter of life and death – and the Prime Minister’s response to a question on the sporting subject is ironic given earlier exchanges. He tells his colleague Saqib Bhatti that turning English teams into global brands would have been a betrayal of their fans and totally wrong, “to say nothing of the lack of competition”.
Greed isn’t always good, it seems, and fair competition matters sometimes. Let’s see whether the Prime Minister’s texts demonstrate a level playing field for those who came forward to help with the pandemic response, or an open goal for those with personal links to those in the top jobs of government.
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