The Friday Blog: Welcome to Lockdown Part Two, the Sequel
Greetings once again one and all, and my most sincere thanks to ParliamentToday’s Julian Robinson, who gave you some wonderful insights in to lobbying and the tools that are available to help organisations of all sizes play their role in democracy. I look forward to hearing from him again, until then you have me.
I hope those of you blessed with children are still thinking about it in those terms after the first half term of the school year. We did (sort of) ok, and even managed a bit of a Halloween celebration. I am still trying to decide if I actually missed the presence of trick or treaters this year, particularly after the girls had done an impressive job on pumpkin carving and we had procured an absolutely massive spider from Wilco, which daughter had affixed to the front door with considerable skill and string. Do not worry, it was not a real spider. No arachnoids were harmed and all that. It is just as well we did, as Bonfire night was a write off. I spent my student year in East Sussex and Bonfire night was a big think in Lewes. I went once. It was terrifying, but to have the option to have gone this year?
I spent the week trying to fall back in love with the Archers, but I am struggling with it a bit if I am honest. It all seems so serious, and, at the moment, serious is really not what I want from 15 minutes of escapism. I want a good old yarn about the Grundy’s borderline criminal, but not at all serious high jinks, or tales of misadventure during karaoke night at The Bull. I really do not want the whole Fallon / Harrison angst thing going on. All right, he says now that he would rather live without kids than without her, but we know how this story ends. Irreconcilable differences on that front will do for their relationship, and Harrison will end up as an embittered old bachelor, living in a section house until he either retires or they write him out, probably by being gunned down in a botched bank job in Borchester. Fallon, on the other hand, within days of the break-up, will meet the real true love of her life and become pregnant with triplets.
Not that we are short of excitement in the real world. I do not think that I really expected the spirits summoned up on All Hallows’ Eve to have magicked away Brexit during my week off, but really, deadlines, what deadlines? I do not know who decided that October 15th was the last dead in a ditch moment to get everything signed, sealed and delivered. Probably some no nowt pundit like me, who noticed that it was the date of an EU Leaders’ Summit and did the back of a fag packet job where it became blindingly obvious, in a deeply flawed way, that mid-October was D day. Talks continue, although finding any information about what is going on requires you to travel to the policy wonks version of the dark web. That is not necessarily bad, as these things go no news is good news. It tends to indicate that things are progressing, albeit slowly in the face of a looming deadline in this case. In fact, this has been the situation for a number of months now.
It has probably not escaped your attention that Joe Biden is set to become the 46th President of the United States of America. I say set to become. Well, you know. Even if the anticipated blowout had happened, he would still only be set to become, as things take a while. Until 20th January in fact. It has always baffled me why that was the case, although I am happy to admit my own ethnocentricity. We know a system, and ok 2010 is the exception that proves the rule, where, typically, the results of the election are known in the early hours of Friday morning, and, if necessary, Pickfords are at the end of Downing Street by teatime. It takes the Americans a little longer to do the dotting and crossing. The main implication seems to me is that Biden will spend most of his first year in office undoing all the Executive Orders that Trump is now frantically signing, either out of spite or in a desperate attempt to keep himself out of jail.
The two events, significant enough that they will undoubtedly be part of our grandchildren’s history curricula, are not necessarily unrelated. There is an emerging school of thought that Boris’ lack of any really, serious urgency to get Brexit done over the past few months, is because he was waiting to see how things played our stateside. Johnson believes he has a serious and solid ally in Trump, who is, after all, probably the only world leader who believes Brexit is a good idea. I include Johnson himself in that, and make no apologies for reminding us that he was never an instinctive Brexiter, and never hoped for or believed it would actually happen. He joined the Leave campaign in 2016, you will recall, primarily to put clear blue water between himself and George Osborne, the man widely regarded at the time as heir apparent to David Cameron.
If Trump had been re-elected, Boris would have felt history was on his side and been emboldened to adopt a robust take it or leave it approach to negotiations with the EU. He would have believed at least, that a favourable US / UK trade deal was all but nailed on. Much as Downing Street may play it down, Biden’s victory is problematic for Boris in at least two specific areas. Firstly, a key pillar of the new President’s foreign policy will be repairing the damage to US/EU relations perceived to have been caused by the Trump administration. If Biden does have sympathies, they will more likely lie with the 27 countries that make up the world’s largest trading bloc, not the one that has just left it. Secondly, Biden, like many Americans, is of Irish descent, a fact of which he is immensely proud. He is also immensely proud of the role the US played in the Northern Ireland peace process. It is no secret that Biden regards Johnson’s approach to Northern Ireland as cavalier to the point of recklessness, and threatens to destroy, with no gain for either side, the precious thing brokered, in no small part, by one of his predecessors. Johnson will have to think very carefully how he behaves towards the EU in the next few weeks, as it may well determine how the US behaves towards the UK. This also depends on to what extent we still actually matter. We do, of course, still matter. We remain a large economy, located in the middle of the Western Hemisphere, with whom others will want to do business. We still have much to be proud of and much to be optimistic about. But we maybe do not matter to the extent we once did. It is recognised in diplomatic circles that, post-Iraq, Briton has consciously become less of an internationalist, a fact confirmed by Brexit. That relationship, the one of Thatcher and Reagan, the one of Blair and Clinton and Blair and Bush, is not, at this moment in time, particularly special. Nobody is working any harder than us at ABHI Towers to identify the opportunities that exist as we become a newly independent coastal State, be that with the MHRA to devise innovative regulation or in the creation of our virtual UK Pavilion, but there are also potential pitfalls aplenty.
And if you wanted any further cheer in your life, welcome to Lockdown Part Two, the Sequel. I sense there will be a different air about it this time, not least because the schools will remain open. Well they will try. Half of the year groups at ours have been sent home at some point since September. But I think you will feel a little less like an outlaw when you visit the shops or the Docs or the park. You know how I like to show off on occasion, only when it is justified mind. But you did hear it all here first. I told you a month or so ago that lockdown was where we were heading, and I also told you that, because Keir Starmer said it was a good idea, it would not happen over the half term holiday. That would have been too sensible a thing to do anyway. And I told you about all the leaky things. You know how I feel about all the leaky things. So now there is going to be an investigation about how plans for the lockdown were leaked, forcing the PM to give the hurry up to his announcement. An investigation? Really? If information security really is so poor in this Cabinet, and the media feel comfortable in publishing hearsay, the head that will have already have rolled is that of the enforcer, the man that manages the message. But The Dom is not going anywhere is he? To illustrate just how ridiculous a proposition it is that information of that sensitivity was surreptitiously obtained by the BBC, who were then happy to report it, let me share with you one of my anecdotes. This one relates to the time of my generation’s nemesis. The Dom equivalent back then was the PM’s Press Secretary, Sir Bernard Ingham. Years later, and well into his dotage, Ingham was asked what the single trickiest thing he had had to deal with in his years of looking after Margaret Thatcher. It must surely have been the “we are a Grandparent” moment. I remember my mother telephoning me immediately afterwards and delivering a considered, forthright and expletive laden exposition of her view of the then Prime Minister’s state of mind. Ingham was unhesitating in his reply, but it was not Thatcher’s regal pretentions that caused the most grief, although it did involve royalty. It related to a visiting Head of State and the associated banquet at the Palace. Proceedings had reached the stage of the Loyal Toast. Assembled dignitaries were upstanding and “The Queen,” echoed around the hall. You will know that in the instant that the toast is uttered, there is one of those natural, but deeply intense moments of complete silence, as glasses are lifted to lips. On this occasion however, the silence was filled. Captured on the microphone, switched on and positioned for Her Majesty’s address, was the clear and distinct voice of Denis Thatcher, “And bugger Europe.” Within moments, the members of the press corps trusted enough to have been invited to report on events, were summoned to an ante room, where, by his own admission, Ingham administered the most savage pre-emptive kicking of his career. The journos were subjected to the full “none of you will ever work in this town again” treatment. And if you do not remember that incident being reported at the time, it is because it never was.
There is a more sobering element to this of course, and one that will impact on your business. On Wednesday morning, NHS boss, Simon Stevens announced that the NHS was to be put back on level 4 alert status. The move means the NHS’s response to the resurgence of the pandemic is being handled nationally rather than regionally and that NHS England’s national incident coordination centre has once again become operational, following it being stood down in July. It started up again at the same time as national lockdown measures came into force. The move also gives NHSE the power to instruct where NHS staff should work and what services need to be delivered and where. There are hopes that mass cancellations of elective procedures can be avoided, but as you will already know, they have started in many places. The situation is one we are closely monitoring, and our dialogue with the highest echelons of the service continues, but the impact on volumes is inevitable.
If you want to cheer yourselves up a bit after all this, perhaps you can go and have a game of golf with Michael Gove. Oh, hang on a minute. Maybe not.
