Boris Johnson’s virtual PMQs shows why Dido Harding’s eight-month silence in the House of Lords must end: Tom Richmond

AN important Parliamentary precedent was set this week when Boris Johnson took part in Prime Minister’s Questions remotely because he’s having to self-isolate 10 Downing Street.
Baroness Dido Harding, Executive Chair of NHS Test and Trace, in Westminster, London. Picture: Aaron Chown/PA WireBaroness Dido Harding, Executive Chair of NHS Test and Trace, in Westminster, London. Picture: Aaron Chown/PA Wire
Baroness Dido Harding, Executive Chair of NHS Test and Trace, in Westminster, London. Picture: Aaron Chown/PA Wire

This – and then his statement on defence spending just 24 hours later – now means there’s absolutely no reason or excuse for Ministers to come up with flimsy excuses to evade such scrutiny.

Gordon Brown and George Osborne both had ‘form’ for this when Chancellor – and I hope Rishi Sunak, the current head of HM Treasury, does not develop this habit just because he’s held in such high regard.

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Now the example set by Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the Commons Speaker, needs to be followed in the House of Lords when it comes to holding the Government’s all-too-powerful advisers to account and who, in some cases, have more decision-making powers and responsibilities than Ministers of State.

Boris Johnson has been giving statements by video link this week. Picture: House of Commons/PA WireBoris Johnson has been giving statements by video link this week. Picture: House of Commons/PA Wire
Boris Johnson has been giving statements by video link this week. Picture: House of Commons/PA Wire

When Baroness Dido Harding, head of the haphazard track and trace policy, was told to self-isolate this week, she made a lame joke at her own expense before adding: “Feeling well. Many hours of Zoom ahead.”

Good. That should include an hour-long inquisition by the House of Lords where the Tory peer has not spoken since March 24 when, ironically, she spoke out in defence of the circumvention of scrutiny at times of national crisis. Sorry, but Covid is not an open-ended invitation to dodge such democratic duties.

Contrast this with Paymaster General Penny Mordaunt’s respectful manner when she promised to investigate issues raised by backbenchers during a debate on Covid-19 – she even said she would meet Hull North MP Dame Diana Johnson immediately afterwards to discuss the surge in cases there.

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And the same principle should also apply to Lord Paul Deighton, Harding’s Tory colleague in the House of Lords, who was put in charge of the procurement of PPE – and presumably signing off those so-called ‘no documentation’ contracts to Government friends that have attracted so much attention from the National Audit Office this week.

We simply don’t know. Previously chief executive of the organising committee that delivered the London 2012 Olympics and Paralympics, he’s not spoken in a Lords debate since February 2018, though he did find time this week to take part in votes on the UK Internal Market Bill as Brexit looms. He, too, can’t be allowed to have power without responsibility – or accountability – and I’m looking to peers to redress this democratic imbalance.

A SIGNIFICANT week awaits Rishi Sunak as the Chancellor prepares to deliver the outcome of a Spending Review that will reveal much about the state of the public finances – and the future priorities of Boris Johnson’s current ‘heir apparent’.

So far the Richmond MP is one of the few Ministers to emerge from the crisis with an enhanced reputation (the aforementioned Penny Mordaunt and Jo Churchill, a Health Minister, are two other notable performers).

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But the historian Michael Ashcroft makes a key point in his just-published book Going For Broke: The Rise of Rishi Sunak that concludes with this columnist’s interview with the Chancellor in July when he described how hard it was to say ‘no’ to spending requests.

Ashcroft suggests that the Chancellor’s “well-attested niceness” could hold him back because politicians need “steel” and that the greater test will come when Sunak has to make decisions that are deeply unpopular with the public. Next week could be the first of them, though limiting the scope of the spending review from three years to 12 months buys wriggle room.

However the book also contains asides from William Hague, who was Sunak’s predecessor as Richmond MP.

The former Tory leader says Sunak can see the industrial landscapes of the Tees Valley from his North Yorkshire house and that “he’s really got clearly in his head that that’s a big litmus test of what he’s doing”. Hague believes the “levelling up agenda might become whatever Sunakism is”. We’ll know much more next week.

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WHY does it take so long to get anything done in this country? I refer to the proposal that tenants in social housing will be entitled to mandatory smoke and carbon dioxide alarms in future.

One of the recommendations from the Grenfell Tower tragedy of June 2017, a consultation will now follow before there’s any chance of this common sense measure being passed into law. I guess landlords – both public and private – will then be given months, if not years, to comply.

Why? I’m amazed that the fitting of such alarms was not mandatory before Grenfell. And I’m even more perturbed by the inaction since a tragedy that claimed at least 72 lives. I can’t work it out. Can you?

I’M LOOKING forward to reading Sir Michael Parkinson’s new family memoir Like Father, Like Son, and their Yorkshire roots. The ultimate interviewer, the reputation of ‘Parky’ meant that it was such an honour for guests to appear on his shows that no underhand tactics were required to attract the biggest – and greatest – names in showbusiness and sport.

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Unlike the now notorious Martin Bashir as the alleged duplicity that led to his now infamous 1995 Panorama interview with Diana, Princess of Wales, destroys his reputation – and that of the BBC which has presided over a cover-up for so long. For, if the BBC was concerned about quality control and editorial 
ethics, it should have been our ‘Parky’ – and not the then unknown Bashir with a name to make – interviewing the late Princess.

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