Sunday 15 September 2019

A little bit of bread and no cheese


Two versions of the same document
This is my interpretation, and I'm sticking to it until something from government shows me I'm wrong.

When Boris Johnson gave Michael Gove the job of disaster planning at the Office of No Deal (Offend - not really), he called on his new civil servants (most of whom had been working on the same job under the previous regime) to tell him where they'd got to.

The result was a document called Operation Yellowhammer - HMG Planning Assumptions - Latest changes in red (02/08/19) - Base Scenario, dated 2 August. This, as we're told by the  Herald's Scottish Political Editor Tom Gordon, who supplied a comparison of that document and the latest version, was given to the Scottish government and - I'd venture to say - to the Welsh administration, with a copy held in reserve for Stormont, or supplied to the impressive Northern Ireland civil service.

Note that Operation Yellowhammer was kicked off by Theresa May as prime minister, and you'll see that unprepossessing image again.

A couple of weeks later, somebody slipped a copy of the document to Sunday Times reporters Rosamund Urwin and Caroline Wheeler, and it became an EXCLUSIVE under the headline "Operation Chaos: Whitehall's secret no-deal plan leaked".

The two reporters claimed a "Cabinet Office source" told them "It is a devastating health check on the nation's preparedness" and a "senior Whitehall source" said "This is not Project Fear - this is the most realistic assessment of what the public face with no deal. These are likely, basic, reasonable scenarios - not the worst case".

Think what you like about anonymous Whitehall sources, but the detail is what we've been hearing from industry after industry and professional body after professional body - British Nuclear Medicine Society to British Retail Consortium, and the Road Haulage Association complained that nobody had warned them of refinery closures (paragraph 15).

On the day (18 August), Michael Gove came out and told us that this was "absolutely the worst case" and that the government had taken "significant additional steps" in the two weeks since the document was circulated - I would bloody well hope so - and this was the line they maintained until after Johnson's "controversial" move to suspend Parliament.




A lot of big things happened during this time which I don't want to spend too much time on here.

  • Parliament passed a law to require Johnson to request an Article 50 extension if he couldn't get the Commons to approve a Brexit deal or no deal.
  • One Conservative MP crossed the floor to join the Liberal Democrats, 21 MPs lost the Conservative whip and another one resigned it.
  • Johnson decided to suspend Parliament so that he couldn't be held to account.
  • And he was taken to court in three jurisdictions - Northern Ireland, and England and Wales, where the courts decided the question is political and therefore not for them, and Scotland, where the judges disagreed, and ruled that the prorogation is illegal. For example, Lord Carloway's opinion stated "prorogation was being mooted specifically as a means to stymie any further legislation regulating Brexit". (There is a lot of argument among lawyers about what should be considered "justiciable" in this context.) The UK Supreme Court has set aside 17-19 September to produce a single answer on this question.
  • People seriously started to ask whether a British prime minister had lied to the Queen.






Back on track

On the last day before Parliament was closed down it was time for emergency measures. Jeremy Corbyn demanded and was granted 90 minutes to debate a motion "on whether the Prime Minister will obey the law that this House has just passed into law". That law was the Benn bill requiring the prime minister to request an Article 50 extension if no Brexit has been agreed by the Commons by 19 October, its royal assent announced earlier in the afternoon to make it the European Union (Withdrawal) (No. 2) Act 2019. The government declined to take part until the end of the debate, when Dominic Raab offered "This Government will always respect the rule of law. That has consistently been our clear position and, frankly, it is outrageous that it is even in doubt".

But it was in doubt, and it still is.

Raab refused to allow Sylvia Hermon to make a point, but Corbyn made way (good tactic in this case). She argued "The Foreign Secretary described as flawed the legislation that is intended to stop the country leaving without a deal, which received Royal Assent today. ​May I recommend to him, and indeed to all Members of the House, Radio 4’s interview with Lord Sumption, a very distinguished former member of the Supreme Court? He said that there was not “the slightest obscurity” about the Act. I rest my case. It is not flawed." The motion passed without a vote, not that we were any the wiser by the end about Johnson's attitude to following the law.

But before that came Dominic Grieve's motion, (he got the full three hours allowable for an emergency motion) which takes us back to the main purpose of this piece:

"That a humble address be presented to Her Majesty, that she will be graciously pleased to direct ministers to lay before this House, not later than 11.00pm Wednesday 11 September, all correspondence and other communications (whether formal or informal, in both written and electronic form, including but not limited to messaging services including WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Facebook messenger, private email accounts both encrypted and unencrypted, text messaging and iMessage and the use of both official and personal mobile phones) to, from or within the present administration, since 23 July 2019 relating to the prorogation of Parliament sent or received by one or more of the following individuals: Hugh Bennett, Simon Burton, Dominic Cummings, Nikki da Costa, Tom Irven, Sir Roy Stone, Christopher James, Lee Cain or Beatrice Timpson; and that ministers be further directed to lay before this House no later than 11.00pm Wednesday 11 September all the documents prepared within Her Majesty’s government since 23 July 2019 relating to operation Yellowhammer and submitted to the cabinet or a cabinet committee."

That's a lot of material demanded from the government: everything about the decision to suspend Parliament, and everything produced by Operation Yellowhammer that ministers actually saw. The motion passed by 311 to 302, but nobody knew whether government would cough anything up, because Parliament was suspended at the end of the day, after opposition parties had stuck together to refuse Johnson his general election get-out.

Two days later Michael Gove released two documents - just two documents - a version of the Yellowhammer report and a carefully lawyered letter explaining why there would be no more. This is yet another piece of evidence that our governance needs some law behind it. There's not much point in having nice "powers" like a "humble address" if they can't be enforced. The US Congress would be laughing at us: they can sub poena people and evidence.

Two versions of the same document
I've read a lot about this Yellowhammer document, this time entitled Operation Yellowhammer - HMG Reasonable Worst Case Planning Assumptions - As of 2 August 2019, and nobody has suggested that it's different from the last one apart from the title. Nobody has even objected to the assumption that paragraph 15, which was redacted in this new version, is identical to the same paragraph in the document leaked to the Sunday Times. So I'll assume it's one document which Gove has painfully tried to misrepresent from the start.

But the title has changed, and all government mouthpieces must fit the phrase "worst case scenario" into every interview.

The sad, but hardly unexpected, thing is that so much of the media does the same. The Sunday Times scoop is vindicated but BBC News slavishly follows the "worst case scenario" line. It would be bad if they were hiding the real contents of the document, but it's just sad that they can only misrepresent it.

And some government mouthpieces really overdo it.





Meanwhile - booksellers' news

David Cameron's book, For the Record, will be published on 19 September, in good time for full appreciation before Halloween.

Boris Johnson told reporters that nothing his predecessor says "in the next few days will diminish the affection and respect in which I hold him". And we all know we can take him at his word.








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