Political amateur dramatics - a UK perspective

Briar Lipson
Insights Newsletter
24 November, 2017

So far in this Parliament, our fresh-faced new ministers have succumbed to a bit of over-exuberance on GST reform, some misguided Vietnamese-whispers, and some contorting parliamentary questions.

But if political amateur dramatics is what you are after there has been little to see here, despite our government’s relative inexperience. Look instead to the UK Conservatives, now into their eighth year in government.

First up from the UK this month came sex scandals. Several people levelled allegations of sexual misconduct by members of both major parties. The Conservative Party compiled a ‘sleaze list’, of 40 of their MPs accused of misbehaviour. Though since discredited as inaccurate, allegations included offences from being ‘handsy in taxis’, and ‘groping’, to conducting consensual affairs and sexual peccadilloes.

Defence Secretary Michael Fallon resigned over the allegations, admitting that in the past his behaviour towards women had ‘fallen short’.

Lesson to us all: according to the Oxford English dictionary a peccadillo is a ‘relatively minor fault or sin’. And there was me conjuring images of pocket flutes!

Next up came the curious case of Priti Patel, the UK’s now-former International Development Secretary.

Secretly, during an August family holiday to Israel, Patel met with Israeli government ministers, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It was a clear breach of the ministerial code, so when the story broke, she resigned.

The lesson here is not to waste your holidays on working. No-one likes over-conscientious achievers anyway.

And lastly, comes UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson. In what he now reveals was a mistake, Mr Johnson told a select committee that as far as he understood it, British citizen Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe - who has been detained in Iran for 18 months and sentenced to five years imprisonment – was there training journalists.

Since making this remark, Johnson has been accused of putting the British mother at risk of another five years on her sentence. Johnson later apologised, explaining that “Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe was there on holiday. She was not there in any professional capacity.”

As with all things Boris-related, I am not sure what the lesson is here, except perhaps not to make blunders, even when you are as experienced as Boris Johnson.

So, while our new government may have appeared a little amateurish at times, we must keep things in perspective. Things could have been a whole lot worse. 

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