15th June 2022
Another ethics adviser to the Prime Minister has resigned.
I’m told Geidt submitted a “strongly worded letter” to the PM resigning earlier today (that the Cabinet Office does not intend to publish).
Feeling is yesterday’s committee session codified in his mind his position was untenable and after a long night of soul searching, he quit
— Aubrey Allegretti (@breeallegretti) June 15, 2022
Lord Geidt was placed in an impossible position.
Not least because he was appointed to an impossible position.
As this blog has previously averred, the entire scheme of the Ministerial Code, with an advisor on ministers’ interests, was a constitutional nonsense.
This is because such a code and such an adviser provided no actual check or balance on the power of the Prime Minister.
The code and the adviser only has the power which the Prime Minister of the day allows it to have.
And like most forms of supposed ‘self regulation’ it was in fact an absence of regulation.
It was a cloak for sheer prime ministerial power, and not any counter to it.
This blog does not call for the resignation of people in positions in power often – but this blog did say Lord Geidt should resign.
And well done Lord Geidt for resigning when he was placed in an impossible position, while attempting to fulfil this impossible position.
***
Comments Policy
This blog enjoys a high standard of comments, many of which are better and more interesting than the posts.
Comments are welcome, but they are pre-moderated and comments will not be published if irksome.
Good for him. He should be one of many.
Complete agreement from me. There are many within the Conservative Party who should not be supporting PM Johnson’s excesses as Prime Minister. Huge reputational damage is being done to the U.K. internationally.
The FT puts in rather more colourful terms.
“ In the end, the strains of the job and the public criticism of him — some media reports portrayed him as “a stooge” — appear to have taken their toll.”
Definitely! But every time you turn on R4 you hear some corrupt and slimy wriggler defending Boris Johnson and his band of nasty, heartless liars.
Well, finally. I am surprised he remained this long. I wonder if Lord Geidt kept a copy of his “strongly worded” resignation letter. He should publish it himself if the Cabinet Office won’t.
Who can be found next to fill the temporary position as Boris Johnson’s independent ethics adviser. His father or his brother perhaps?
So, the resignation letter has been published, and it seems he found himself in an “impossible and odious” position when asked about a proposed government action which would involve a “deliberate and purposeful breach of the Ministerial Code”. All very opaque.
Helpfully, the Prime Minster’s response reveals it involves the Trade Remedies Authority taking action to protect an unnamed “crucial industry” from “material harm” but which “might be seen to conflict with our obligations under the WTO”.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/correspondence-from-lord-geidt-and-the-prime-ministers-response
Oh dear. International law is often more like guidelines, isn’t it, but there can be consequences.
I wonder which particular Nolan principle would be breached here? Selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership. Hmm. The government under this PM is almost the opposite – narcissistic, corrupt, venal, opaque, dishonest.
The TRA’s website shows it has recently been taking action to counteract subsidies or dumping of various metals – aluminium extrusions from China, flat and coiled steel from Russia and China – as well as glass fibre from China, and biodiesel from the US and Canada. But perhaps it was the Ironing Boards from Turkey which finally pushed him over the edge.
https://www.trade-remedies.service.gov.uk/public/cases/
There comes a point when the bucket of whitewash runs out of paint.
Took his time though, didn’t he? If the government chooses not to publish his letter of resignation, as indicated, then surely he must.
If he is somehow embargoed from doing so that implies censorship and would be another example of constitutional abuse by this government.
If he simply chooses not to then that implies something else. Perhaps the outrage is felt in a specific and limited way, such that should he be offered an alternative position he could accept that position without, technically, appearing a hypocrite?
Useful to remember that during the last (prolonged) vacancy after Alex Allan’s resignation as Independent Advisor, Ld Gus O’Donnell – former Cabinet Secretary- was giving evidence to the Committee on Standards in Public Life. He observed that anyone willing to take on the role of Independent Advisor in its present enfeebled form was, by definition, unsuitable for the post.
Impossible position but at least resigning is reported. That’s value.
His resignation as the second of such, will weigh in people’s minds so to that extent it is a check and balance and will erode the PM’s legitimacy to govern. It is attritional.
I am so thankful for your posts, in this crazy political climate you cut through all the froth and razzmatazz and render it down to sane and calm facts .
Bless you .
The Honourable Lord Geidt
Had been appointed to do some ethics advising shite
Seemed he was often working in the past
One wondered how long that could last
In front of an HoC committee
His words lacked legitimacy
They spewed out as double talk
Showing his determination not to walk
It then became rather surprising
When Geidt quitted doing his advising
In that role conceived by Johnson
As if he’d been overwhelmed by conscience
Losing two ethics advisers might be careless
Or just some bad luck
You can’t tell if they lack heart
Or don’t give a Jiminy Cricket’s fart
What we can discern and maybe learn
Is that ethically advising Johnson is what a fool earns
Whilst he continues his down his path of chaos
You will find that he has won, and you have massively lost
`it took him time. But anyone with a sense of self worth would eventually resign from providing a moral shield for the current PM. Now that the wafer thin veneer of respectability provided by Guidt is removed, let everyone see the PM for what he is. And let’s see who continues to defend his behaviour.
Starmer today made a point of highlighting Tory MPs’ assessment of their leader. Geidt’s resignation should remind them that it is not okay just to let these failing pass – yet again.
Lord Geidt should sleep sounder tonight. I hope that relief will be shared by us all before too long.
One of the most surprising and frankly terrifying lessons of the last 5 years or so has been the revelation that US Democracy is in fact shockingly fragile – that a putative tyrant can come so perilously close to pulling of a coup and/or taking a nation to the brink of a civil war.
Only just behind this in terms of the amount of concern we should experience would be that similar flaws are to be found throughout the British system of governance. Whether that be through the perversion of the representative model of government (taking the nation to war despite a criminal lack of evidence to support the move); whether that be through the bare-faced, outright lies the then PM told the House and nation in support of his fawning support of the then US President; whether it be through the near-criminal levels of negligence shown by 3 PMs and their Ministers in regards to the Referendum on EU membership, everywhere you look you can find evidence that the British system of government has only managed to survive this far because the central participants have observed a certain set of norms.
It was a failure of our current PM to follow those norms that prompted Lord Geidt’s resignation.
But does that solve the problem? Has this PM shown one iota of contrition or humility for anything? Has he ever admitted to a mistake? Does he care one jot for the world outside his window as long as he’s got a couple of bottles of Bolly in his fridge? (Bollinger).
Surely there can be a better way to run a “democracy” than to have one single person (the PM) choose a sycophantic cabinet and then ride roughshod over everything he touches? Proponents of the current system may point to the General Election as a means to effect change… but what if the harm done between now and then proves to be catastrophic?
What then?
“…whether that be through the bare-faced, outright lies the then PM told the House and nation in support of his fawning support of the then US President; ”
This is really unfair. Yes, Blair misled Parliament to get approval for the Iraq War, but he did so only because he knew that without British support the US would go it alone and invade anyway. That would have been a much bigger disaster. Blair convinced Bush to deal with Afghanistan first. Bush was ready to take out Saddam from 12 September. Blair tried to add some legitimacy to the war effort and helped to gain NATO support. He may have succeeded in preventing a world war. He did so at the expense of tremendous political capital. Blair was a good leader in spite of everything.
I do so agree and it’s refreshing to read your defence of Blair – yes, despite his faults.
I’m no Blairite, but give the man his due.
David will recall when we were together on the train platform at Doncaster and he retrieved a copy of Tony Blair’s freshly minted autobiography from the bin. It was an hilarious find that did not quite rescue a terrible day in court.
I remember that moment well! I donated it to a charity shop in the end.
Did he leave the can of whitewash behind for his successor?
I came to the view several years ago that what we needed was a directly-elected speaker (by us the voters, not MPs) to organise and run our politics separate from the political parties. This matter makes that clear.
What I wonder is whether that given the PM is appointed by the Queen, isn’t unethical behaviour actually embarrassing the Monarch?
Better late than never.
Looking at the good lord’s bio I don’t think he was at all suited to the job of Boris’s ethics adviser. Perhaps an ex site manager from Romford market would have known more about Ethics.
Johnson to applicant for vacant post:
“That’s my last Ethics Adviser painted on the wall,
Looking as if he were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now; Fra Pandolf’s hands
Worked busily a day, and there he stands.
Will’t please you sit and look at him? I said
“Fra Pandolf” by design, for never read
Strangers like you that pictured countenance,
The depth and passion of its earnest glance,
But to myself they turned (since none puts by
The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)
And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst,
How such a glance came there; so, not the first
Are you to turn and ask thus.”
To paraphrase Oscar Wilde : “To lose one ethics adviser may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness.”
It is to their eternal shame no member of the Cabinet has yet followed Lord Geidt’s example. By continuing to serve in the Cabinet they are, by implication, complicit.
No doubt they are all sitting on their hands waiting for the axe to fall on the PM so that the ‘bun fight’ for his job can start. Personally I would prefer to see someone from outside the Cabinet get the job. Any minister with designs on the top job ought to resign now although I accept that history indicates the one who wields the knife rarely gets the crown.
The customary exchange of letters between Lord Geidt and the PM adds more fuel to the fire.
The sparse details, and surrounding coverage, suggest that the ‘straw that broke the Camel’s back’ is a potential decision by the SoS for International Trade to retain steel import quotas after 30 June “notwithstanding [doing so] might be seen to conflict with [the UK’s] obligations under the WTO”.
It would be a most peculiar (if welcome) development if the exercise of a minister’s statutory power that would, or could, breach international law in, to borrow a phrase, a specific and limited way would be, without more, a “deliberate and purposeful breach of the Ministerial Code”. It would have the merit of according with the tenor of the Government’s position before the Court of Appeal in Ex P GCHR [2018] EWCA Civ 1855.
However, it cannot be logically reconciled with the Cabinet Secretary’s ruling, in September 2020, that executing primary legislation that breaches international law in a specific and limited way does not breach the Civil Service or Ministerial Code.
To try to draw a distinction between a minister bringing legislation through to enactment which breaches international law and exercising a statutory power in a manner which is arguably lawful, as a matter of English Law, but breaches international law would be embarassingly close to Lord Keen’s generous, but rejected, attempt to cover the Government’s shame two years ago.
Of course, Lord Geidt was not the PM’s Ethics adviser in September 2020 and, perhaps, he would have resigned then if he was? Or perhaps, the Cabinet Secretary no longer stands by the previous ruling?
We don’t know. We don’t even know if there was more to Lord Geidt’s concerns than the ‘mere’ exercise of a power in breach, or arguable breach, of international law. The fundamental problem is we, most likely, will never know: because, the Ministerial Code is, as you have eloquently explained, merely a thing writ in water and is no substitute for actual accountablity or fidelity to the rule of law.
Discovery of documents is perhaps poorly taught in law schools. You only learn the real lessons when you are qualified and on your feet.
Last night the idea that the resignation letter and response could be kept private were either plain daft or cunning of the highest order.
The phrase « other European countries » as used by Johnson this morning (and not last night) is bordering on the offensive from the viewpoint of Eu citizens particularly as yesterday new infringement proceedings were issued alleging potential UK smuggling of high value electrical goods into the single market.
None of this is going to end well.