Ian Watmore, who has served as the chair of the Civil Service Commission since 2016, has been moonlighting as the chairman of the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) for the last year; raking it in with a £150,000 salary whilst working just 3 days a week. Given Simon Case’s insistence yesterday that he had “not been made aware of of any instances of senior civil servants holding outside interests which are considered to conflict with their roles”, this raises a few questions.

As chair of the Civil Service Commission, Watmore is responsible for “safeguarding an impartial civil service” and ensuring “that appointments are made openly, fairly and on merit.” Considering how Government approval was needed for any televised cricket played last year, Guido imagines Watmore could have come in handy if there were any problems…

UPDATE: It looks like Watmore has a history of jeopardising his public commitments. Back in 2018, Watmore left his job at the Football League after an inquiry found he had undermined a £595 million deal with Sky Sports by pursuing alternative contracts without the board’s approval. Just the man to trust with maintaining Civil Service impartiality then…

Guido noted yesterday it’s interesting having to watch Labour push the claims of Cummings given they tried so hard to discredit him in 2020. It seems the government has also picked up on this, with Thérèse Coffey instantly referencing the rose garden presser and his Barnard Castle trip when asked about Cummings’s latest claims, in an obvious attempt to shoot the messenger. The problem with this is the same people in government now trying to discredit Cummings spent 2020 holding him up as a paragon of virtue…

Ben Wallace morning media round was little better than Liz Truss’s yesterday, having to contend with another leak in the Mail, that Boris allegedly said he’d rather see bodies piled high “in their thousands” than put the UK into a third lockdown. Reminder: Cummings is sincerely claiming he is not the source of leaks…

“It’s not true… we’re getting into the sort of comedy chapter now of these gossip stories. ‘Unnamed sources’ by ‘unnamed advisors’ talking about ‘unnamed events’ – none of this is serious”

On Today – apropos of nothing – Wallace asked himself the rhetorical “Do I think the PM is sleazy? No I do not”.

Wallace says he’ll leave commenting on this gossip story for “the Hello magazines of the world”. Today’s goossip is tomorrow’s front page news…

This morning the BBC reveal texts between the PM and James Dyson, in which Boris promised to “fix” a tax issue to prevent Dyson’s employees having to pay extra if they came here to make Covid ventilators during what was a national emergency. The Treasury changed the rules to mean any days worked by foreign employees towards the national Covid effort wouldn’t be counted by HMRC between March and June 2020. Only an hysterical partisan would take issue with this, here’s Labour’s line this morning;

“These are jaw-dropping revelations. Boris Johnson is now front and centre of the biggest lobbying scandal in a generation, and Tory sleaze has reached the heart of Downing Street.”

A gigantic volte-face given Labour repeatedly praised the ventilator response – a response the tax changes aimed to bolster. The changes were openly put to parliament and applied to non-tax-resident doctors and engineers who would otherwise have had negative tax implications for helping in the fight against Covid. VAT and customs duties on vital medical equipment were also waived. In April 2020, Rachel Reeves said the government needed to “strain every sinew and utilise untapped resources in UK manufacturing, to deliver essential equipment to frontline workers”. A week later, Starmer praised everyone involved in the effort to get ventilators:

The Ventilator Challenge is an example of how UK manufacturers, a world class workforce and @unitetheunion have come together to provide our NHS with the vital equipment it urgently needs. Well done to everyone involved. https://t.co/7u9vhQrDVc

— Keir Starmer (@Keir_Starmer) March 30, 2020

Just last month, Anneliese Dodds admitted the government had worked with manufacturers to deliver the “seemingly impossible, to record time” on ventilator production. Something their holier-than-thou anti-‘crony’ position would have prevented.

This latest accusation of sleaze is a misstep by Labour. As Tony Blair told Today this morning, “I find it hard to get worked up about this… there’s got to be a certain degree of understanding.”

Most people will think it was good of Dyson to put up £20 million and hundreds of his staff on to the project at short notice and no cost to the taxpayer. They will think it fair that those who came to our aid were not punished by the taxman for helping. There are some genuine questions about cronyism to be answered when it comes to the supply of PPE, some of which may well be answered with criminal charges. If Labour starts making weak accusations that don’t stack up they will start sounding like the boy who cried wolf…

Guido’s pleased to see the Lobby finally picking up on the Rob Roberts saga, first reported on this website two months ago. Today’s BBC’s report added little to story Guido readers didn’t already know.

While the official Parliamentary investigation into the Delyn MP is ongoing, one fact omitted from the story so far is the young male staffer involved in an incident – which the Chief Whip had to intervene over – was none other than Roberts’ own senior Parliamentary Researcher. Rob’s advances on his researcher first began in the MP’s car while driving through his constituency, just minutes before arriving back at home to his daughter and wife. Ten days after the young man started working for him…

The BBC reports that Rob asked the staffer out “to dinner”. It wasn’t merely a dinner request that led his researcher to stop going into work a further ten days after his boss’ first leering advance..