While it might have fewer implications for his premiership than Tiverton & Wakefield, Boris’s defeat in removing the Commonwealth Leader Baroness Scotland is no less awkward for him. Going into today it was reported Boris’s team was “optimistic about ousting” the former Blairite cabinet minister, however in the last hour her challenger – the Jamaican foreign minister – lost the contest to Scotland: 27 to 24…
Boris’s opposition to Scotland is nothing new, given the number of scandals she’s presided over. During her time the Commonwealth has racked up more than £600,000 in employment tribunal costs. The Commonwealth’s audit committee has also accused Scotland of “circumventing” competitive tendering rules by awarding a £250,000 commission to a company owned by a fellow Labour peer. In 2016 it was revealed £338,000 had been spent refurbishing her Mayfair apartment, and she’s also had to deny helping a friend from Grenada to secure a knighthood. Valid reasons to get rid, though a third election loss in half-a-day doesn’t look like the result from a slick No. 10 operation…
Labour is making hay while the sun is shining over Boris and Rishi’s fixed penalty notice charges, as you would expect. Generally it is a good rule that lawmakers can’t be law breakers, though it is the case that ministers receiving fixed penalty notices is hardly anything new. Guido thought he’d wander down memory lane to help contextualise Labour’s performative outrage…
Starting off most recently, Welsh First Minister Mark Drakeford called for the PM to resign as “You can’t be a law-maker and a law-breaker.” This seems to be a new position from Drakeford given his own health minister Eluned Morgan received a speeding fine of £800 just last month as well as a six month driving ban. She remains in situ…
Then we get into the weeds of Blair and Brown’s ministers. Most prominently among whom must be Harriet Harman. While serving as a minister and deputy leader of the Labour Party, Harman was charged with not one, not two, but three speeding offences; in 2003, 2007 and 2010, wracking up a whopping £810-worth of fines and nine penalty points on her licence. Harman has accused Boris of not only breaking laws he made, he broke laws in place to keep people safe. Much like speed limits…
Fixed Penalty Notice queen Harriet Harman then piroutted and defended Baroness Scotland, serving as Gordon Brown’s Attorney General at the time, when she received a £5,000 civil penalty notice for hiring an illegal worker. While this would have been bad enough, Scotland was a Home Office minister who helped introduce the very legislation under which she received the fine. Scotland said the penalty was caused by a technical error and compared it to a parking ticket, saying “it’s not a criminal offence”. Brown said “no further action was necessary”…
Lastly there’s Liam Byrne, who said yesterday “We cant have a rules based order with leaders who break the rules.” In 2007, Byrne was fined £100 after admitting to using his mobile while driving, as well as receiving three points on his licence. The fine was ironic as, at the time, Byrne had been a long-standing road safety campaigner, tabling a petition in 2005 from constituents calling for tougher penalties for dangerous drivers.
He once told a parliamentary committee that the most dangerous drivers were “serial potential killers” and said he was “shocked” at the leniency of sentences handed down to them.
The Commonwealth is facing a legal bill of over £1 million after its disgraced leader Baroness Scotland lost a second major employment tribunal case in under a year. That’s after already blowing vast sums of taxpayers’ money on bumper contracts for her friends and attempting to bill the taxpayer £450,000 to do up her grace-and-favour Mayfair home…
This time, Scotland’s Secretariat was found to have breached its contractual obligations on two counts towards its former Deputy Secretary General, Dr Josephine Ojiambo. Scotland initially failed in her obligation to consider the renewal of Ojiambo’s three-year contract, before attempting to stop Ojiambo from pursuing a grievance with a barrage of email ultimatums trying to force her into a contract extension of a mere 3.5 months – and only on the condition that she dropped “ALL” her other complaints. Unsurprisingly Ojiambo declined.
The tribunal awarded Ojiambo all legal costs along with compensation which is expected to run up to a quarter of a million pounds altogether, not including the Commonwealth’s own legal costs. The total damages and legal costs from the two cases could run to as much as £1.25 million – over 5% of the Commonwealth Secretariat’s annual expenditure. Taxpayers again picking up the tab for Baroness Scotland’s chronically unprofessional behaviour…
A senior Commonwealth Secretariat civil servant, who was forced to resign during the Baroness Scotland expenses scandal after being accused of leaking to the press, has won his claim for breach of contract against his old employer. Ram Venuprasad said he was “marked out” by Scotland after he complained internally about her shameless spending splurge, which Guido reported in detail at the time. Scotland refused to appear at the tribunal and the Commonwealth Secretariat will now have to give Venuprasad a huge taxpayer-funded payout, which could reach as high as six figures. Baroness Brazen blowing more of your money…
Baroness Scotland was the Attorney General who refused to appeal the lenient sentence of John Worboys despite calls from women’s groups back in 2009. Campaigners told her the eight year sentence was a “disaster” but she ignored them. If Scotland had acted, or Keir Starmer had prosecuted Worboys for the other 75 complaints against him, there is no way Worboys would be set for release now. Instead their rank incompetence means justice isn’t being done…
H/T Sean O’Neill
The Guardian sinks to new depths of sycophancy today with its hilariously soft-ball interview glorifying the shamed Baroness Scotland. Little more than an adulatory puff-piece, the article comes in the wake of a watershed series of IPSO rulings that entirely vindicated journalistic investigations into Baroness Brazen’s eye-watering expenses. The paper devotes no fewer than three pages to shilling for the Baroness, giving an unchallenged airing to her side of the story. Even though the piece claims to investigate the details of the refurbishment of her home – carried out at vast public expense – neither the print nor the online version are accompanied by any pictures of the interior. This is particularly amusing as the latter version is headlined: “inside Lady Scotland’s refurbished home”. An explanation is given for this glaring oversight:
“A request to publish pictures taken inside the house was refused.”
We paid for it, so why aren’t we allowed to see?
Throughout, the author entirely misses the point:
“To my surprise, there is no sign of anything that could reasonably be described as an extravagant upgrade.”
That’s because press scrutiny halted the egregious renovation works from taking place at all…
No mention is made of other criticisms of Scotland, not least the Baroness’s work for the Kazakhstan and Maldives governments. Did those questions go unasked?
Moreover, the Guardian clearly struggled to find defenders of the Baroness who would put their name to quotes. All that can be mustered are simpering lines from Scotland fan Lord Mandelson and Evan Harris, director of Hacked Off, who has a vested interest in damning IPSO on any account. Even The Guardian seems to admit no serious argument can be made in Scotland’s defence…
