Damian Green – hardly an MP on the ‘Borisite’ wing of Tories – has skewered the “fake outrage” of the Lobby in his question during an Urgent Question requested by the Labour Party into yesterday’s Lobby farce:
“Does my Honourable friend agree that what we’re seeing here is some fake outrage and a mass outbreak of snowflakery?”
In the Labour Party’s MP briefing for the Commons session, they included the false information David Frost is a Civil Service appointee, and it fell to Clive Efford to walk into the trap. Minister for the Constitution, Chloe Smith, reminded Labour of Guido’s earlier report that Frost is a SpAd
Guido doesn’t think this will put the argument to bed any time soon however…
Guido has long been a fan of slimming down the vast amount of government waste that emanates from Whitehall, even he was a little taken aback by the Telegraph’s front page story that Boris was supposedly planning to slash over half of the Cabinet roles and merge several huge Government departments together. The number of Cabinet posts would apparently be cut from 26 to just 12, with major departments including Work and Pensions, Justice and Transport reportedly set for the chop. Unfortunately it seems that someone was freelancing and speaking only for themselves…
Boris Johnson supporter Damian Green says that reports tonight that Johnson is considering plans to shrink down the size of the cabinet "seems hugely unlikely to me”#newsnight | @maitlis | #newsnight pic.twitter.com/jFNKSzzp3W
— BBC Newsnight (@BBCNewsnight) July 1, 2019
Damian Green was confronted with the plan on Newsnight last night and reacted incredulously. Team Boris have, alas, firmly rubbished any suggestion that it came from them. The Telegraph’s own article merely cites various MPs who now support Boris who have expressed a preference for merging various Government departments, it’s a pretty major leap from there to presenting it as official Boris policy. Liz Truss as BEIS minister might be up for closing that department…
First big beast to come out publicly for fresh-faced Hancock…
The Information Commissioner’s office has written to MPs to remind them not to share their usernames and passwords with others. Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham wrote to all MPs this week:
“My office observed reports from social media in early December 2017 in which a number of Members openly revealed their practice of sharing their login details and passwords. I was concerned by these reports and have decided to write to all Members to highlight the importance of following good practice in respect of password management and information security.”
During the Damian Green scandal press reports noted the practice of MPs sharing their passwords with staff. Sharing passwords could give MPs plausible deniability over their online actions…
The letter from the ICO came to MPs in the notoriously impregnable form of a Microsoft Word document. The properties tab in Word revealed the username of the document’s author and members of ICO staff who had edited it. Some way to go to achieve max info sec…
An unrepentant Damian Green tells the Today programme he still believes he was never inappropriate to Kate Maltby and his text about her corset was just “a joke”. Put the shovel away…
Damian Green is still blogging under the title ‘Commons Touch’; his pieces also go out as a newsletter under the same title. Time for a refresh?
