As Oscar Wilde might have said, to lose one minister is unfortunate. To lose a second minister in the space of two weeks looks like carelessness, especially when the minister appears to have pursued secret diplomacy at odds with the positions of the Foreign Office,. To place a third minister under investigation for alleged sexual harassment looks like the end of a government. To place a fourth minister under investigation for “improper advances” towards his staff, and because a senior policeman has reported finding “extreme pornography” on his House of Commons’ computer, makes you wonder whether the Conservative party is intent on disqualifying itself from office.
Six months into Theresa May’s tenure, the prime minister is running out of ministers, and running out of road. Still, the clown car sputters absurdly onward, spilling passengers as the driver turns the wheel, only to find it coming loose in her hands.
It was unfortunate that defense minister Michael Fallon was both a key ally of May and a groper with wandering hands. It was even more unfortunate that Fallon had a tendency to lay those hands on female journalists. His fall was precipitated by the backwash of the Harvey Weinstein affair, which has initiated the so-called “Pestminster” scandals, in which both Conservative and Labour MPs have been accused of offenses ranging from inappropriate language to sexual assault.
Despite intense media attention, Fallon took his time going before resigning on Nov. 1. This alone indicates the weakness of May’s position. Her government is committed to delivering the Brexit that she voted against, and continues to divide her party. Her Cabinet was designed to balance the Leavers and the Remainers, and to keep her rivals inside the tent, the better to express themselves outward. Fallon’s departure tipped the balance towards the Leavers.
So did the opening of a Cabinet Office enquiry into May’s deputy prime minister Damian Green over claims that he had behaved inappropriately toward a party activist, and that in 2008 a counter-terrorism investigation had discovered pornography on his computer “so disturbing” that the leader of the investigation, ex-Metropolitan Police commissioner Bob Quick, referred it to the Keir Starmer, the Labour MP then directing the Crown Prosecution Service. Starmer has been described as having concluded that the material “did not cross the threshold of criminality.” Green has denounced Bob Quick as “a tainted and untrustworthy source,” and the allegations as “an unscrupulous character assassination.” Two prominent female Conservatives, one of them the ex-minister Anna Soubry, have called for Green to step down during the enquiry.
A separate Cabinet Office enquiry is examining into the conduct of international trade minister Mark Garnier, who reportedly admitted to a British newspaper that he had called his Commons’ secretary “sugar tits” in front of witnesses, and had sent her into a sex shop to buy two vibrators while he waited outside—one for his wife, and one for a female assistant in his constituency office. Further demonstrating his natural feel for politics,. Garnier apologized on Wednesday morning. He insisted that his words and the sex toy episode had been taken “out of context.” What he meant was that his apology would be overlooked in the context in which he issued it, the media frenzy over another minister, Priti Patel.
Patel, the minister international development minister resigned on Wednesday afternoon. The child of Gujurati parents who were expelled by Idi Amin from Uganda and rebuilt their lives in Britain, Patel was a rarity, a young female minority Conservative. She rose rapidly after election to the Commons in 2010, was a prominent campaigner for Brexit, and entered the Cabinet last May as the first British Indian minister. The cause of her resignation was a series of meetings with high-ranking Israeli officials, conducted without the knowledge of the Foreign Office.
In August, Patel visited Israel for what she described as a “holiday,” and met with 12 Israeli politicians in as many days. These included Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Yair Lapid of the Yesh Atid (There Is a Future) centrist party. At all but one these meetings, she was accompanied by Lord Stuart Polack, a driving force in the Conservative Friends of Israel group. This was a clear breach of ministerial rules. Before a Cabinet member meets with foreign politicians, the meeting must be registered with the local British embassy.
Of course, the particular sensitivity of Patel’s “holiday” destination made these meetings more than a procedural challenge to the Foreign Office, which has an institutional distaste for the Jewish state. In a further breach of protocol, Patel visited the Golan Heights, which Britain does not recognize as part of Israel. There, she inspected an IDF field hospital which treats civilians and anti-Assad fighters, some of them accused of Islamist links. She is reported to have pondered whether her department could co-fund the IDF’s field hospitals.
Patel is also reported as having suggested that her department could collaborate with its Israeli counterpart in development projects in Africa. The deepening of economic links with Africa is a part of the Netanyahu government’s effort to broaden Israel’s international support—and thus a strategy for diluting the hostility of Muslim states and leapfrogging that of the Arab states.
Patel did not follow the rules for arranging these meetings, and did not report them in the proper fashion. She claims that foreign secretary Boris Johnson knew what she was doing, but this does not mean that his civil servants in the Foreign Office knew. She has accused the Foreign Office of inciting the scandal by briefing the media against her.
It may not be coincidental that Patel’s department, International Development, used to belong to the Foreign Office, and that the mandarins would like it back. They might also like to regain influence over Britain’s policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict after Johnson and May’s recent celebration of the centenary of the Balfour Declaration.How much did May know about this? The Jewish Chronicle, British Jewry’s paper of record, claims to have seen proof that Michael Oren, a deputy minister in Netanyahu’s Cabinet, informed David Quarrey, the British ambassador to Israel, and Alistair Burt, minister for the Middle East, of the Netanyahu-Patel meeting within hours of its taking place.
The Jewish Chronicle reports that May discussed Patel’s meeting with Netanyahu, and her plans to co-ordinate African development with Israel, before Patel met for further discussions with Israeli foreign office official Yuval Rotem in September at the UN General Assembly. May is described as having agreed that development co-ordination was “sensible” but needed a “sign off” from the Foreign Office.
This is not how May remembers it. Her office claims that she did not know anything until last Monday, when the growing scandal obliged her to summon Patel to 10 Downing Street. May’s aides claim that Patel supplied a list of the 12 “holiday” meetings, but did not mention the New York meeting, and that this omission was grounds for her firing.
However, the Jewish Chronicle claims that Patel did disclose the New York meeting, but “was told by Number 10 not to include it, as it would embarrass the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.”
On Wednesday, May recalled Patel from a tour of Africa. Ironically, Patel was about to fly from Kenya to Uganda, from where her parents were expelled in the Seventies, when she was ordered back to London. While Patel was in the air, Stephen Pollard, the editor of the Jewish Chronicle, explicitly contradicted the government’s version of events.
Pollard wrote that before word of Patel’s meetings with Israeli officials reached the press, he had been told “very matter-of-factly that there would soon be an announcement of co-operation between the UK and Israel over aid in Africa—that we would divert some of our aid money to the Israelis to fund some of their aid work there.”
“I was told that it had been signed off between DfID [the Department for International Development] and Number Ten, but that the FCO [Foreign and Commonwealth Office] had kicked off because it felt its toes were being trodden on,” said Pollard.
Further, Pollard claims that when the story broke in the newspapers, two “senior and reliable sources” told him that May knew “in full” about the Patel-Netanyahu meeting, because she and Patel had discussed it prior to the U.N. General Assembly in September. The sources also said May knew about the Patel-Rotem meeting at the General Assembly.
Patel broke the rules, and her freelance diplomacy exposed her to departmental turf wars over the most contentious issue in British foreign policy. May gave her the chance to resign before she was fired, but she still has a future. May has not resigned, but she has no future. Her staff have either been deceitful or incompetent, and perhaps both, and she seems to be implicated in the business. As Stephen Pollard says, there are “serious questions for Number 10 to answer about who knew what, when—including the PM.”
Serious as these questions are, they may quite soon become academic. On Tuesday, Grant Shapps, leader of the anti-May Conservative rebels, claimed that his group now have the necessary 40 names whose signatures could force a vote of no confidence in May’s leadership of the party. Shapps gave May a week to respond.
