Saturday 9 July 2022

Another ministerial mushroom

You may know the description of a certain style of management as "mushroom farming": keeping the erks in the dark and feeding them with (let's be polite) manure.  I almost felt sorry for junior minister Vicky Ford the other day when she had been sent out to bat for the PM with a brief that was factually incorrect. Johnson had revealed the day before that, while Foreign Secretary and at the time of the Salisbury poisonings, he had had a private meeting with Alexander Lebedev a former (and maybe still) agent of the Russian state. The Opposition had tabled an Urgent Question on the subject and relentlessly attacked Ms Ford, exposing the weakness of the government's defence.

I understand that a major reason for the resignations of Welsh Office minister Simon Hart and Children's minister Will Quince was that they had been sent abroad to lie for the prime minister, and were shocked to discover what they had unwittingly done. It would be unsurprising if Vicky Ford has also resigned.





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