Perhaps Chris Grayling has a knowledge of basketball that belies his suit-straining paunch, as the Transport Secretary seems to have taken up Gatorade’s challenge to Be Like Mike, quickly compiling his own catalogue of failures.
Last week proved Grayling’s commitment to cock-ups, with his role in not one but two costly scandals again putting his position under scrutiny.
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| Like Mike? Chris Grayling in Kent |
On Thursday afternoon, the government was forced to pay £33 million to French transport company Eurotunnel in an out-of-court settlement as the Seaborne Freight fiasco reached its farcical conclusion.
Eurotunnel had taken the government to court on the grounds that the procurement process that saw Grayling’s Department for Transport award a £14 million contract to Seaborne Freight was not sufficiently thorough and transparent, meaning their business case was not given a fair hearing. Seeing as Seaborne Freight turned out to have no ships and no port to land them in, Eurotunnel probably had a point.
On Friday, a vintage Grayling blunder from 2013 was brought up from the cellar by the National Audit Office (NAO), with a price tag north of £400 million to the taxpayer. The NAO's report reminded Parliament that in his stint as David Cameron’s Secretary of State for Justice, Grayling had applied the trusted Tory tonic of privatisation to Britain’s probation services with his typical combination of diligence and flair.
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| Grayling was Justice Secretary before Michael Gove |
The eye-wateringly expensive experiment yielded poor results, with a 2.5% drop in the number of offenders proven to commit another crime more than offset by the number of offences by reoffenders rising 22%. Fans of mass incarceration could at least be cheered that the number of offenders recalled to Britain’s famously safe and rehabilitative prisons after breaching a licence condition increased by almost half, from 4,240 to 6,240.
Grayling’s week from hell, alongside previous failures such as a rail timetable reshuffle that left platforms across England looking like the Battle of Thermopylae, ought to make his position untenable.
Indeed, Labour’s shadow transport secretary Andy McDonald and deputy leader Tom Watson have both clamoured for “heads to roll”. However, it might yet be too soon to expect a resignation.
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| Here's one he made earlier: passengers queue amid rail timetable chaos |
Theresa May has repeatedly spoken of her admiration for Geoffrey Boycott, but it appears Grayling plays the role of another English cricketer within the Tory cabinet. It’s likely that May sees her Transport Secretary as a John Edrich figure, the fearless Surrey opening batsman who was once likened to a ‘human punching bag’ when facing the dreaded Australian duo of Jeff Thomson and Dennis Lillee.
Jeremy Hunt did a similar job in his hapless stint as Health Secretary, somehow clinging on for six years as waiting lists lengthened, survival rates fell and medical staff quit. These dour, grey ministers have turned incompetence into a bizarre virtue, much admired by the Tory leadership for their ability to shrug off the concept ministerial responsibility and ride out media storms, rather than display any skill in governing.
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| Accident waiting to happen? Jeremy Hunt visits a hospital |
Although regularly confronted by the miserable results they have overseen, they know that any resignation would damage their party’s hold on power. So they hang grimly on, and are handsomely remunerated for their subsistence politics. Their only merit is understanding that modern society’s ever-accelerating news cycle will soon move on, the scrutiny will fade and new catastrophes will snatch the public's attention.
Oh - have you seen the news about Storm Freya?
