Despite the BBC somehow omitting to pick up on it (ace reporter Ku Enns Berg fails again) NHS Secretary Jeremy Hunt yesterday politely told Cap’n Theresa of the Mayflower to take her offer of a smaller job as Business Secretary, and thrust it into the anterior darkness.
In so doing, Hunt quite knowingly screwed up the Prime Minister’s moves further down the line, and caused a chaos of chickens inside Number 10. As she is nowhere near powerful enough to fire the mutineer, Hunt stays in his role as Angel of Death on all things public health…..but with the words ‘social care’ added to the role.
There are three central questions to ask here:
1. Was the addition of ‘social care’ May’s idea or Hunt’s?
2. Who did she have in mind for the role?
3. How many others said either they wouldn’t budge, and/or other victims should be spared?
The notion that the idea came from May et al is plausible….but I think also it’s very likely that Hunt’s promoters were part of the thinking, and Hunt himself knew in advance about both the bigger role and the fact that she wanted to give it to someone else.
Theresa May’s intolerably weak position is very old news, and for myself I am a believer in her imminent doom.
The real story here is not the weakness of the Leader, but rather the power of the people behind Hunt.
They were strong enough to overrule Cameron’s desire to demote Hunt in 2012, and they are even stronger now: only five days ago, the Health Secretary had to apologise after he approved the cancellation of 55,000 non-urgent operations until February….but still he has emerged yet again smelling of roses.
I continue to insist that Jeremy Hunt’s business, health and familial connections to JJ Lewis, Baroness Nettlestone, Rupert Murdoch and other shady characters suggest that he is absolutely key to the establishment of an open-legged approach to corporate globalist power in the UK.
As to who May had in mind for the Health Secretary’s role newly expanded role, I have no idea. It would obviously have been an ally, but they are by now an endangered species. Whoever knows the answer probably has the big story of the week.
We know of one other Cabinet member who refused to budge – Justine Greening at Education – but she lacked backers with muscle. Interesting, however, is that Greening does believe passionately (as do I) that the decline in social mobility is one of the biggest failures of Thatcherism. She’s more One Nation Tory than most of the shower currently in charge at CCHQ…and so the desire to move her has to be seen, as with Hunt’s resistance, as yet another victtory for those referred to by John Major as “The bastards”.
I have no doubt that all the other larger Beasts – Home Secretary Amber Rudd, Chancellor Philip Hammond, Brexit Secretary David Davis and Foreign Secretary Boris – were unouchable….itself of interest because last week, there were strong rumours that Davis would be dumped in favour of giving Boris a more central, hardline role in the negotiations with Brussels.
Brexit, in fact, is behind little or nothing in this partially unshuffled and then re-reshuffled nonsense. It was and is about who leads the Conservative Party into the next Election.
May has blinked bigtime, and the obduracy of Jeremy Hunt shows that, if necessary, the No Turning Back wing was prepared to go all the way and have a full-blown challenge to the Prime Minister right in the middle of Brexit.
The non-promotion of Brexiter Boris – and the willingness of the fanatics behind Hunt to weaken the UK vis-a-vis the EU – suggests still further that the Globalist totalitarians are in firm control of Neoliberal Gulch.
They know now that they have the beating of Theresa May. Make no mistake, she has been hit amidships and below the waterline. A horrible thought.
And Labour? More generalities wrapped in clichéd spin and sealed by timeworn syntax from the Great Helmsman: Jeremy Corbyn said: “The government’s big plan for the new year is to dodge the real issues and reshuffle the pack in a pointless and lacklustre PR exercise. It’s simply not good enough. You can’t make up for nearly eight years of failure by changing the name of a department.”
In private, he has not missed the point of what’s going on: extreme political ideology on the UK Left is about to have its OK Corral gunfight with insane economic ideology on the globalist Right. But in public, Jeremy of Nazareth is as ever the false prophet of Utopia feeding on the gullibility of those typologies who, eighty years ago, hailed Josef Goebbels as the destroyer of Communism.
Very little in this post is good news for British citizens born female in the 1950s – or disabled at any point since. When ideologues do full-on battle, the most vulnerable are always the biggest losers.
The Slog 