Minister for Mis-spending
She’s tipped as a future star. But Penny Mordaunt must first get her foreign aid budget under control
AFEW months ago, i was surprised to get a message from the office of the international Development secretary, Penny Mordaunt. Would i come in for a chat? The Cabinet minister, it was explained, had just begun her new job. she was aware that i took an interest in her department’s work and she was eager for ideas.
i duly met Ms Mordaunt, who was accompanied by an official. My principal advice to her was this: beware your civil servants who will, as night follows day, obstruct everything that you try to do which goes against their world-view.
in addition, if she defied their wishes, the Civil service would probably brief viciously against her in private and leak harmful stories about her to the media.
i then warned Ms Mordaunt that i believed the foreign aid budget was out of control. i pointed to a number of scandals. They included the disgraceful episode when the Marxist government of Ethiopia was given millions of pounds of British taxpayers’ money to put Communist propaganda in school textbooks, and there was also the apparent funding of jihadi militants in syria.
As a result of a host of other examples of mis- spending — such as more than a quarter of a billion pounds used to build a runway for a south Atlantic island where planes can’t land — public confidence in Ms Mordaunt’s department was at rock bottom.
To rebuild confidence, i suggested a major audit of how the tens of billions of public money had been spent on the overseas aid budget.
Though the minister herself said nothing, her official looked concerned and took copious notes.
i then counselled Ms Mordaunt that she should learn from what had happened to her predecessors, Priti Patel, Justine Greening and Andrew Mitchell.
They had all become enthusiastic drivers of the foreign aid gravy train — pouring billions into projects abroad at a time of austerity, when Britain was borrowing huge sums and our elderly care system teetered on the brink of collapse through lack of funds.
This dismal trio of Tories — wedded to a flagship policy of spending 0.7 per cent of GDP on foreign aid — failed to tackle the endemic corruption and waste that was a byword for the euphemistically named Department for international Development (DfiD).
i told Ms Mordaunt there was an obvious reason for her predecessors going native.
Mitchell and Patel, in particular, had come from the Right wing of the Conservative Party and were keen to ingratiate themselves with the Left by championing a cause close to the hearts of those who want foreign aid to be a tool for expiating guilt over the British Empire.
Needless to say, i didn’t expect Penny Mordaunt to take my advice.
indeed, i’m afraid she has been a disappointment as international Development secretary.
she has been in her post just over 12 months and there has been no sign of that desperately needed audit of the scores of billions of pounds spent on overseas aid.
What’s more, the whole overseas aid sector is catastrophically out of control. Among several scandals, most egregious has been that concerning Oxfam — probably Britain’s best known charity.
it received £31.7 million from the Government in 2017. Meanwhile, it was revealed that DfiD officials had turned a blind eye to claims that staff used sex workers while delivering aid in haiti, and there have been allegations of paedophilia.
Last month, the Mail exposed a disturbing story that raised huge questions about potential mismanagement and conflict of interest at Oxfam.
The charity has quietly moved the bulk of its operations from Oxford to Kenya, while the head of Oxfam international, the charity’s global HQ, is a Ugandan who is fast becoming the most powerful female African political figure in the world.
When we asked for a response from DfiD, there was no reply from Ms Mordaunt.
The only interpretation for this silence was that this was fresh proof of her reluctance to offend the powerful interests which benefit from Britain’s foreign aid budget.
This week, her failings were proved beyond any doubt.
New figures showed that UK spending on foreign aid has soared to £14.1 billion, up from £13.4 billion in 2016. That works out at £742 per family in Britain a year. A prodigious amount of money when our national debt is at a mindblowing £1.79 trillion.
some of this money — contributed by hard- working British families — was spent on supporting the fracking industry in China, the second largest economy in the world.
Almost £ 100 million goes to india, a country so wealthy that it has spent a similar amount on a lunar probe.
Billions are given as a blank cheque to bloated organisations such as the World Bank, which use our money without our control.
i must stress that i strongly support foreign aid spending if used in a sensible way. But not if millions are handed to a dodgy Who’s Who of corrupt countries where proper oversight is nigh impossible.
MOST worrying, none of the poorest five countries in the world (as measured by GDP per capita) are among the top five beneficiaries of UK aid.
it would, of course, be wrong to blame Penny Mordaunt personally for all of this grotesque mismanagement and waste of public money.
it was David Cameron, who, in a cynically calculated attempt to shed the so- called ‘ nasty party’ tag some had wickedly attached to the Conservative Party, committed a Tory Government to spend 0.7 per cent of the national budget on foreign aid.
Nor is Ms Mordaunt helped by the presence of Matthew Rycroft as her Permanent secretary.
At his previous job as the UK’s representative at the United Nations, this misguided mandarin watched on as world leaders did little to stop the genocidal killing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar or deal adequately with famine in the Yemen — the two greatest humanitarian catastrophes of the 21st century.
With inevitable talk of possible future Tory leaders, Penny Mordaunt, 45, has been suggested as a fresh face capable of selling a modern form of Conservatism to the electorate.
To most voters, the former paratrooper’s daughter is best known for appearing on TV doing a bellyflop into a swimming pool while a contestant on the diving reality show splash!. sadly, her failure to confront the chronic problems involved with foreign aid show that she is badly out of her depth.