Grayling’s record shows he is the kiss of death to any department brief
In the dying days of Gordon Brown’s premiership, the unfortunate fellow was nicknamed “Jonah Brown” by the Guido Fawkes blog, where I worked at the time. The name fit, because everything Mr Brown touched seemed to turn to dust. Whether it was cutting the ribbon to open a bank’s headquarters (Lehman London) or praising Labour councils that soon fell to the SNP, Jonah seemed to leave a trail of destruction behind him.
Mr Brown is gone from frontline politics but he has, I would suggest, left us a worthy heir in the form of the Transport Secretary, Chris Grayling. Mr Grayling’s department was severely criticised this week by a report stating that he and his department took far too much on trust from rail operators earlier this year, rather than scrutinising assurances that their disastrous timetable changes would be fine.
Ensuring the country’s infrastructure works might be among the most basic and fundamental tasks of government, but Mr Grayling seems to find
Ensuring that our infrastructure works is a basic task of government
political manoeuvring more interesting.
This is his third major policy brief and his third failure. As employment minister under David Cameron, Jonah Grayling wasted £5 billion on a rushed new work programme, which was later found to have a slightly negative, if any, effect on getting people
back into work. As justice secretary, he set to work cutting his department with such little care that the backlog of cases waiting to be heard in the Crown Court shot up by 27 per cent, even as he missed the chance to head off a major crisis in our prisons.
Jonah Grayling doesn’t quite have the same ring to it as Jonah Brown, but he has the same kiss of death. Mrs May should be careful about where he goes next.
Evan Davis is to move from Newsnight to
presenting Radio 4’s
PM show, replacing Eddie Mair. He will be a great loss to Newsnight, where his non-aggressive but careful and detailed interview questions were much more often able to catch out his subjects than those of his fellow hosts.
Some people will no doubt complain that the BBC ought to have given the PM job to a woman. As a consumer, I’m rather glad they prioritised fitness for the job over the right chromosomes.