Greening’s gone AWOL ...but then she didn’t want the job anyway
Extraordinary blast at his successor by MP Andrew Mitchell... architect of the 0.7% pledge
THE MAN who preceded Justine Greening as International Development Secretary has criticised her failure to stick up for Britain’s £12 billion foreign aid spending. In an outspoken interview with The Mail on Sunday, Andrew Mitchell claims she never wanted the job in the first place and rebukes her for failing to hit back at claims that huge sums of foreign aid have been lost in corruption and waste. He also claims that: Controls imposed by him to curb corruption are being undermined;
His pledge to stop doling out large sums to charities and force them to give better value for money has been abandoned;
Ministers risk being accused of using aid as a ‘slush fund to give to their favourite causes’.
Mr Mitchell defends his key role in the Tory pledge to spend 0.7 per cent of the UK’s income on aid. But he says the 215,000 Mail on Sunday readers who have signed a petition protesting against it are right to demand to know how every penny is spent.
Mr Mitchell’s two years as International Development Secretary were the high point of his career; weeks after he was moved to become Chief Whip in 2012, he became embroiled in ‘Plebgate’.
Accused of calling a No 10 policeman a ‘f ****** pleb’, he had to quit the Cabinet. He then sued for libel and lost humiliatingly, leaving him with a legal bill estimated at £3million. His City earnings saved him from bankruptcy, if not his reputation. But there’s nothing that cheers up a politician more than seeing their successor making a hash of things.
WHILE Ms Greening has retreated to her Whitehall bunker after this newspaper’s exposé of the aid scandal, former Royal Tank Regiment officer Mr Mitchell has come out all guns blazing. ‘I hear the PM defending it [foreign aid] but I don’t hear many other Ministers defending it,’ he says archly. ‘If they don’t, the public will presume this is a taxpayerfunded slush fund that Ministers give to their favourite causes.
‘Some people think the best thing is to lie down and let the issues roll over you. I’m the sort who marches towards the sound of gunfire.’ He adds with a grimace: ‘Though it’s not always been to my advantage’ – a nod to ‘Plebgate’.
He says Ms Greening ‘must get out there’ and argue for the aid budget. So why hasn’t she?
‘I have no idea, you will have to ask her. She inherited a department absolutely at the top of its game. I’m told she didn’t awfully want the job.’
He isn’t finished. Was it true that when David Cameron moved Greening to the Department for International Development (DFID), she told the PM: ‘I didn’t come into politics to give money to poor people’ – a claim she strongly denies. Parroting Francis Urquhart, the fictional Chief Whip from the original British TV political thriller House Of Cards, Mitchell says: ‘You may say that – I couldn’t possibly comment.’ Yes, he really did say it.
At times Mr Mitchell is a caricature of the former Rugby School pupil nicknamed ‘Thrasher’. As Shadow International Development Secretary from 2005 to 2010 his preferred mode of making ‘fact-finding’ trips to developing countries was on Conservative millionaire Michael Ashcroft’s luxury private jet, like a latter day Tory viceroy. Yet there is no doubting his genuine zeal over foreign aid – or his expertise. His views are much closer to those of Clare Short, a Labour predecessor as International Development Secretary, than Ms Greening. Mr Mitchell and Ms Short teamed up on an initiative for Syrian refugees only weeks ago.
Some say Mr Mitchell was overenthusiastic at the DFID – for example writing a cheque for £16million of taxpayers’ money to his own pet cause, Rwanda, on his final day in the job. He insists it was all above board.
Mr Mitchell gives the Ms Greening knife another twist when asked if the disclosure last week by this newspaper that DFID overspent the 0.7 per cent target by an astonishing £172million last year will lead to a further loss of public support. ‘Yes,’ he replies. Furthermore, Ms Greening should be forced to pay back the £172 million to taxpayers – from this year’s budget.
In another swipe, Mr Mitchell suggests the DFID watchdog he set up to investigate aid corruption – the Independent Commission on Aid Impact (ICAI) – is being undermined by Ms Greening.
‘If you give a Minister a choice between being highly accountable and not, they will always opt for the latter. ICAI needs more monkey glands not fewer,’ a phrase that matches the African artefacts scattered around his study. He also points the finger at Ms Greening for failing to implement his plan to stop writing blank cheques to charities – socalled ‘core funding’ – in order to force them to put in specific aid project bids. He proposes what he calls an overseas aid version of the ‘buy one get one free’ offers in supermarkets, whereby charities bid for Government cash for individual projects – to stop them splurging it on fat-cat charity chiefs’ wages and fancy offices instead of getting young girls in Afghanistan into schools.
He ‘can’t wait’ to defend the 0.7 per cent target in the Commons debate set to be triggered by our readers’ petition. If Ms Greening doesn’t come out of hiding, Mitchell might have to stand in for her. Unlike her, he would be confident of thrashing all dissenters.