SIR IAIN DUNCAN SMITH

WITH the Government embroiled in allegations of sleaze and facing calls for enquiries, you might assume these issues transfix the country.

Yet engaged as I and others are in the local election campaign, knocking on doors, I don’t hear anything about it. The streets of Westminster look, as they often do, a thousand miles away from the streets of the rest of the UK.

People know they have just been through the worst year since the Second World War – with three lockdowns, schools closed and people dying as a result of this silent killer, coronavirus.

This, not Westminster arguments about sleaze, is what has etched itself into our shared psyche.

Thanks to the Government’s successful vaccine rollout, we are now being inoculated ahead of our European neighbours. People, while they grieve for loved ones who died, can hope for a family holiday to put this nightmare behind them.

I don’t say that the issues about ministerial and Civil Service codes of conduct aren’t important; they are.

The Government has in its hands vast sums of taxpayers’ money and has to be careful not to leave itself open to the charge that it favoured any business for personal financial or political reasons.

But what we don’t need now, on top of the Covid nightmare, is the eruption of personal score-settling by advisers, ex-advisers and some ministers. This self-indulgent tit for tat risks calling into question the very effectiveness of government at a critical time.

Those in government should rise above it and do the job they were elected to do.

The public have watched in horror the tragedy of the wrongly jailed postmasters unfold. After all, who doesn’t know their local post office and respect those that provide that service up and down the country?

Putting that right cuts straight through to people beyond the Westminster bubble.

It’s about their lives. It’s the sort of issue that’s rightly raised on doorsteps.

That’s why, despite this new provocation of threatened attacks on the judgement of the Prime Minister by Dominic Cummings, it seems to me that the Government should rise above it.

The man who broke the lockdown rules and never apologised to the British people, may not be the credible source some suppose he is.

Either way, as the Prime Minister said the other day, the big decisions the public face are urgent and they look to the Government to get these right.

Westminster and its personal vendettas are not what they want the Government to waste its time on.

The successful vaccine rollout has put the UK on a glidepath to unlock and get back to normal, while other countries struggle with new outbreaks of coronavirus.

That is what the public wants when they say the Government should do its job and rise above Westminster.