Hunt and Javid, the decisive duo taking on the pfafferati
JEREMY Hunt sat alongside Home Secretary Sajid Javid on the Government bench when Mr Javid announced – he yapped it out – the likely and swift legalisation of medicinal cannabis.
Health Secretary Hunt will be able to say, oh- so innocently, that he attended because his own department is involved with drugs policy.
But that may not have been his only reason for staying in the Chamber. This looked like a signal: We two (Hunt and Javid) are the doers, the decisive duo of tomorrow, the ones who have stood up to marmish, procrastinating Mrs May and the pfafferati. We have told her to act, pronto, to respond to these prominent stories about youngsters who need cannabis for medical treatment (Mr Hunt’s presence seemed to say). And when it comes to replacing her as Tory leader, both of us fancy our chances.
Mr Javid spoke with his usual staccato rasp. He whacks words like a table-tennis player hitting the ball hard. He was so over-excited at the start of his Statement yesterday that he swallowed half the syllables in the word ‘efficacy’.
His appetite for the fray is asserted without subtlety. Of the current block on medical cannabis, he said it was ‘not satisfactory, not satisfactory for parents, not satisfactory for doctors and not satisfactory for me’. Me, me, me. He immediately added: ‘I’ve now come to the conclusion it is time to review the scheduling of cannabis.’ That ‘scheduling’, by the way, was pronounced in the American fashion, as though ‘skeduling’.
A man in an unseemly hurry? Or a politician who, at last, alleluia, is prepared to scythe through some of Whitehall’s knots and actually get something done? Or both?
For decades, Whitehall has slowed political change to the speed of a glacier. Some will say that is because the brilliance of our unwritten constitution is that it prevents hotheads from making revolutionary changes. Others will say it is because Whitehall likes to retain the power and therefore blunts politicians’ promises of action.
Look at politicians’ attempts to stop vexatious prosecutions of British Armed Forces veterans. Look at proposals to reduce death duties. Look at the time spent on the Iraq inquiry. Look at Brexit. All have been paralysed by officialdom.
Mr Javid, spanking the English language, was breaking the inevitable Whitehall review into two parts. The first would be run by chief medical officer Sally Davies. The second would be run by the (vast) advisory council on the misuse of drugs. Mr Javid said Prof Davies could do her review work in a week. He hoped the advisory council could report in ‘weeks’. Imagine the panic in Whitehall. Civil servants are going to have to hurry their shots.
Mr Javid was relishing all this. Crispin Blunt (Con, Reigate) praised him for ‘the rapid way he has gripped the matter’. Sir Desmond Swayne (Con, New Forest W) said there had long been a need for ‘political leadership’ on the medical cannabis argument, and at last we had it.
THEonly real quibbles came from Tory backbenchers such as Craig Mackinlay (S Thanet) and Richard Drax ( S Dorset) who pushed him to stress that recreational cannabis – ie dope – was not going to be legalised. Mr Javid happily gave this reassurance. Someone mentioned that Lord Hague was calling for the legalisation of all cannabis. ‘He’s wrong!’ shouted Simon Hoare (Con, N Dorset).
Norman Lamb (Lib Dem, N Norfolk) accused Cabinet ministers of ‘dreadful hypocrisy’, given that ‘most of them, unless they were very odd people’ had at one time smoked weed. Mr Javid stuck to his position that this was simply about medical uses for the drug.
The positive medical effects of this long-overdue decision may be pretty immediate. The political effects? I suspect it will help the Tories to rebrand slightly, make them look a little less constipated. And it will give civil servants the screaming abdabs. They love, above all else, to obstruct by delay. Mr Javid just unblocked the sink a little.