Ministers are brought to heel with WFH tracking

JACOB Rees-Mogg’s failed bid to suppress details of his parliamentary attendance has led Downing Street to secretly monitor the whereabouts of all Ministers, I can reveal.

Rees-Mogg was outed last week for trying to stop a Freedom of Information request about the number of times he had worked from home.

The ‘Lefty’ request to ‘track our movements’ was an outrage, he harrumphed.

However, the Minister for Government Efficiency has only himself to blame for sparking interest in his comings and goings after leaving passive-aggressive ‘sorry you were out’ notes on his officials’ empty desks.

Faced with the prospect of more FoI requests, Downing Street and the Cabinet Office began clandestinely compiling details of how many times Ministers and MPs acting as Government aides were absent from Parliament and, importantly, why.

The idea behind the tracking operation, said a source, was to ‘get ahead of the story’ – and was not simply a waste of taxpayer resources by the Cabinet Office, already home to the infamous ‘clearing house’ designed to block such transparency requests.

Unfortunately, news of these secret manoeuvres triggered another blue-on-blue row… over a dog called Winston.

No 10’s surveillance operation revealed that Montgomeryshire MP Craig Williams had missed key parliamentary business after his springer spaniel died.

During the worst cost-of-living crisis since the 1970s, the aide to Chancellor Rishi Sunak was excused from attending Parliament – a practice known as ‘slipping’ – to mourn Winston’s passing.

‘He made quite a fuss about a dog. People were annoyed – there is a limited number of “slips”, and him getting one meant someone else couldn’t,’ an MP told me.

Friends of Williams have spoken of their colleagues’ ‘heartlessness’.

One said: ‘It’s a perfectly legitimate reason. Any suggestion it wasn’t could only be made by someone lacking empathy for how traumatic a loss of a dog is.’

Rees-Mogg should expect to see more empty desks adorned with pictures of a pooch and a lead hanging from the chair.