Boris Johnson faces questions about whether $150,000 speech broke rules

Boris Johnson is facing questions over whether he followed rules on paid employment after leaving No 10 after receiving $150,000 (£135,000) for a speech to a group of US insurance brokers.

Rowena Mason  www.theguardian.com

The former prime minister gave a speech to the Council of Insurance Agents and Brokers in Colorado Springs this week, only just over a month after leaving Downing Street.

Johnson did not seek approval from the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (Acoba) before giving the speech. Sources close to the former prime minister suggested there was no need because it was a one-off.

Former ministers need to apply for permission to take up outside employment only if they have signed an ongoing contract with a business, such as a speakers’ agency. Cabinet ministers are also expected to wait three months before taking up employment.

Johnson was recently added as an available speaker to the website of an agency called the Premium Speakers Agency but his profile disappeared and those close to him claim he was mistakenly listed.

Angela Rayner, Labour’s deputy leader, challenged Johnson to prove that he has stuck to the rules.

“Boris Johnson might claim that this was just a one-off but the rules state that ex-ministers … joining agency circuits or scribing newspaper columns must submit an application before accepting them.

“The disgraced former prime minister and now part-time MP once again has questions to answer about whether he has followed the rules he was once responsible for.

“The anti-corruption watchdog was already toothless, but under the Tories, it’s been muzzled and neutered, leaving an open door to former ministers who want to line their pockets as soon as they leave office. Labour will clean up politics by ensuring proper and enforceable sanctions for rule breaking and banning former ministers from lobbying government for at least five years after they leave office.”

The Times reported on Wednesday that Johnson’s Colorado speech was greeted with a standing ovation. He made jokes about it having been expensive for him to have been born in the US – he renounced his US citizenship in 2016 but prior to that had faced hefty tax demands – and gave his assessment of the situation in Ukraine.

His appearance involved a 30-minute speech and a 45-minute “fireside chat” but no questions from the audience.

Johnson also set up his own office this week, likely to be the vehicle for accepting earnings, registering The Office of Boris Johnson Ltd with Companies House.

Johnson previously broke Acoba rules when he failed to declare a column from the Daily Telegraph after leaving office as foreign secretary.

However, there are no formal sanctions for a breach of the rules, leading to accusations that Acoba is a toothless watchdog.

John Penrose, Johnson’s former anti-corruption tsar, has suggested ministers should have to sign legal deeds agreeing to abide by Acoba’s rules before taking office.

He told the Guardian earlier this year: “Acoba isn’t fully legally binding at the moment, and it ought to be. So what [the Boardman review] has suggested is that civil service contracts should make Acoba’s decisions binding and, because ministers aren’t technically employees, the equivalent for them is that they sign a legal deed that says: ‘I will be bound by the decisions of Acoba.’ It’s a nice, simple way of giving Acoba the teeth and claws it needs.”

The mystery of who killed the economy?

The most striking line from Liz Truss in Prime Minister’s Questions was when she said there wouldn’t be any government spending cuts.

Chris Mason Political editor BBC

But how is that going to work if the government is also intent on not junking any more of its budget plans announced a few weeks ago?

I’ve just spent 20 minutes in what we call a “huddle” here in Parliament, where political reporters fire questions at the prime minister’s official spokesman.

There are two explanations, both of which do point to shrinking budgets.

The first is that the colossal injection of public money being spent helping families and businesses with energy bills is included, so there isn’t a cut overall but government departments still face cuts to their budgets.

The second, more likely explanation, is that the numbers in the spreadsheets won’t fall, but won’t rise as fast as inflation.

That allows the prime minister to answer the question in the way she did, but government departments will face budgets that mean the money they have doesn’t go as far as it did.

Her official spokesman wouldn’t be drawn on whether this was a plausible explanation, but didn’t deny it.

When I was a small boy at school, Andrew Bailey was a prefect and, then as now, a distant figure of authority. We called this stout disciplinarian “Bastard Bailey” because he showed little mercy towards any pupil he discovered enjoying an illicit Rothmans behind the science labs. Entreaties for clemency based on fictional bereavements or medical conditions were routinely ignored. Names were obtained, noted and passed on for appropriate action.

Sean O’Grady www.independent.co.uk

Seems he hasn’t changed that much. The distressed pension funds begging him to buy their devalued British government bonds have been met with that same stony resistance. He’s right, in the sense that propping up pension funds in trouble isn’t the role of the Bank of England. It’s not their fault that they’re in trouble – that’s because the panic-inducing effects of the mini-Budget are still being felt throughout the financial system and the economy.

Maintaining financial stability is the task of the Bank, which is why the Bank ended up buying the funds’s gilts, but it couldn’t do so endlessly or across the entire £1 trillion industry. It seems Bailey concluded that there’d be no “contagion” from his move. It’s up to the government and the pension fund trustees and regulators to order any rescues, and the Bank will no doubt advise on making them work.

In effect, like it did with the failed banks in the financial crisis of 2008, Britain may need to effectively nationalise some of these final salary funds, if the deficits become that large. If that happens, then final salary scheme pensioners will have some or all of their income guaranteed by the UK taxpayer, which some might find odd.

More to the point, the resulting debt taken on by the government will add to the national debt, along with the massive liabilities racked up over a couple of world wars, the global financial crisis, the Covid furloughs and Brexit.

There are hints that Bastard Bailey may, unusually, relent and carry on propping up these pension funds, but the dilemmas remain. It’s not financially sustainable for the Bank; and it’s not easily consistent (if at scale) with selling gilts to push interest rates higher to push inflation down.

It feels like the financial system is continuing to come under stress because investors do not trust the government to manage the economy and public finances responsibly. The solvency of pension funds and banks are intimately linked to UK plc, because these institutions rely on gilts as a “safe” asset – and now they’re not. That’s a systemic problem. A very big one.

Though as yet undeclared, the United Kingdom seems to be tumbling into a full-blown sovereign debt crisis. That is, of course, simply financial jargon for a country at risk of being insolvent – unable to honour its debts as they become due. Investors seem less and less willing to fund the activities of the British government, and less and less inclined to allow the nation, in colloquial terms, to roll over its overdraft or max out the credit card again. It could scarcely be more serious.

The Bank can try and keep liquidity up and interest rates down to save the pension funds; or it can restrain inflation by pushing interest rates up – but it hasn’t the means to do both. Britain may need a loan if the markets close to it. That is what the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is for – to restore order and confidence, as well as lend money.

It is astonishing. All investors want to know, in return for lending His Majesty’s government thousands of millions of pounds, is how sure they can be that they’ll get their interest paid and their money back. It is not too much to ask. They are not much interested in fairy tales about “unleashing potential” and Brexit opportunities.

At the moment, America seems the safest haven, and Britain the least safe among the major economies. It is not a good place to be. If things spiral downwards, because Liz Truss cannot get either tax increases or spending cuts, or both, through parliament, then the IMF will be needed to rescue the British from their own incompetence. There may be another change of prime minister, of chancellor, or a general election and a new government. In any case, we cannot go on as we are, because the money has run out. So much for “taking back control”. Trust is at a discount.

The storm that began on 23 September was and is a direct result of Kwasi Kwarteng’s disastrous mini-Budget. Mini-Budget; maxi trouble. Despite attempts to row back, the storm has blown up again. Having dismissed the permanent secrecy to the Treasury, Sir Tom Scholar, presumably because Sir Tom had the temerity to point out the flaws in the chancellor’s approach, Kwarteng has now appointed another civil service lifer, James Blower, to try and restore confidence. It has been to little avail.

Nor has his decision to bring his next mini-Budget forward to 31 October, and, at last, the appropriate forecasting from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR). And of course he has U-turned on the abolition of the 45 per cent additional rate of income tax. It settled things for a while, but it will take much more to get investors to invest in Britain. Ironically, that was the whole purpose of the mini-Budget as the driving force in Truss’s ill-fated dash for growth.

The UK has spent decades trying to improve its credibility as a destination for international investors. Part of that was building up a strong institutional framework whereby monetary and fiscal policy would be scrutinised and made transparent – an operationally independent Bank of England accountable to parliament on its performance; a strong independent Treasury with the ability to reevaluate politically motivated or vanity projects; the OBR; and a range of ratings agencies, think tanks and parliamentary committees able to raise legitimate questions and keep ministers “honest”. Successive chancellors worked within this system, aside from a brief hiatus when Rishi Sunak was supposed to turn the Treasury into an arm of No 10.

However, during the Tory leadership campaign, Truss, as candidate, and Kwarteng, as her campaign aide, and then again as prime minister and chancellor, systematically trashed this structure. They derided the “abacus” mentality of the Treasury and its “orthodoxy” and briefed how they’d love to break it up.

Kwarteng carelessly rubbished the Bank’s record, bullied its governor, Andrew Bailey, while Truss openly discussed changing its remit to make it more pro-growth (and thus weaker on inflation). The OBR was sidelined in the mini-Budget process. The civil service was ignored. All of these institutions were called a “blob”, and Truss implied they were part of some “anti-growth coalition”. It’s absurd, and the stuff of conspiracy theories. How did the Tory party end up here?

Such is their delusion that Truss and Kwarteng blithely assumed that the markets would take the vague “plan for growth” at face value, and that trend growth would soon be restored to 2.5 per cent per year. Investors were confidently thought to be willing to believe that the biggest tax cuts in half a century would pay for themselves before long. They didn’t, which was bad enough, but now Truss and Kwarteng are believed to be so untrustworthy, there is an additional risk premium being applied to Britain, due to it being led by such unimpressive figures.

Britain is not a basket case, even if its present incipient sovereign debt crisis bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the problems that Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain suffered during the various euro crises around a decade ago. When the Callaghan government turned to the IMF for help in 1976, it did Britain some good, and the loan wasn’t needed until a year later. But, as in those cases, some outside intervention was needed to restore confidence.

An IMF team sitting in the Treasury and taming Kwarteng’s tendency to arrogance and restoring investor confidence would at least start the process of recovery. Our pension funds and banks will be all the safer if the present government is replaced by an IMF committee. So much for taking back control.

Childhood days on the beach or messing around in rivers can have significant lasting benefits for our wellbeing in adulthood, according to a study.

South West Water permitting – owl

www.theguardian.com

It found that exposure to blue spaces – such as coasts, rivers and lakes – as a child made revisiting blue spaces in adulthood more likely, as these adults showed greater familiarity with and placed greater value in natural settings.

More than 15,000 participants in 18 different countries were surveyed for the study, published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology by researchers at the University of Exeter.

“Learning to swim and appreciate the dangers in terms of rip currents, cold temperatures etc is of course primary,” says Mathew White, a senior scientist at the University of Vienna and co-author of the study, “but the message we are trying to get across is that to only teach children about the dangers of water settings may make them overly afraid of, and ill-equipped to benefit from, places that can also be hugely beneficial to their health and wellbeing as they grow up.

“The vast majority of blue space visits both for adults and children do not involve getting wet – so there are also many advantages from spending time near water, not just in it.”

There has been a growing body of research over the last decade about the specific beneficial effects of blue space on mental health.

A review published in the International Journal of Hygiene and Environmental Health in 2011 suggested visits to blue space could increase people’s physical activity levels and lower stress and anxiety, while boosting their mood and psychological wellbeing.

Another review published by the Environmental Agency in 2020, found that blue spaces were associated with improvement of mood and feelings of restoration to a greater degree than green spaces.

The study’s lead author, Valeria Vitale, a PhD candidate at Sapienza University of Rome, said via email: “We recognise that both green and blue spaces have a positive impact on people’s mental and physical health. Also, prior studies examining childhood nature exposure and adulthood outcomes have largely focused on green space, or natural spaces in general. However, as we highlighted in our paper blue spaces have unique sensory qualities (light reflections, wave motion, sounds, etc) and facilitate a distinct range of leisure activities (swimming, fishing, water sports).”

She added: “We believe our findings are particularly relevant to practitioners and policymakers because of the nationally representative nature of the samples. First, our findings reinforce the need to protect and invest in natural spaces in order to optimise the potential benefits to subjective wellbeing. Second, our research suggests that policies and initiatives encouraging greater contact with blue spaces during childhood may support better mental health in later life.”

Further evidence has been heard this week in the planning inquiry into the proposed 100-acre quarry at Straitgate Farm near Ottery St Mary. The applicant, Aggregate Industries, is appealing against Devon County Council’s refusal of their planning application last December. 

Philippa Davies www.sidmouthherald.co.uk 

Last week the inquiry began with local councillors outlining their objections. The county councillor for the Otter Valley, Cllr Jess Bailey, Ottery town councillor Roger Giles and West Hill parish councillor Amanda Townsend addressed the hearing. Their concerns included flood risk caused by the quarrying, potential risk to the quality of water supplies, and the potential traffic danger on the B3174 if the quarry went ahead, caused by more heavy lorries using the busy road. 

The inquiry then heard a large amount of technical evidence on the impact of the proposed quarry on water quality, water flow and flood risk. Hydrogeology experts appointed by all three parties – Devon County Council, Straitgate Action Group and Aggregate Industries – were cross-examined by the respective parties’ barristers. 

On the fifth day of the inquiry there were discussions on the impact of the proposed quarry on protected species living on the site, in particular bats and dormice, and mature trees. 

The inquiry heard evidence from Devon County Council’s tree consultant Michael Steed and its ecologist Miss Christine Mason. Aggregate Industries’ consultant was Stuart Wilson of SLR Consulting. 

Cllr Bailey said: “Although I had previously robustly objected to the proposed quarry focusing on road safety and trees, I took the opportunity to ask a question of Aggregate Industries’ consultant about two particular trees. I am most concerned about the plight of the magnificent oak trees at the entrance to the proposed quarry on Birdcage Lane and I sought clarification on their future.  In response to my question Aggregate Industries insisted that the root protection areas could be preserved in order that the trees can be retained.” 

Speaking afterwards, Cllr Jess Bailey said she was ‘not at all convinced’ by this evidence. 

She said: “I completely agree with Mr Steed for the county council who suggested that there is no justification for felling any 200-year-old oak trees, let alone two, and that the scheme should be refused on this basis or consideration should be given to alternative access”. 

The hearing is expected to finish on Friday, October 14, with the result announced at a later stage.