22 V2 The Sunday Times April 3, 2022COMMENT
N
orth Moreton in Oxfordshire
was dubbed the kindest village
in Britain by a tabloid newspa-
per last month. It has only 350
residents in 157 properties, yet
it has offered homes to 50
Ukrainian refugees. North
Moreton seems to be the rule
rather than the exception. The British
public is overwhelmingly disgusted by
Vladimir Putin’s invasion of his neighbour
and in favour of helping fleeing Ukraini-
ans. More than 200,000 people and
organisations have registered to sponsor
refugees under the Homes for Ukraine
scheme, hastily brought in after the Home
Office’s original position — that only
Ukrainians with families already here
would be allowed to come — was roundly
criticised for its meanness.
Predictably, government machinery
has not kept up with the public’s generos-
ity. As of Thursday, 32,800 Ukrainians had
applied for visas under the first scheme,
for families, and 32,200 had applied
under the second, for sponsorships. Of
the first group 24,400 had been issued,
and of the second, 4,700. The measly offi-
cial response has been embarrassing. We
have read of Ukrainian families turning up
at Calais, being given a KitKat and a packet
of crisps and being told to apply online
and make their way to Paris, Brussels or
Lille for an appointment a week later.
There have been many reports of more
mundane bureaucracy. It is a horrendous
own goal, given how well Britain has done
in supplying Ukraine with weapons such
as the Starstreak missile used to shoot
down a Russian helicopter last week.
It is not too late to fix this. The govern-
ment’s eventual feats of organisation dur-
ing the Covid crisis, pulled off after Boris
Johnson’s cabinet realised what was at
stake, show what can be done when there
is intense focus from the top. Britain’s
vaccine buying and delivery were the
envy of much of the world.
Luckily, flickers of a similar awareness
are dawning now. Simon Ridley, who ran
the Cabinet Office’s Covid task force for
two years, has been parachuted in as atemporary permanent secretary to over-
see the response to the Ukrainian refugee
situation. Richard Harrington, the former
Conservative MP for Watford, has been
clad in ermine and made minister for refu-
gees in the Home Office and Michael
Gove’s levelling-up department. Harring-
ton told MPs last week that he and col-
leagues were “looking at every bit of the
process to try and speed it up”. The gov-
ernment wants to process 15,000 visas a
week within a fortnight. That number is
going to be a stretch — but then so was the
vaccination programme.
The refugee crisis has confirmed sev-
eral things we knew already. The Home
Office has a “computer says no” mentality
— literally in this case. The Times reported
on Friday that visa application data had to
be fed through one programme to be
checked, identity documents had to go
through another system and then a case-
worker had to pull both together manu-
ally on a third system. A senior official said
the three “very clunky” systems had
“been around for more than 20 years”.
The Home Office is right to insist on
carrying out safety checks on the homes
taking in Ukrainians and security checks
on the Ukrainians entering them. But a
21st-century democracy should not run
on such antiquated systems. A more capa-
ble home secretary would have tackled
the underlying problem sooner, or at least
pre-empted its effects in this case.
Organisational dysfunction ultimately
comes from the person in charge. Johnson
is often accused of failing to tackle compli-
cated matters until he is shamed into
doing it as a matter of urgency. The puzzle
of how to yoke together the Home Office,
the levelling-up department and the civil
service has until now been untroubled by
his close attention. An inability to think
about a problem, choose a course of
action and persevere with it — unless not
doing so risks immediate disaster — has
become a defining characteristic of his
premiership.
The tens of thousands of Ukrainians
seeking refuge here deserve better. And
so, in the long run, does the British public.Five years have passed since the ripples
from Harvey Weinstein’s fall reached the
House of Commons and exposed the
Pestminster scandal. The reckoning over
sexual misconduct claimed the scalps of
two cabinet ministers and several MPs,
including the Conservative member for
Dover, Charlie Elphicke, some of whose
predations were reported by The Sunday
Times.
The claims revealed today against
David Warburton, the Tory MP for Somer-
ton and Frome, are a depressing sign of
how little may have changed. Warburton,
56, a married father of two, is accused of
snorting cocaine and behaving inappro-
priately towards women. Two have made
formal reports to the House of Commons
independent complaints and grievance
scheme (ICGS), created after the events of
2017 to improve the way Westminster
handles claims against MPs.
The ICGS investigates complaints and
then refers its findings to an independent
panel of eight experts. The process can
take a long time and the outcome is sub-
ject to appeal. Andrea Leadsom, the
former Commons leader who worked on
a cross-party basis to set it up, has warned
that some in Westminster see it aspointless. Other reforms suggested at the
time of the ICGS’s formation, such as com-
pulsory management training for MPs,
have fallen by the wayside.
MPs control the staffing of their offices.
Warburton is among those who employ
their own spouses as managers. Members
have rightly resisted previous efforts to
take away their ability to hire and fire,
pointing out it would undermine their
democratic mandate. But the alternative
should not be allowing Victorian working
practices to persist at Westminster.
The ICGS, in theory, removed whips’
offices from the complaints process,
lessening the risk of politicisation. The
scheme needs to be reinforced and simpli-
fied so those bringing their concerns for
consideration can be confident of a fair
and quick resolution. And the Commons
needs a continuous human resources
function, staffed by civil servants, to sup-
port MPs’ offices. This would be unobtru-
sive but would introduce a background
level of professional management. It
would be important for dealing with
matters falling below the threshold of a
formal complaint. Everyone should be
able to take their worries to someone
other than the boss’s wife.Westminster must catch
up with the 21st century
For a dwindling number of us, clothes
shopping means going to a shop and
trying on various clothes. For the rest, it
means looking online at clothes worn by
impossibly attractive models; ordering
said clothes; discovering they do not
make us impossibly attractive; and
returning them. This is dispiriting and, to
put it mildly, a faff.
So a new system that allows online
customers to create an accurate avatar of
their own body (complete with face) to tryon those clothes virtually sounds a good
idea. Our reporter used it to find a splen-
did green satin tea dress, and would like to
wear it to parties.
The technology is impressive, but we
wonder if its creators have thought this
through. There is an obvious next step:
move those parties online too, and we can
simply send our avatars to attend them.
No need for physical clothes at all, and we
will all have more leisure time to take up
new hobbies. Dressmaking, perhaps.Does my avatar look big in this?
ESTABLISHED 1822The can-do vaccine spirit
must be applied to refugees
Dominic Lawson
to bills, and to public appointments, should the
Queen become incapacitated. As the invariably
wise Libby Purves pointed out earlier this year,
it grates that Princess Anne, who was replaced
on this quartet by William when he became 21,
is not thought more suitable than “a
disreputable sleaze and a commercially
compromised émigré”.
Yes, Princess Anne, the hardest-working of
the royal family (measured by the number of
appointments she carries out), adored by the
more than 300 charities she supports
unceasingly as patron, who represented her
country in the Olympic Games, who like her
mother has never exuded a scintilla of self-pity,
who had the good sense not to accept royal
titles for her own children, who won the
nation’s hearts when resisting a deranged
kidnapper with the words “not bloody likely”.
The best of the lot of them ... who would make
a wonderful and completely uncontroversial
monarch. Except, she is 17th in line to the
throne, so that’s never going to happen.
Yet our best monarchs have all been
queens: not just Elizabeth II but the one most
historians would rate the greatest of all,
Elizabeth I. Then there is Victoria, who gave
her name to our most spectacular age. Queen
Anne is too often discounted: it was under her
reign that the United Kingdom was created,
and she was instrumental in the formation of
the Union, which she promoted in her first
speech as monarch.
Our worst rulers, however, have all been
kings. There are a lot to choose from, but a
shortlist would have to include the
astonishingly selfish Edward VIII (whom the
royal confidant Kenneth Rose recorded in
1972 saying, “It was the Jews who brought us
into the war”); George IV, whose death was
actively celebrated by the nation; Charles I;
further back, John, Stephen and any of the
Richards. Readers may have their own list of
un-favourite monarchs, but I doubt many will
include any queens.
In fact, when the Duchess of Cambridge was
pregnant with her first born, parliament
passed an act ending succession based on male
primogeniture; it meant — though things did
not turn out that way — that if the child had
been female, she would have taken precedence
over any subsequent male offspring.
Based on past results, I would have favoured
a 180-degree switch to female primogeniture.
We could then happily have renamed our
country the United Queendom.
[email protected]T
he pictures of the Queen at last week’s
memorial service for Prince Philip
were almost too poignant to look at.
Apart from the sense that we were
intruding into the most private grief,
there was the profoundly
disconcerting thought that this might
be the last time we would see
Elizabeth II in public.
Disconcerting because, for many millions of
her people, Elizabeth is somehow the nation’s
matriarch as well as its monarch. And no one is
more important to a family than the mother. By
definition this role, and the emotions that it
engenders, cannot be fulfilled by a man.
It is partly for this reason that her eldest son
and heir will never be able to take his mother’s
place in the affections of his future subjects.
Prince Charles is fully imbued with the sense of
duty inculcated in him by his parents, but there
is a strain of self-pity in him that was anathema
to them — indeed to their generation — and that
is less lovable.
A glimpse of this was provided in the
memoirs of Max Hastings, in which he
described how, when he was editor of The
Daily Telegraph in the mid-1990s, he warned
the prince at a lunch between the two of them
that his demand for greater public sympathy
sat ill with his status. “His fist banged on the
table, rattling the silver. ‘Nobody but me can
possibly understand how perfectly bloody it is
to be the Prince of Wales!”’ Charles was right,
of course; but his reaction confirmed
Hastings’s point.
A similar thin-skinnedness can be seen in
Charles’s sons — in Prince Harry’s case now
manifested in a toxic mixture of royal
entitlement and Californian therapy-speak.
William, more than anyone, realises what
terrible blunders his younger brother has
made — is making — and how potentially
damaging they are to the royal “firm”.
But it was disappointing to learn, after the
Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s trip to the
Caribbean the week before last, that, in the
words of one of their media advisers, William
wants to end the “never complain, never
explain” approach of the Queen. Or, as more
than one report, citing “royal sources”, put it:
“He has a plan to future-proof the monarchy by
making it more reactionary.” I think they must
have meant “reactive”.
That would be a mistake. A running
commentary from the royal family about itself
is not required, and especially if it is
conditioned by any sense that the mostprivileged family in the country feels it is not
being treated fairly. Even if it isn’t. In fact the
vast bulk of media coverage of the royal family
is supportive, and at times sycophantic — much
more so than any politician could, or should,
ever expect.
It is not, though, at the level of the
sycophancy that princes have always received
in their interactions at a personal level. That
habit seems odder nowadays, given that we are
no longer a deferential society. But it still exists.
And it is no fault of princes that their
characters are damaged by this. Very few
personalities could not be corrupted by such
automatic entitlement. It is analogous to the
spoilt child.
For some reason it does seem the male of the
species that is especially vulnerable to this. It
may be because men are in fact more spoilt;
but also the male ego seems more liable to be
warped by endless flattery. Women see such
crawling for what it is, and do not let it go to
their heads. In short, for what may even be
biological as well as social reasons, women are
less prone to arrogance. The obverse of
arrogance is humility; and it is that which the
Queen — perhaps also in part because of her
deep religious faith — radiates so appealingly.
Appealing because humility is the perfect foil
to privilege and status.
The obvious contrast is with Prince Andrew,
who seems to have convinced himself that he
has some sort of genius for talent-spotting
business opportunities, but in fact surrounded
himself with an assortment of spivs and
chancers. The scandal involving personal
payments of £1.1 million to the prince, for
precisely nothing, instigated by a Turkish
suspected fraudster, is just the most recent
demonstration of this self-destructive delusion.
Yet Andrew and the Californian exile Harry
make up, with Charles and William, the four
“counsellors of state”. That is, they are
designated to fill the role of giving royal assentS
o then, Covid. I know the very word
makes us all glaze over, but what is
going on? Infection rates are near
record levels. Absolutely everyone
seems to have it, in a way that feels
unprecedented: at no point in the
past two years have I known more
infected middle-aged people. More to
the point, a lot of them are really quite unwell,
despite being triple-jabbed, and are surprised
to find themselves flattened by the virus when
they were expecting entirely manageable
variants on the “bad cold” theme. The Times
Radio presenter Ayesha Hazarika wrote about
her experience of this last week.
Another lot have it and feel well enough to
go racing about as normal, spreading the
goodness far and wide, since we’re all going to
get it, or get it again, anyway, so what does it
matter? Covid’s over, or as good as, and hardly
anyone dies of it any more so there’s no need to
make a boring fuss. It’s as if one group of
people are the fun, carefree hedonists —
parties, crowded bars, tans and cocktails — and
the other are mimsy, finger-wagging prigs in
cardigans and sensible shoes, tutting,
“Actually, I think you’ll find ...” No one wants
to be Team Prig, but at a certain point you do
begin to wonder.
Sir Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief
scientific adviser, said on Thursday that “the
current wave is not over” and that “room for
this variant to evolve remains very large”. In
the past week Sir Chris Whitty, the chief
medical officer for England, told a conference
that “the waves are still occurring” and will
continue to do so; Jenny Harries, head of the
UK Health Security Agency, said that everyone
should “be very sensible” and keep wearing
masks “in periods of high prevalence, such as
now;” and Sir Jonathan Van-Tam, the former
deputy chief medical officer, said he was
having “sleepless nights” over the spring
booster take-up. Quoting these eminences feels
quite retro, like still loving a boy band that’s no
longer popular, but discounting what they aresaying on the basis that we’ve heard enough to
last a lifetime doesn’t feel sensible either.
Who is listening, though, aside from the
people who never stopped worrying about
ever-evolving variants and vaccine efficacy
waning over time, who still wash their hands
whenever they come inside, who maintain
social distancing? In the complete and glaring
absence of government guidance — all anyone
ever says is: “We’ve got to learn to live with
Covid,” which is true but also unhelpful —
people are making up their own rules: I won’t
wear a mask to the shops but I will on the train.
I won’t go to the drinks thing, but I’ll go to the
supper. This is called using common sense,
although with numbers this high, you could
probably get the virus from kissing your friend
hello in your own house as easily as from
kissing a complete stranger in a crowded,
airless basement.
Everyone is doing a different thing.
Someone comes to mend the boiler wearing a
serious-looking mask; someone else delivers
something cheerfully bare-faced. You see the
mask and think, “Lighten up — it’s fine”; you
see the bare face and think, “Hmm”. No one
can win. One local shop has never stopped
requiring masks and sanitised hands; others
don’t seem to mind what you do (I have been
monitoring a sanitiser bottle at one. It’s gone
down by maybe 2cm in a week. I know it’s the
same bottle because I scribbled a dot on it in
Biro.) At the supermarket the masked party-poopers seem to be looked at slightly askance
by the unmasked, as if they are being
ludicrously melodramatic.
All this before you even get to the question
of what to do if you are infected. Since many
people can’t afford to take unpaid time off,
they go to work anyway, as they are lawfully
entitled to do, even though one person’s teeny-
tiny sniffle is another person’s week in bed. An
older woman I know, who is in her late
seventies, finally succumbed to the virus a
couple of weeks ago. So strange were her first
symptoms — her speech suddenly stopped
making sense, and when she stood up, she
found she couldn’t walk unaided — that the
people having supper with her at the time
wondered whether she’d had a stroke. She
tested positive the next day and passed the
virus to her daughter, who now has Covid for
the second time, while still suffering occasional
after-effects of the first bout. These come in the
form of benign paroxysmal positional vertigo,
whereby the crystals in your inner ear (I had no
idea, but it’s real) travel to where they
shouldn’t and make you feel debilitatingly
nauseous, to the point where you want to be
sick when you move your eyes. If this is “living
with Covid”, it isn’t much cop.
The breezy assertion by the government that
vaccinated people are largely Covid-proof, and
that we must now just let it do its thing until it
peters out, doesn’t inspire confidence when so
many people are finding themselves so unwell.
Or the formerly breezy assertion, I should say —
as the number of infections rises, the
government is now making futile noises about
how it might be an idea to wear masks again
after all, even though large swathes of people
have stopped listening.
I dislike an edict as much as the next person,
and if edicts really do remain unnecessary,
then great. But, like many of us, I have a
sneaking feeling that making up our own rules
isn’t working as brilliantly as it might, and it
makes me worry.
@IndiaKnightWe’re just making up our own rules, and health experts are visibly twitchy
If this is living with Covid,
I’m not sure I want to
At the supermarket
the masked are
looked at askanceLike her mother, she
has never exuded a
scintilla of self-pityIt’s time we became
the United Queendom
India Knight
This country has always benefited from female monarchs. Anne II, please