The Sunday Times November 28, 2021 21
would have increased from 80 to around
- “We united the right at the 2019 elec-
tion,” said one minister. “Farage had
nowhere to go. We can’t afford to let him
back in.”
The second danger is that the prime
minister now finds himself frequently on
the opposite side of an ideological debate
from the two politicians who some
donors want to succeed him sooner
rather than later. The Spectator’s Politi-
cian of the Year was Sunak, who joked
grimly that his award “only cost £400 bil-
lion”. Liz Truss, the foreign secretary,
was named Politician to Watch.
A
t the Tory winter ball fundraising
dinner earlier in the week, Sunak
and Truss were said to have spent
the evening assiduously wooing big
money donors with their low-tax,
pro-business conservatism. A cabinet
minister said: “They were both working
the room all night.”
Truss’s ambition is such that when a
former minister lamented the chaos dur-
ing a recent soirée at the home of Thérèse
Coffey, the work and pensions secretary,
the foreign secretary responded cheek-
ily: “It will be better when I’m in charge.”
A clear gap has opened up between the
top two and other cabinet pretenders.
One donor stumped up £35,000 last
week to play cricket with Sunak; another
paid £22,000 for karaoke with Truss. At a
recent auction by Surrey Conservatives,
two books by Dominic Raab, the deputy
prime minister, fetched a princely £8.
The more damaging split between No
10 and 11 Downing Street was made more
acute last week when a tweet from the
BBC’s political editor, Laura Kuenssberg,
triggered a social media storm. She
quoted an anonymous “senior Downing
Street source” saying: “There is a lot of
concern inside the building about the PM
... it’s just not working.” In the subse-
quent confusion Johnson allies blamed
Sunak’s chief of staff, Liam Booth-Smith
— wrongly, the Treasury insisted. This
weekend others are pointing the finger at
Allegra Stratton, once Sunak’s spin doc-
tor, now Johnson’s mouthpiece on cli-
mate change. She denies responsibility.
Some are concerned enough to brief
against the chancellor. “Rishi’s just not
ready to be prime minister,” one recent
Johnson adviser said. “He risks being the
Ole Gunnar Solskjaer of Westminster,” a
reference to the recently dismissed Man-
chester United football manager, who
some believe got the big job too soon.
While Sunak and (particularly) Truss
might be more in tune with Tory grass-
roots and with Baker and Davis, Tory
pollsters suggest that it is Johnson whose
often contradictory stances best mirror
the average voter. One pollster said: “C1s
and C2s [people in the lower income
bracket] in Nuneaton are bothered about
tax. They are increasingly skint. They
fully expect taxes to go up. But they also
want lavish public services. It’s a very
Boris-like have-your-cake-and-eat-it
approach. People basically want to hang
the paedos and fund the NHS.”
This is where the dysfunction in Down-
ing Street becomes significant. Incompe-
tence has the power to decouple Johnson
from voters who would otherwise givehim the benefit of the doubt on policy.
There is fury and despair among MPs
at Johnson’s chaotic style and the fact
that since Dominic Cummings departed
there are no advisers able to head off
damaging flights of fancy. One longtime
Johnson ally said his approach to ideas he
disliked was “consent and evade”, agree-
ing, then doing what he wanted all along.
Some in No 10 recall Cummings using Bis-
marck’s remark about Kaiser Wilhelm to
describe Johnson: “He is like a balloon: if
you don’t keep fast hold of the string, you
never know where he will be off to.”
This weekend, Downing Street went
on the record to deny claims in Westmin-
ster that Johnson has three times asked
Lord Udny-Lister to return to the senior
No 10 role he left earlier in the year. “Rub-
bish,” the spokesman said. Other sources
claim Johnson has floated the idea of
handing Kit Malthouse, the policing min-
ister who was his deputy mayor in Lon-
don, a beefed-up political role in No 10.
A Tory who has worked in Downing
Street called for the head of Dan Rosen-
field, the chief of staff seen as lacking
political nous or the stature to make John-
son listen: “Rosenfield has to go. It needs
to be someone who is actually interested
in politics.” One senior Tory said: “I sense
complacency in No 10. They seem to
think it’s just mid-term blues. They have
no plan on how to turn things round bar
KBO,” (Winston Churchill’s abbreviation
for “keep buggering on”).
Without organisational and ideologi-
cal coherence, Johnson, the godfather of
this government, may turn out to be
more Don Quixote than Don Corleone.‘Breast pest’ photographers to be
stopped by change in voyeurs’ law
People who take photographs
of breastfeeding women
without permission could
face up to two years in jail.
Dominic Raab, the justice
secretary, is expected to
make such voyeurism a
criminal offence.
It follows a campaign led
by Stella Creasy, Labour MP
for Walthamstow, who was
photographed breastfeeding
her four-month-old baby on
public transport. She has
been working with Jeff Smith,
the Labour MP for
Manchester Withington, on a
campaign under the slogan
Stop the Breast Pest.
The campaign began whenCaroline Wheeler
Political EditorNew ID check plan to block
children from porn sites
The Sunday Times November 28, 2021 21
thrash out how they stop
children stumbling across
porn or harmful material on
suicide and eating disorders.
De Souza, a former head
teacher, said she had seen the
hugely damaging effects of
pornography on children,
including a young girl who
took her own life. “Kids are
seeing things that warp what
they think real sexual
relationships are like,” she
said. “I’ve had girls say to me
that during their first kiss with
their boyfriend he’s tried to
strangle her because he’s seen
it on a porn video. Girls are
filming themselves in their
bedroom and sending it to
boys who are sharing it. These
girls are being pestered ten or
more times a night to send
naked images of themselves.
I’ve had boys traumatised
because they are in big
WhatsApp groups, seeing
things they don’t want to see.”
The tougher rules are
expected to be written into
the forthcoming online harms
bill, which had been due
before Christmas but has
been put on hold until the
new year after Boris Johnson
told the House of Commons
liaison committee that he
wanted to see it strengthened.
Dorries has also told MPs that
she wants it to go further.
Theresa May’s government
passed the Digital Economy
Act in 2017, requiring
commercial providers of
pornography “to have robust
age verification controls in
place to prevent children and
young people under 18 from
accessing pornographicMinisters are preparing to
introduce laws to prevent
children accessing online
pornography.
Plans to bring in age
verification for adult sites,
which were shelved in 2017,
are now being looked on with
approval by Nadine Dorries,
the culture secretary, and
Nadhim Zahawi, the
education secretary.
Their support follows work
by Dame Rachel de Souza, the
children’s commissioner, who
has sent a report to ministers
recommending that age
verification becomes
compulsory on all porn sites.
Today she reveals that in
meetings with porn providers
she found them willing to
introduce age verification
measures as long as they were
imposed industry-wide.
Studies show that half of 11
to 13-year-olds have seen
pornography at some point.
This rises to two-thirds of 14
to 15-year-olds and four in five
16 to 17-year-olds, according
to De Souza. She is also
pushing for the big tech firms
such as Facebook, Snapchat
and Instagram to do much
more to prevent children
from seeing porn and other
damaging material on their
sites by accident, although
ministers are not expected to
back full age verification for
these platforms.
The eight big tech
companies have been
summoned to a meeting on
Wednesday hosted by the two
ministers and De Souza toTim Shipman material”. However, it was
never enacted after privacy
campaigners claimed that it
would force users to hand
over their identities to porn
sites.
De Souza said that
technology now existed that
will allow users to prove their
age online using a passport or
other identification in a way
that they secure an access
code. “Technology is so much
better now and the privacy
issues are no longer a
concern,” she said. “Third
parties can do age verification
and get rid of that information
straight away.
“I met with some of the
biggest porn companies and
challenged them on age
verification. As long as all
adult sites have to have age
verification put on them, they
would be comfortable to go
forward with that. They
basically said, ‘Make us do it’.
I was pleased with that.”
Ministers are examining
how to introduce age
verification using biometric
data and “age assurance”
measures, whereby sites can
use artificial intelligence to
identify children by the way
they they behave online or
interact with a device,
including the language they
use.
Senior government sources
said officials were considering
whether to write changes into
the published draft of the bill
or whether to amend the
legislation when it goes before
parliament in the spring. The
bill is expected to become law
by the end of next year.A girl
said a
boy
tried to
strangle
her on a
first kiss
ILLUSTRATION: TONY BELLthat victims have to report
incidents of common assault.
Currently, police must
charge someone within six
months of the incident.
Separately, the defence
secretary is considering
introducing harsher penalties
for military personnel who
commit sexual offences.
Ben Wallace is understood
to be “reviewing a range of
offences that would address
better respect for women”.
The move follows
controversy over the killing of
Agnes Wanjiru, the Kenyan
woman found near a British
army base. Wallace also
wants to close a loophole
allowing convicted sex
offenders to continue in the
armed forces.the MPs were contacted by
32-year-old Julia Cooper, a
constituent of Smith, who
saw a man taking
photographs of her with a
long-lens camera while she
was breastfeeding with other
mothers in Sale Water Park.
Copper told police but was
informed that there was no
law preventing unwanted
photography in public.
Ministers are expected to
amend the 2019 Voyeurism
Act, which banned
photographing genitals or
buttocks without consent, in
a practice known as
upskirting.
Raab is expected to
introduce the new offence in
the new year. He is also
expected to extend the timeStella Creasy was
photographed
breastfeeding
while on a bus