The Times’ fake diaries

It has not been a happy half-term for the lobby team of The Times. Yesterday the paper serialised extracts from the diaries of Rishi Sunak’s chief whip, Simon Hart, which produced some squelching and one political story — that Kemi Badenoch is useless. However, the paper didn’t notice this until hours after everyone else did.

The book is called Ungovernable: the political diaries of a chief whip. And Macmillan’s publicity material describes it as being “a first-of-its-kind extraordinary look at life as a chief whip … a revealing, real-time, blow-by-blow account — offering a glimpse of what truly goes on in Westminster behind closed doors.” Poor Jack Straw is roped in to puff that, “Hart is a secret masochist — writing a diary every night after a punishing day as Chief Whip.” There’s only one problem, which is that this can’t be true.

That these extracts can’t all have been diaries — let alone what Macmillan calls a “real-time, blow-by-blow” account — is inescapable from the very first thing gobbeted by The Times. And seemingly not noticed by any of their lobby team.

October 24-27, 2022

I am in Central Lobby when I get a call. “Rishi Sunak”, it says on the screen. He sounds somewhere between overwhelmed, excited and grateful.

After a few niceties he says, simply and slightly awkwardly, “Will you be my chief whip?” Slightly awkwardly, I agree. I feel pride, but a sense of terror too. There is no hiding place now, no one else to blame. It’s terrifying.

I am told to report to the Old Admiralty Building at the top of Whitehall in 15 minutes to “assemble a government”.

Once the sackings are complete, we move to No 10 for the hirings.

[But] before the ink is even dry, Suella Braverman is in trouble for leaking confidential info to a backbencher, Sir John Hayes.

It was put down to lazy misuse of the internal email system.

By unhappy coincidence for Suella, there is more than one person on the parliamentary email system of the same name as Sir John’s staffer, to whom she had intended to send the “protected” information.

The other happened to be a rather good friend of mine, startled to receive such sensitive material out of the blue and rightly minded to “do the right thing” by alerting the authorities. Understandably, the PM is loath to lose her this soon, so we gloss it over, at least for now. Let’s hope she remembers.

As this isn’t just mistaken, it entirely misleads about how Rishi Sunak became prime minister. Which was, loath as both might now be to admit it, because Suella made him PM.

In actual, well-recorded fact, Braverman had already been sacked by … Liz Truss long before Hart got back anywhere near the Whips’ Office to “gloss over” anything. This happened at the behest of Simon Case, then Cabinet Secretary, with the connivance of notoriously useless Home Office permanent secretary Matthew Rycroft. In other words, the deep state Truss is now so exercised by persuaded the hapless 49-day queen to get rid of her firebrand Home Secretary. 

This was for accidentally showing a non-classified briefing paper to a parliamentary colleague. But which instead of going to a former security minister, in fact went to an employee of blowhard Tory backbencher Andrew Percy. Who promptly porcinely squealed to Truss’s hapless chief whip, Wendy Morton, that even trying to show non-classified material to John Hayes was the greatest political crime of the century.

Exit Braverman from Truss’s cabinet on 19 October, after the briefest PM in British history fell for this load of cobblers. That was immediately followed the same day by Braverman’s explosive resignation letter calling on Truss herself to go. Which, combined with Morton’s unrelated implosion as chief whip, removed the remaining internal support for Truss’s already besieged leadership.

Not one aspect of this came across the desk of then Welsh Secretary Simon Hart. Indeed, notoriously Sunak didn’t become prime minister until after Braverman backed him over Boris Johnson, almost certainly because Sunak had in fact promised her a return to Marsham Street.

Which successfully extorted promise would have been a juicy story for Simon Hart’s “diaries”, and presumably one he, as chief whip-elect would have known about. But for some strange reason hasn’t seen fit to write about.

Parliament Square asked some of Hart’s colleagues from the Tory whips’ office for their verdict on their sometime chief. “He was/is a nice enough guy but essentially a second stringer and a bit of a dud” said one. A senior colleague concluded that Hart, “wasn’t a fifth columnist (I don’t think) but just a dolt who hadn’t the eyes to see what was going on”.

It’s a shame that The Times hasn’t noticed what’s going on with these “diaries” either.