Everyone is familiar with the term forecasting, where you look at all the data and information available to you and make some educated assumptions about what might happen in the future.
But I learned a new term recently from a civil servant (they generally seem to love a buzz word).
It’s hindcasting. The idea being you put yourself in the future and look back towards the present day, trying to pick out the moments that will define and shape the future.
Doing a bit of my own hindcasting 20 years from now, I wonder if we’ll look back on this period of politics and see that while Boris Johnson was ultimately brought down by Partygate and the Pestminster scandals, it was the abuse of the PPE procurement system which brought down the Tories.
That’s the process the UK Government went through during the pandemic to try to buy as much personal protective equipment as they could for NHS staff and other key workers.
It led to hundreds of millions of pounds of tax payers money being spent in a matter of days – apparently with very few checks and balances over who got what, how much people were paying, who was benefiting and what the quality of the end product looked like.
PPE scandal reporting makes troubling reading
We know a fair bit about how badly this whole buying process was done but nothing like the whole story.
We know that millions of pounds were spent on products that were so poorly made they were dangerous and therefore couldn’t be used.
And we also know that MPs and Lords were frantically lobbying the government on behalf of businesses in their constituency.
Some of this was legitimate and well meaning and we shouldn’t forget that. People offering up the services of distillers who were prepared to turn their hand from whisky and gin to hand sanitisers, for example.
An awful lot of it appears to have been far less wholesome, however.
MPs lobbying on behalf of companies they were paid advisers to.
Or in the case of the allegations being made against Tory peer Michelle Mone, companies she had direct family links to.
She’s in the news today because she’s both taken a leave of absence from her post and been suspended from the Tory whip.
But it’s been reported that she and her family benefited to the tune of £29 million throughout the pandemic.
Independent inquiry may be Sunak’s only hope
The so-called fast lane, which led to companies getting easy access to our cash during the pandemic, may yet prove to be biggest political scandal in living memory.
Bigger even than the MPs expenses scandal which did so much damage to the standing of politicians in this country and the very vocation of politics itself.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is not a man who needs to seek his problems.
His in-tray is bursting with headaches he largely inherited but was also complicit in.
If he is to have any hope of getting on to the front foot as PM, he surely has to get to grips with this PPE scandal.
Sunak should announce an independent inquiry, open the books and let the public follow the money.
Who benefited from our collective pain?
Was it a legitimate spend of tax-payers money?
And if it wasn’t, what’s the price of that dishonesty and how do we ensure it can never ever happen again?
Civil Servants begged Government Ministers not to give contracts to some of these dodgy companies.
They had major red flags. 🚩
But the Government didn't listen. This corruption cost the taxpayer £50 million!
My intervention in the PPE Contract debate. #PPEscandal👇🏾 pic.twitter.com/9l9k55qYG3
— Dawn Butler MP✊🏾💙 (@DawnButlerBrent) December 6, 2022
In so doing, he’d probably drop a lot of his close allies knee deep in the brown stuff.
But in truth, it will all come out sooner than later.
This can either be a drip drip story that plagues the Tories from now until the day they leave office, reminiscent of the sleaze scandal that dogged their predecessors in the late 1990s.
Or he can cleanse the party of it all now.
That wouldn’t just be the right and proper thing to do.
It would be smart politics if he has any desire to rebuild trust with the public he wants to lead.
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