The first rule of PPE donations is: don’t talk about PPE donations – especially if they come from China.
I discovered this while enquiring about the million facemasks quietly provided to the UK Government during the pandemic by Tencent, the Chinese tech giant close to the Beijing government.
The firm also has a streaming arm, China’s largest, which put out a censored version of the 1999 film Fight Club last month, with Big Brother mandarins altering the cult film’s subversive ending.
The firm also has a streaming arm, China’s largest, which put out a censored version of the 1999 film Fight Club last month
Its version had authorities stopping Project Mayhem from blowing up capitalism and sending the free-thinking alter ego of the narrator (played by Brad Pitt) to an asylum.
Chinese audiences are also being treated to Tencent’s censored version of TV sitcom Friends. All references to lesbians and gays are cut and the line ‘women can have multiple orgasms’ is changed to ‘women can have endless gossips’. What an anti-climax.
It took three weeks and threats of a complaint for pen-pushers at the Foreign Office, Cabinet Office and Health Department to come clean that ‘senior officials’ in a ‘centralised team’ in the latter had signed off the Tencent PPE donation, and that smaller amounts of protective equipment were sent to individual NHS trusts in April 2020. The Bank of China also helped out.
Now, former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith is planning to back an amendment to ban PPE procurement from anywhere linked to genocide.
‘Health practitioners in this country are wearing government-issue, tainted PPE,’ he told me. Tencent says it was happy to have ‘saved lives at a critical time’, which is no doubt why three peers – Lords Carter, Glendonbrook and Mance – proudly declare shareholdings in the Chinese firm.
As any observer of soft power and decades of Russian and Middle Eastern money sloshing through the London laundromat know, foreign largesse often ties politicians and political parties to regimes they soon find committing evil crimes against humanity.
Lord can run and hide
‘Oligarchs in London will have nowhere to hide’, Boris Johnson said. Time will tell. For now, members of the House of Lords who take the Kremlin rouble certainly do.
Take Labour Lord (Peter) Goldsmith, who has taken a ‘leave of absence’ from the Upper House because he doesn’t want to declare how much foreign clients, including the Russian government, pay him for his legal wisdom.
Tory MP Bob Seely tried to use a Commons debate to criticise the former Attorney General but was told by the Deputy Speaker that absent peers are protected by the convention that fellow Parliamentarians cannot be ‘criticised directly by name’.
So as well as being entitled to retain titles, have access to Parliament and its dining facilities, and use of official stationery, while not having to declare outside interests, peers on leave are also beyond parliamentary criticism. End this preposterous loophole now.
The road to war in Ukraine prompted a ceasefire in the leadership race to replace Boris Johnson. Until, that is, hours after the invasion began when kingmaker Michael Gove tweeted how a business school lecture by Rishi Sunak was ‘quite brilliant’.
Michael Gove tweeted how a business school lecture by Rishi Sunak (pictured) was ‘quite brilliant’.
The gushing didn’t go unnoticed in the corridors of power – nor the fact that, regardless of Putin’s invasion, the Chancellor happily went ahead with a speech to set out his vision of Sunak-ism.
The Treasury, one insider tells me, failed to respond when some quizzical Downing Street staff asked why Sunak had not cancelled.
The Chancellor was still on manoeuvres last Friday, when his newsletter, while titled ‘Slava Ukraini’ (Glory To Ukraine), contained seven references to what he called his ‘first major speech’. There was also a ‘candid’ shot of him preparing for it, expensive sleeves rolled up, and captioned ‘Out and About’. A bit like his naked ambition.
Commons Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle is taking a novel approach to party discipline.
He warned Stoke-on-Trent North Tory Jonathan Gullis to stop his rowdy disruptions – ‘otherwise I’ll ring your mother’.
The newbie MP tells me he’s now slipped Hoyle his mum’s number.
