To lose one cabinet minister in two months may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose two may look like carelessness. To lose three strongly suggests downright incompetence. Yet as Damian Green follows Michael Fallon (remember him?) and Priti Patel (and her?) out of the cabinet room door last week, Prime Minister Theresa May is still very much in charge. To say she has never been stronger would be an exaggeration. But, like Forrest Gump or the Duracell bunny, the prime minister just keeps on running.
In the Westminster context, Green’s sacking was a textbook move. A dispassionate observer can scarce forebear to cheer the skill with which the mandarinate carried it out. The first rumours that Sue Gray’s cabinet office ethics inquiry into Green’s conduct was on May’s desk came more than two weeks ago. Meanwhile, May had massively important Brexit business to deal with, in Brussels and in the Commons. The government’s survival was on the line.
Interest in the Green inquiry duly ebbed. Indeed, Westminster almost forgot about it. May had a very full parliamentary day last Wednesday, with Green at her side for part of it at prime minister’s questions, without a whisper seeping out. Then, that evening, the news dropped. Whitehall still knows how to orchestrate matters to its own ends.
May is not untouched by the sacking of Green. This most isolated of prime ministers is more alone than ever. Losing Green on top of the June departures of her advisers Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill reduces her trusted circle still further.
She remains safe as leader because the Tory party cannot agree on her successor and because she still manages to straddle Tory divides on Brexit. But the loss makes a new year cabinet reshuffle more likely, an event that could easily backfire. Her strength is in her weakness. The isolation will get her one day.
Nevertheless, politics, like life in general, has an extraordinary ability to absorb the disruptive and then to move on. It will soon become the orthodoxy — perhaps, just hours after the event, it already is — to say that Green’s departure, though much unwanted by May, was inevitable. Yet pause for a moment and you will see that this is not as obvious as it may now appear.
Green had at least three really big things on his side as Gray’s report circulated around May’s office in recent days. The first was May’s long friendship and support for her colleague. The second was the enduring legacy of indignation among Tory MPs about the way Green’s Westminster office was searched by the police in 2008, at the behest, ultimately, of Gordon Brown’s government. The third was continuing outrage in his own party, and more widely, against former police officers who were believed to be pursuing a vendetta against an elected politician for nearly a decade. These were good reasons to suppose that Green could have withstood a critical finding.
Green even had the messy but, for him, useful conclusion of the Gray inquiry, that Kate Maltby’s accusations about the way the former first secretary came on to her in private and on the phone was one of those “he said/she said” conflicts of evidence that often go with the territory. There would have been anger and distress from Maltby and her defenders if Green had stayed on after that finding, but it feels almost certain to me that this would have been survivable. True, the inquiry found that Maltby’s account was “plausible”. But power would still have won.
In the end it was the porn, stupid. Yes, I know, technically it was the lying about it, and not the porn on Green’s computer itself that forced him out. The resignation letters make this very precise. May’s letter is a collector’s item in this respect. After nearly two pages of personal compliments and supportive words for Green’s treatment by the police, she finally says that Green’s press statements last month were inaccurate and misleading, and were a breach of the ministerial code that required his sacking.
It is John Profumo all over again, albeit in a much more minor key. Half a century ago, the Conservative war minister had to go, not because he had sex with Christine Keeler at the same time that she was also sleeping with a Soviet spy, but because he lied about it. Green’s lie is trivial by comparison with Profumo’s. But it could have the same origin: embarrassment, then shame, about illicit sexual behaviour.
Green is a grown-up. He is responsible for his own actions. I have no idea what his sex life is, or has been, like. I don’t care. He is entitled to make sexual mistakes, as we all are and as we all do at one time or another, providing they do not hurt others. I agree with May’s sacking letter when it says “those who put themselves forward to serve the public should also be accorded the respect of a private life within the law”.
But Green (or someone) is to some degree a victim of the fact that online pornography is so easily available. People — they are overwhelmingly men — access porn because they can. MPs are not employees, so their offices are not even subject to employer-imposed controls. A digital revolution combined with a free-and-easy approach to online controls meant that porn went from being concealed in brown paper bags on top shelves in seedy shops that charged money for it to being a mass online product costing nothing at all and sent straight into your home, office or phone for anyone to see.
The fact that men may like porn is not a justification for this ease of access. Porn demeans women. It is violent. It is socially undesirable. It is very bad for men too. To his credit, David Cameron grasped this. The upshot is the Digital Economy Act 2017 , not yet in force but coming into operation in a few months. This requires internet service providers to impose an age verification requirement that will be a deterrent not just to children looking for freely available porn but also to adults such as Green (or someone), who will have to go through a process to gain access.
In time, shame and embarrassment may act as a deterrent not just to telling the truth but to porn itself. Society would be better off with as little access as possible, and ideally with no access at all. Controls matter. They should be stronger.
Green’s sacking is a loss to the government, parliament and politics, but it was the porn that got him. He was a weak fool to lie about it.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist.
