Gavin Williamson’s departure is about more than just the messages | Sam Coates
The pantomime villain of British politics has exited stage right – leaving for a third and presumably final time, with the crowd booing.
There are no public dissenting voices to his departure. It has been deemed inevitable.
But nothing about this case is as obvious as it seems. Perhaps the most intriguing opening question is why Rishi Sunak appointed Sir Gavin Williamson in the first place and whether it’s worth at least examining the argument for why the PM may in time regret accepting his resignation.
None of which is to excuse some of Sir Gavin’s messages and reported comments to colleagues, which are rightly judged harshly in the cold light of day.
Ultimately, that’s what has sealed his fate, and in Westminster there was an immediate consensus that his departure was necessary.
But this alone does not always mean it was the sensible course, and some of the judgements involved are more intriguing and nuanced.
However distasteful, the messages and testimony were not the only reason he went. Ultimately what has transpired over the last 48 hours is that Sir Gavin had too many enemies for Number 10 to cope with, deciding now was ripe for settling scores.
Last night, the new PM judged the cost of losing him had become a price worth paying. But it took two weeks for Rishi Sunak to reach this conclusion. Why and what changed?
From the moment of his appointment, Sir Gavin’s third act in government irritated colleagues. After a divisive tenure as chief whip, difficult time as defence secretary and deeply troubled time as education secretary.
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Bluntly, he is unpopular.
Unusually for a politician, even Sir Gavin cheerily acknowledges this in private. Rishi Sunak will have had people telling him this too.
But the PM had appointed Sir Gavin as a troubleshooter, a position he needs more than almost any other right now, that under Boris Johnson was held by Nigel Adams, who stayed with Johnson in the bunker to the very end.
This signals a strong belief that whatever his troubled public profile, the PM trusted his political instincts and skills enough to keep him close.
If Mr Sunak’s decision to reappoint Suella Braverman to a big job (home secretary) was to appease an important caucus (the hard Brexiting ERG-ers), it is at least as significant Sir Gavin had a floating role which carried little meaning as far as the public was concerned, and has fewer than a dozen MPs he counts as friends, and certainly is not head of any faction.
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The PM was never buying many friends by appointing Sir Gavin.
So the motive in getting him back in cabinet lay elsewhere. The truth is that Sir Gavin had the same appeal to every prime minister (bar Liz Truss) from David Cameron onwards. While never great at front of house, he understood the political reality of trying to coax, cajole and – yes – coerce a fractious, fighty, Conservative Party to march behind the prime minister of the day.
This is a smelly and unpleasant task, and Sir Gavin outwardly relished the unsavoury aspects too visibly.
However, he also understood MPs individual constituency needs, weak points, their venality and vanity, their selfish aspirations, personal difficulties and policy pressure points.
Sir Gavin’s talent was to understand and reflect back at MPs the bits of their personalities they wish the wider public didn’t know. Such a person was never going to be popular, and his caustic humour and talent for misjudging certain audiences meant he made the job of hating him easier than it should have been.
Yet there are fewer MPs with a talent for political management and an encyclopaedic knowledge of the kind of political and personal trivia than you might expect in SW1. It’s become an exponentially harder task the longer the Tories have been in power.
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People with his skillset are few and far between.
And the challenge of keeping the Tories together is arguably the biggest Mr Sunak faces. Battle scarred by the Johnson years and the need to extract a landslide winning PM; traumatised by the Truss mistake, encircled by global and domestic challenges and now led by a man who lost the last Tory membership vote, Mr Sunak needed every piece of party management advice he could get; which is why he turned to Sir Gavin.
Selling spending cuts and tax rises to a sceptical party and convincing them compromise on Brexit in Northern Ireland is the right choice: each an impossible task.
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For sure, his reputation meant he was not the person to sell the strategy to colleagues – that’s what the urbane chief whip Simon Hart is for. But Mr Sunak calculated there was a role for a man who could help with deciding the strategy in the first place
That was before the revelations of the last few days: most striking the testimony of Sir Gavin’s deputy Ann Milton about his enjoyment of using salacious personal details for leverage.
Yet the other examples less clear cut: Sir Gavin, then a backbencher, challenging chief whip Wendy Morton over WhatsApp. Rude? Yes. Juvenile? Yup. Pompous? Definitely. But bullying? She was the person at this point in power, not him. How feasible is it for a backbencher to bully the chief whip?
Are we really going to see a new era of rectitude amongst whips as they grapple with the challenges? Are we going to see more cabinet ministers ejected, I’m a Celebrity-style, when the herd turns?
Who will Rishi Sunak stick to when the going gets tough? As we enter week three of his premiership, Gavin Williamson is gone but Suella Braverman remains in post.
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Police investigating criminal offence after Daily Telegraph columnist ‘dumbfounded’ by social media post probe
Essex Police say they are investigating an alleged criminal offence of inciting racial hatred, after Daily Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson said she was “dumbfounded and upset” when officers knocked on her door last Sunday.
Ms Pearson revealed she was told she was being investigated over a year-old deleted post online.
She said she wasn’t informed which post had been reported, but suggested it could have been related to the 7 October attacks in Israel or pro-Palestine marches.
She claimed the officers told her she was being investigated for a NCHI (a none crime hate incident) an incident involving an act which is perceived to be motivated by hostility or prejudice towards persons with a particular characteristic, but is not illegal.
NCHI reports have long been controversial, with many citing free speech concerns, and Ms Pearson’s account of the police visit has led to widespread support from Conservatives and online commentators, including Tory leader Kemi Badenoch.
But an Essex Police spokesperson has told Sky News its investigation was never for an NCHI, and that the matter was always being treated as an investigation into an alleged criminal offence of inciting racial hatred.
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Speaking on her Planet Normal podcast on Wednesday, Ms Pearson said she found the visit “chilling”.
“I was dumbfounded, upset, it’s not very nice,” she said. “I was in my dressing gown on the step of the house, these two coppers were there just outside the door.
“There were people gathering for the Remembrance Day parade so there were people watching from the other side of the road.
“Whatever I did or didn’t tweet, if somebody found it offensive, that to me is still not a reason for two policemen to come to my house on a Sunday morning.
“You know, they don’t do that for burglars, do they? We know policing is under-resourced and they are unable to attend often quite serious crimes.
“This was the most extraordinary overreach and state intrusion into my private life and I don’t think I did anything wrong and I think their response was outrageous.”
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In a statement, Essex Police said: “Officers attended an address in Essex and invited a woman to come to a voluntary interview.
“They said it related to an investigation into an alleged offence of inciting racial hatred, linked to a post on social media.
“For clarity: a complaint of a possible criminal offence was made to the police and this is why we called; to arrange an interview.
“Everyone was polite and professional throughout the brief conversation.”
They said an officer told Ms Pearson: “It’s gone down as an incident or offence of potentially inciting racial hatred online. That would be the offence.”
Essex Police say they have complained to the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) over what they call “false reporting” regarding the ongoing investigation.
In an interview with The Telegraph published yesterday, Kemi Badenoch said police visiting a journalist over a social media post was “absolutely wrong” and that “we need to look at the laws around non-crime hate incidents”.
“There has been a long-running problem with people not taking free speech seriously,” she said.
She challenged the prime minister to review the laws, saying: “Keir Starmer says he is someone who believes in these things. Now he needs to actually show that he does believe it. All we’ve seen from him is the opposite.”
Ms Badenoch added: “We need to stop this behaviour of people wasting police time on trivial incidents because they don’t like something, as if they’re in a nursery.
“It’s like children reporting each other. And I think that in certain cases, the police do it because they’re afraid that if they don’t do it, they will also be accused of not taking these issues seriously.”
Essex Police said the officers went to the address to invite Ms Pearson to attend a voluntary interview as part of their investigation, which was passed to them by another force.
“The report relates to a social media post which was subsequently removed,” the statement read.
“An investigation is now being carried out under Section 17 of the Public Order Act.”
Essex Police also said they made attempts to contact Ms Pearson before the visit.
Other prominent Conservative voices such as Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Chris Philp have also leapt to Ms Pearson’s defence online, as has X owner Elon Musk, who quoted a post about the incident and said: “This needs to stop.”
Police commentator Graham Wettone told Sky News the police are “duty bound to investigate allegations of crime”.
“They’ve had an allegation of crime made there,” he said. “They will investigate it. If at the end of this they decide that no criminal offence has been committed – and we’re not at that stage yet – then it can still be recorded as a none crime hate incident.”
The police, he said, are duty bound to keep a record of none crime hate incidents.
“Parliament said they want the police to do this, to investigate and record incidents like this. So they are doing exactly what parliament and society asked them to do, and they are getting criticism for doing what people want.”
UK
Sir Keir Starmer vows to defend budget decisions ‘all day long’ as farmers slam ‘disrespectful’ PM
Sir Keir Starmer has said he will defend the decisions made in the budget “all day long” amid anger from farmers over inheritance tax changes.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves announced last month in her key speech that from April 2026, farms worth more than £1m will face an inheritance tax rate of 20%, rather than the standard 40% applied to other land and property.
The announcement has sparked anger among farmers who argue this will mean higher food prices, lower food production and having to sell off land to pay for the tax.
Sir Keir defended the budget as he gave his first speech as prime minister at the Welsh Labour conference in Llandudno, North Wales, where farmers have been holding a tractor protest outside.
Sir Keir admitted: “We’ve taken some extremely tough decisions on tax.”
He said: “I will defend facing up to the harsh light of fiscal reality. I will defend the tough decisions that were necessary to stabilise our economy.
“And I will defend protecting the payslips of working people, fixing the foundations of our economy, and investing in the future of Britain and the future of Wales. Finally, turning the page on austerity once and for all.”
He also said the budget allocation for Wales was a “record figure” – some £21bn for next year – an extra £1.7bn through the Barnett Formula, as he hailed a “path of change” with Labour governments in Wales and Westminster.
And he confirmed a £160m investment zone in Wrexham and Flintshire will be going live in 2025.
‘PM should have addressed the protesters’
Among the hundreds of farmers demonstrating was Gareth Wyn Jones, who told Sky News it was “disrespectful” that the prime minister did not mention farmers in his speech.
He said “so many people have come here to air their frustrations. He (Starmer) had an opportunity to address the crowd. Even if he was booed he should have been man enough to come out and talk to the people”.
He said farmers planned to deliver Sir Keir a letter which begins with “don’t bite the hand that feeds you”.
Farmers’ tractor protest outside the Welsh Labour conference in Llandudno, North Wales
Mr Wyn Jones told Sky News the government was “destroying” an industry that was already struggling.
“They’re destroying an industry that’s already on its knees and struggling, absolutely struggling, mentally, emotionally and physically. We need government support not more hindrance so we can produce food to feed the nation.”
He said inheritance tax changes will result in farmers increasing the price of food: “The poorer people in society aren’t going to be able to afford good, healthy, nutritious British food, so we have to push this to government for them to understand that enough is enough, the farmers can’t take any more of what they’re throwing at us.”
Mr Wyn Jones disputed the government’s estimation that only 500 farming estates in the UK will be affected by the inheritance tax changes.
“Look, a lot of farmers in this country are in their 70s and 80s, they haven’t handed their farms down because that’s the way it’s always been, they’ve always known there was never going to be inheritance tax.”
On Friday, Sir Keir addressed farmers’ concerns, saying: “I know some farmers are anxious about the inheritance tax rules that we brought in two weeks ago.
“What I would say about that is, once you add the £1m for the farmland to the £1m that is exempt for your spouse, for most couples with a farm wanting to hand on to their children, it’s £3m before anybody pays a penny in inheritance tax.”
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Welsh farmer Gareth Wyn Jones
Ministers said the move will not affect small farms and is aimed at targeting wealthy landowners who buy up farmland to avoid paying inheritance tax.
But analysis this week said a typical family farm would have to put 159% of annual profits into paying the new inheritance tax every year for a decade and could have to sell 20% of their land.
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The Country and Land Business Association (CLA), which represents owners of rural land, property and businesses in England and Wales, found a typical 200-acre farm owned by one person with an expected profit of £27,300 would face a £435,000 inheritance tax bill.
The plan says families can spread the inheritance tax payments over 10 years, but the CLA found this would require an average farm to allocate 159% of its profits each year for a decade.
To pay that, successors could be forced to sell 20% of their land, the analysis found.
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