Sometimes you just can’t win. Just a week after announcing he was barring Huawei from the UK’s 5G network by 2027 – the Chinese had apparently promised they wouldn’t do any spying in the next seven years – Dominic Raab was back in the Commons to make yet another ministerial statement. This time to indefinitely suspend the extradition treaty with Hong Kong and to impose an arms embargo on the territory. Try to think of it as “tough love”, the foreign secretary insisted. If we didn’t adore the Chinese so much and admire their progress this century then we wouldn’t be making such a fuss. But now we had such high expectations of them, it was only right that we submit China to the same level of scrutiny as we would any other country. Apart from the ones with appalling records of human rights abuses from which we made a small fortune flogging arms. Those could all be safely overlooked. “The UK is watching,” Raab said grandly, the vein in his neck throbbing with intent. Somehow he manages to look even more terrifying when he’s trying to sound reasonable than when he’s going full-on psycho. He had liaised on these sanctions with the UK’s Five Eyes partners and was hoping to achieve the same level of coordination with European allies. If only there was an organisation uniting 27 European countries that the UK could join, then it would have been a whole lot easier. Typical Europe. Never there when you really need it. Yet despite Raab’s best efforts to take a tough line with China, it still wasn’t enough to satisfy MPs from both sides of the house. Lisa Nandy, the shadow foreign secretary, damned him with faint praise. Dom had taken some decent first baby steps, the Labour MP said, but there was so much more he could have done. If the UK was so worried about Chinese involvement in sensitive areas affecting national security, then how come we were letting them build a couple of nuclear power stations for us? Raab stuck his fingers in his ears and pretended he hadn’t heard. Nandy was also surprised the government wasn’t more bothered about China’s treatment of the Uighur Muslims and wanted to know why Magnitsky sanctions had not been taken out against some known individual offenders. Raab ummed and ahhed. It was all very difficult. No one cared more about the persecution – genocide was a terribly ugly word – of an ethnic minority than him. However, you also had to remember that China was the world’s second most powerful economy and so for the time being he would prefer to give it the benefit of the doubt. But he was definitely keeping an eye on the situation. This rather set the tone for the rest of the session. Conservative Tom Tugendhat chalked up the sanctions as a win for the foreign affairs select committee, which he coincidentally chairs, and wondered if Raab might care to consider some of its other, more hawkish, recommendations in relation to China. Others weren’t quite so keen to credit Tugendhat as they rather fancied taking some of the plaudits for the hardening of the line themselves. But a consistent theme emerged. It wasn’t sinophobic to take action against China’s human rights abuses and to be concerned about the Uighurs: it was what any decent country would do. By the end, Raab appeared somewhat bemused. It’s not every day he is the biggest dove in the chamber and you could sense him longing to go berserk and impose any number of sanctions on the Chinese. Just as a matter of macho pride. But he just about held it together till the close, though you wouldn’t bet against a pile of corpses being found in the Thames tomorrow morning as Raab tries to exorcise his pent-up frustration. Recess can’t come too soon for Dom. The same could also be said for Matt Hancock, who was also forced into making a Commons statement following Boris Johnson’s rather optimistic Santa Claus press conference last week saying the UK would basically be back to normal in time for Christmas. Presumably the prime minister still hasn’t got round to reading the report from the Academy of Medical Sciences that suggested the country could be facing a further 120,000 deaths over the course of the winter. Mattbeth looked defeated from the start as he tried to channel Boris’s mindless optimism. The track-and-trace system was working brilliantly because it had managed to track down 180,000 while missing an equal number of contacts. Realising that was the only even vaguely good news on offer, Hancock tried to claim the early reported successes of the Oxford and Imperial vaccine trials as a triumph for the government, rather than for the scientists. “We have a plan and it is working,” he said, fooling no one but himself.
There was a time when Jon Ashworth, the shadow health secretary, used to do his best to boost Hancock’s confidence by offering him emotional support from the dispatch box. “You’re doing really well Matt. Honestly.” But even Ashworth hasn’t been able to keep up that level of encouragement in the face of repeated government incompetence, and so this time he just let rip with a long dose of honesty. The track-and-trace numbers were crap. The app was non-existent. Local authorities weren’t getting the data they needed. The government had ignored Sage advice. The chief nursing officer had been silenced by the government for not giving the thumbs up to Dominic Cummings’ Durham safari. There was no plan in place other than waiting on a miracle of a vaccine appearing. Wasn’t it time to level with the public? Over the last few weeks, Mattbeth has been getting progressively more tetchy. He’s done his best but it hasn’t been good enough. And even his best efforts have been undermined by Boris. He knows the government has been found out yet cannot bring himself to admit it. Because if he did then he might need to ask himself why he doesn’t have the self-worth to resign. Instead, time and again he allows himself to be trampled on. Hancock couldn’t contain himself. Rather than answer the questions, he attacked Ashworth for no longer being supportive. Just like Boris, he now mistakes reasonable scrutiny for a personal attack. The MPs in the chamber kept their heads down, trying to avoid making eye contact with the health secretary. It’s never comfortable to watch a minister breaking down in public.