Today it’s my privilege to announce the inaugural winner of my Black Pot award for the week’s most breathtaking hypocrite in public life.
It has been a closely fought contest, as you can imagine, with a crowded field of kettle-shamers vying to outdo each other in attacking others for sins of which they are quite as guilty themselves.
You won’t be surprised to hear that an early favourite was Sir Bernard Jenkin, the Tory grandee who sits on the bench of the kangaroo court — whoops! I mean the privileges committee — and voted to expel Boris Johnson from the Commons after finding him guilty of lying to Parliament about his attendance at a lockdown-breaking party on his birthday.
TOM UTLEY: Today it’s my privilege to announce the inaugural winner of my Black Pot award for the week’s most breathtaking hypocrite in public life
As readers who follow these matters will know, Sir Bernard is now under investigation by the Metropolitan Police over allegations that he himself attended a birthday party, thrown for his wife during lockdown in December 2020, when all such gatherings were banned. Oh, how poetic justice can be!
In our fair-minded mercy, however, we Black Pot judges have decided to suspend judgment on Sir Bernard’s case until the full facts emerge from the police investigation. If he is found guilty — as his silence since the allegations were made suggests he may well be — he will be a shoo-in for the next Black Pot. That’s especially if he adopts the Johnson defence that he didn’t realise he was breaking the law.
Grant Shapps MP, Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero has is the inaugural winner of TOM UTLEY’s Black Pot award for breathtaking hypocrisy – after he attacked Britain’s supermarkets after the Competition and Markets Authority found they had overcharged motorists for petrol and diesel by as much as 6p a litre. But he is a long-standing member of a government that jacks up the price of petrol and diesel by no less than 52.9p per litre, in fuel duty alone — and then charges another 20 per cent in VAT
Another strong contender is Sir Tony Blair, who had the brass neck to lecture the Tories this week on the urgent need for a ‘wholesale transformation’ of the NHS — a transformation that he himself signally failed to attempt during his ten years in Downing Street, when he was in a position to do something about the sorry state of the service.
I’m sad to record that yet another claimant to the title is the otherwise admirable Jonny Bairstow, the England batsman and wicket-keeper who was outraged when his Australian opposite number sneakily dismissed him in the second Test when he strayed from his crease, wrongly believing that ‘over’ had been called.
He kept very quiet about the fact that he himself has been accused of having tried something similar against the Aussies, as recently as in the first Test.
But I must keep readers in suspense no longer. It is now time to open the tarnished envelope and announce that the inaugural winner of my Black Pot award for breathtaking hypocrisy is a man whose extraordinary ascent up the greasy pole of public life has baffled me since his first political incarnation as a shadow minister some 16 years ago.
Step forward… drum roll, please… the Right Honourable Grant Shapps MP, Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, who has served in the course of his career as (deep breath) Business Secretary, Home Secretary, Transport Secretary, Minister of State for International Development, Chairman of the Conservative Party and Minister of State for Housing and Local Government.
He wins the award for his bare-faced chutzpah this week, when he attacked Britain’s supermarkets after the Competition and Markets Authority found they had overcharged motorists for petrol and diesel by as much as 6p a litre. Some of them, he fumed, had been using motorists as ‘cash cows’.
‘They jacked up their prices when fuel costs rocketed, but failed to pass on savings now costs have fallen,’ he said, adding: ‘It cannot be right that at a time when families are struggling with rising living costs, retailers are prioritising their bottom line.’
Just think about that for a moment. Here is a long-standing member of a government that jacks up the price of petrol and diesel by no less than 52.9p per litre, in fuel duty alone — and then charges another 20 per cent in VAT, on both the product price and the duty.
That’s well over ten times as much as the supermarkets stand accused of overcharging at the pump.
Sir Bernard Jenkin (pictured), the Tory grandee who sits on the bench the privileges committee — and voted to expel Boris Johnson from the Commons after finding him guilty of lying to Parliament about his attendance at a lockdown-breaking party on his birthday, was an early favourite for TOM UTLEY’s inaugural Black Pot award for the week’s most breathtaking hypocrite in public
Another strong contender is Sir Tony Blair (pictured), who had the brass neck to lecture the Tories this week on the urgent need for a ‘wholesale transformation’ of the NHS — a transformation that he himself signally failed to attempt during his ten years in Downing Street
Then there are the dozens of other ways in which politicians, national and local, have sought for decades to milk motorists dry. I’m thinking of Vehicle Excise Duty, congestion charges, Ultra Low Emission Zones (that’ll be an extra £12.50 a day, thank you very much, if you can’t afford a newish car) and the preposterous 20mph speed limits that yield such a fortune in fines from drivers who are caught unawares. Just ask the Archbishop of Canterbury.
More scandalous still, perhaps, are the extortionate fees and fines charged by hospital car parks. These mean that the longer patients are kept waiting to see a doctor in our wonderful, strike-ridden NHS — seven, eight and nine-hour queues in A&E are far from uncommon — the more those lucrative fees mount up.
Yet a government with a majority of 60, in a sovereign parliament with the power to end all this exploitation, has done precious little to address any of these grievances.
So how remarkable that Mr Shapps seems to see nothing hypocritical about laying into supermarkets over their failure to consider the plight of those millions of families and businesses who depend on their cars, vans and lorries, at a time when inflation is eroding everyone’s budget.
Just who, exactly, is treating motorists as ‘cash cows’? Or, to put it another way, if I may borrow the words of Jesus, as reported by St Matthew in his account of the Sermon on the Mount: ‘And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye…
‘Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.’
Like all ministers, Mr Shapps will of course argue that the Government has no choice but to carry on milking motorists in order to help balance its decidedly lopsided books. But what, pray, is the difference between that and ‘prioritising the bottom line’ — the very ‘crime’ of which he accuses the supermarkets?
Mr Shapps seems to see nothing hypocritical about laying into supermarkets over their failure to consider the plight of those millions of families and businesses who depend on their cars, vans and lorries, at a time when inflation is eroding everyone’s budget
Has it not occurred to him that the retailers, too, must balance their books if they are to stay in business, when they are losing money on many products in their competition to keep the prices of food and other essentials as low as they can?
(Don’t tell me, by the way, that these taxes on fossil fuels are all in aid of the Government’s hare-brained, ruinous scheme to ban the sale of new petrol and diesel vehicles by 2030. Indeed, you can bet your last penny that, before you know it, they’ll be taxing electric cars and vans every bit as extortionately.)
Heaven knows, it’s no part of my intention to stick up for fuel retailers who fleece the public.
Nor, for that matter, am I endorsing unsportsmanlike tactics in cricket.
Still less am I arguing that Sir Tony Blair is wrong when he calls for the wholesale transformation of the NHS, which is now needed even more urgently than in the days when he was at the helm.
Indeed, though hypocrisy may get a rotten press, I reckon there’s at least something to be said for it, now and then. After all, it’s surely better for a serial fraudster to preach against thieves, rather than urging everyone else to behave like him.
In the same way, I guess it’s better for Mr Shapps to attack rip-off merchants, with his insufferably smug smile, rather than telling them it’s perfectly fine to bleed motorists dry, since he and his fellow ministers are the worst offenders.
As the Duc de La Rochefoucauld put it so brilliantly, in an epigram I never tire of quoting: ‘Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue.’
But as politicians of all parties vie for future Black Pot awards, wouldn’t just a little self-awareness be welcome, once in a while?
