rewards of chaos

It is getting very confusing. Despite the quantity of meetings that Patel had during her 'holiday' in Israel, there's some pieces that still don't stack up with the news reports.

There's that minuted meeting on 22 August where Mr Oren, Deputy Minister at the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office, told Middle East minister Alistair Burt and British Ambassador David Quarrey that Ms. Patel had a successful meeting with Mr Netanyahu.

It says they in turn told Downing Street. But perhaps they forgot. Or it could be a fib, I suppose? But wait, they are diplomats, so they must be telling the truth. Maybe its a symptom of the chaos.

Then there's the London meetings, back in September. There's actually a tweet with a photograph of Patel and Erdan standing in the House of Commons.

Now this would be a very badly kept secret, or maybe there's a fib somewhere in the process? Or more chaos?

The strangest one is when Patel met Rotem in New York on September 18th. It says that the meeting wasn't disclosed after advice from Number 10 because of potential embarrassment to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Apparently the FCO gets sensitive about having things happen which it feels are its own territory.

So was there a cover up, or is it a fib that Number 10 didn't know? Perhaps put it down to chaos?

I'll also take the broader view of Number 10. It's not one person. It's a full dither of civil servants, with commensurate stackable in-trays. So who knows where the isolated information has finally landed? And who bothered to forward it anywhere? Perhaps it was all chaotic?

As a slight aside, I used to travel to Israel and remember some of the weird meeting pressures. My typical post-flight hotel arrival time was around 5 a.m, and my hosts for whatever meetings I was attending would invariably have things booked for later that same morning.

Despite a main purpose there would always be extra meetings snuck in, and they'd often have sensitive connotations. Meet this security firm. Meet this supplier operating with special tax advantages. Today we are meeting the Army, but outside the barracks in a metal-detector surrounded cafe. I became wise to this after a while, but it seemed to be a part of the local culture to attempt these extra things, so the thought of Patel's 12 meetings organised by a fixer doesn't particularly surprise me, and could easily have been run over just a couple of days.

But back to the UK.

Boris Johnson has wanted his department to absorb DfID, calling it “a colossal mistake in the 1990s to divide the Department for International Development from the Foreign Office”. No great surprise if there's no love lost during the recent exchanges, then.

And behind the monied scenes, let's not forget that DfID uncovered some dubious practices about how foreign aid has been offered from the UK. There were the stolen papers from DfID allegedly used for Business Development by a well-known firm of contractors referred to in tabloid circles as foreign aid fat-cats.

Some quite complicated agendas then.

There's too many half-truths in all of it. More like a government-wide malaise. Instead of strong and stable we get chaos and lies.

Johnson makes it up on the hoof. The last few days illustrate his lack of contrition related to that prisoner situation, but it is only one of his series of blunders which are still not being brought to an end.

And Davis, with his own quoted 50-60 Brexit sector analyses which, now they are being asked for, are mysteriously incomplete.

But May doesn't need to do anything. No-one wants her job at the moment.