Via Simon Clark, The Times today reports on the revelation that Anna Soubry was almost certainly the source for Patrick Wintour's article describing plain packaging as a done deal.
"We are going to follow what they have done in Australia. The evidence suggests it is going to deter young smokers. There is going to be legislation," said a senior Whitehall source said.It led to this rather awkward moment for David Cameron, who just happened to be in Bradford the very next day. Bradford being a major centre for packaging manufacturers!
I'm sure she was hoping that her discussions with Wintour would remain anonymous. However, thanks to a {cough} FOI request we know she was alone among a list of nine influential DoH personnel to meet Wintour 5 days before his article was published (click to enlarge).
Yup, I'll bet Dave was well chuffed with Soubry for that disastrous timing.
Scroll on to this week, and the Editor of the Lancet tweeted this.
Word arrives that Anna Soubry has fallen out of love with Jeremy Hunt. She wants plain cigarette packaging but he is resisting her. #badlove
— richard horton (@richardhorton1) April 21, 2013
Again the 'dickie bird' in the know isn't attributed, but this time there isn't an option of the FOIA to try to narrow it down. However, it will be someone not averse to passing privileged info to journalists, and perhaps a bit unrestrained. Mouthy to a politically naive extent, you could say.
You know, like Anna Soubry talking to Total Politics.
‘To be quite frank, when the PM said to me, ‘I want you to do public health’, I thought, ‘Oh boss, I respect you so much, but I’m the only woman here and I get public health – I hope there’s no connection there.
‘Maybe I can make people realise that this is not a soft bloody girly option, it is a big serious job. I’m a huge fan of our prime minister… but I did sit there in the cabinet room and think, ‘Boss, you do know what you’ve just done? You’ve given public health to the girl again, except I’m not a girl, I’m a tough old bird’.’
Facepalm.
Not satisfied with dumping Cameron in the slurry last month, she's gone and done it again ... as the Speccie points out.
But does Soubry think the PM sees some jobs as ones that should only be done by women? That’s not a particularly complimentary implication about his approach to equalities, and will also be a gift to Labour, which likes to make a big fuss about the Prime Minister’s women problem.
Indeed.
Incredibly, though, she is today also causing uncomfortable problems for her party in the minimum alcohol pricing debate!
Miss Soubry insisted that she is still “convinced” that minimum pricing is correct and claimed that the measure is “still official policy”.
Conservative cabinet ministers seem to have correctly realised that minimum pricing punishes the innocent poor, and is a pretty stupid policy for "Tory toffs" (or "the nasty party") to be promoting. Yet here's Soubry stubbornly putting the interests of state-funded career prohibitionists above the welfare of her party after being mesmerised by appalling junk science.
My description of Soubry as 'the most gullible MP in the government' is well-drawn, in my humble opinion.
But here's the best bit.
She added: “The Tory Party must learn from its own history that when we fight each other, you can guarantee to lose.”
Well, considering the one making the most embarrassing and credulous noise is Anna Soubry, perhaps she should try shutting her child-like manipulated trap for a while, eh?
(Thanks to the fellow jewel robber who submitted the FOI on my behalf, you know who you are)
