Steerpike

It's been a very good year for Serco. The British outsourcing company which runs the Test and Trace service is making some £50 million a month, according to an answer given this week by health minister Jo Churchill. Serco declared in June a 50 per cent jump in profits based off its work on various government contracts. Revenues for the FTSE250 giant are forecast to be £2.2 billion – almost 20 per cent higher than the same period in 2020. The company's links with the Conservative party are well-known – its CEO is Rupert Soames, brother of the legendary Sir Nicholas who sat in the Commons from 1983 until 2019. The current minister of state for health meanwhile is Edward Argar, a former head of public health at Serco.

Boris Johnson may be focusing on the NHS backlog but for some of his parliamentary colleagues there's another logjam to be addressed: an excess of invites to belated summer shindigs. Among the various soirees flying around, one caught Steerpike's eye: the All Party Parliamentary Group on China's reception next Wednesday on the Commons terrace pavilion. The guest of honour at the wine-fuelled bash will be none other than the Chinese ambassador to the UK Zheng Zeguang, Beijing's man in London. The APPG on China is chaired by Tory Richard Graham but understandably the invitation sent by his group has naturally not gone down well with those Conservative colleagues sanctioned by the regime earlier this year.

Oh dear. Longtime readers will recall that it was just three years ago that the Conservative conference app was revealed to have a major security flaw. The private data of senior party members – including cabinet ministers – was accessible to anyone that logged in as that particular conference attendee, with the phone numbers of Boris Johnson and others being made accessible. Johnson's picture was changed to one featuring a pornographic image; Michael Gove's to that of his formerTimes boss Rupert Murdoch. Three years on, attendees for next month's conference will be hoping security measures have been enhanced – especially as this year's shindig is likely to require all attendees to show proof of vaccination.

It's been a busy year for the National Trust. The charity, which boasts more than five million members, has rarely been out of the headlines amid criticisms of its restructuring programme and controversial report on properties with links to colonialism. And now a fresh fight looms over hunting ahead of next month's annual general meeting. A proposed motion calls for the Trust, the UK’s largest private landowner, to outlaw all legal trail hunting on its land. The charity’s board of trustees are yet to take a position on whether to back the proposal but have said they 'are keen to hear the views of the membership on this subject.

One of the points of discussion which dominated British politics in the Brexit era was the possibility of the formation of an ‘EU army’. During the referendum campaign and for years afterwards, Remainers and ‘People’s Vote’ campaigners repeatedly claimed that there was no serious chance of establishing an EU army because the upper echelons of the Commission had no interest in the idea – despite top Eurocrats being so open about their goals. But now the fall of Afghanistan and the sudden realisation of Europe's dependancy on America has brought the issue to the fore once again.

Oh dear. Not content with swelling the Scottish government to an eye-watering 29 ministers in a parliament of 129, it seems the SNP now wish to emulate Beijing's over-mighty executive in other ways. Economist Mark Blyth, who was appointed less than two months ago to the Scottish government's much-trumpeted economic council, has suggested that China's controversial 'Belt and Road' scheme could well be the answer to the ails of an independent Scotland.  Speaking on a Zoom call he responded to a question about whether a post-Scexit Edinburgh would be dependant on 'Russian roubles' by suggesting the threat of a Beijing-backed scheme would be worth exploiting to prove Westminster wrong for not wanting to 'play ball.

Ben Wallace's week goes from bad to worse. Amid continuing criticisms of the botched evacuation from Afghanistan, news reaches Steerpike that talks have begun about making the story of Operation Ark into a Hollywood film. It was said that the story of Penn Farthing's evacuation of his animal sanctuary from Kabul had every thing: drama, tragedy and a rich cast of heroes and villains. And now that story could be told with the rest of the world, judging from the interest already being expressed. Animal welfare campaigner Dominic Dyer, a close friend of Farthing, told Steerpike that while the immediate focus had been on the evacuation of the at-risk animals, discussions have already begun about dramatising Penn Farthing's tale.

Fresh from his Crete holiday, Dominic Raab appeared at the Foreign Affairs Committee looking tense and awkward. The Foreign Secretary has been dragged to an extraordinary meeting of the panel specially convened in spite of the parliamentary recess to answer questions about the collapse of Afghanistan and rushed evacuation of the Western powers. Raab's session overstretched to almost two hours and saw a range of hostile questions from right across the House. A glowering Tom Tugendhat ambushed the embattled minister with his department's principle risks report from July 21 warning of collapse of Afghanistan while a deluge of questions about the Crete holiday were met by Raab's insistence that such queries were just a 'fishing expedition.