According to Friday’s Guardian subtitle “MP quits six weeks after humiliating failure to become committee chair” and of course it has taken Chris Grayling that long to make his resignation from the Intelligence and Security Committee known. However the Committee was not re-formed until Monday 13th July by Boris Johnson seven months after the General Election. This was the longest break since the Committee was first established many years earlier under the Intelligence Services Act 1994. Then Parliament closed down at the end of the following week and so although it has taken Chris Grayling six weeks to resign, in fact it has only been active for two weeks. The Committee is designed so that the members choose the Chair person and yet back at around the 11th of March, four months before Johnson was prepared to set up the Committee, he had already announced that Chris Grayling would be the Chairman. Then on the 13th July when Johnson announced the Committee which included 5 Tories that he had selected out of the 9 members of the Committee, he made it clear to all 5 of them that they needed to vote to support Chris Grayling. However one of their team agreed to stand as an alternative Chair after being approached by some of the other members and so Julian Lewis who had been a Conservative MP for New Forest East since 1997 was elected by the other 4 members and himself which prevented Chris Grayling from being elected. Julian Lewis who had been a very committed Tory was then thrown out of the Party by Johnson who was not an MP until 2001 which was the same Election that enabled Chris Grayling to become an MP so in fact Julian Lewis has been a Conservative MP for four years longer than either of these other two people.

Many people were very disturbed at the idea of the Prime Minister refusing to set up the ISC for seven months, for announcing a Chair four months earlier even though that was not his position to do so and in these two cases attempting to prevent the Russian Report to be published, which should have been published back in November last year before the General Election. On top of that the decision for its publication to be delayed until after the deadline for a transitional period in the EU to be extended is very disturbing given that the Russian Government influenced the EU referendum. On top of all of those issues it is very disturbing that a party political group has rejected a person who has been serving it for 23 years just because he chose to follow the rules of the Committee as opposed to the corrupt approach by his current party leader.

Of course all of these factors are not necessarily the straw that will break the back of the Prime Minister and persuade him to resign, even though they are more than sufficient. However his speech in Dublin last year is potentially that final straw given that at present his Government is now committed to a no deal Brexit, based on what all of the team are claiming!