Is Michelle Donelan’s political career worth £15,000? Apparently not

If you want to survive a ministerial scandal, your chances are so much better if it is complicated.

No ministerial heads publicly rolled over the scandal of wasted billions over PPE procurement, because unpicking what was incompetence, what was understandable given the panic of a crisis, and what might have been outright corrupt, is a tough task – and tends to get skipped over by those reading or watching the news.

Instead, ministers lose their jobs for smaller-scale wrongdoing that is easy to understand. The most obvious of these from recent history is that of Michael Matheson, who was until recently Scotland’s health secretary – who had let his children use his work iPad to stream on holiday. He racked up an £11,000 bill which he tried to land on the taxpayer.

Had he just admitted the error and paid up, he would still be in post. Instead, weeks followed where he dug his heels in, and changed his story as to how the bill had been racked up. To save himself £11,000, he cost himself his job and the SNP weeks of negative coverage.

You might have hoped Michelle Donelan, the UK’s cabinet minister for science and technology, would have kept this case in mind when she charged £15,000 of legal costs to the taxpayer over her own cock-up in an alleged defamation case.

Not only does the public have a fairly good rough idea of what defamation is and how it works – look at the huge public fixation on the “Wagatha Christie” case – but worse for Donelan, pretty much every journalist in Westminster knows how it works, too. We have to write about people all the time, and keep the libel writs down to a minimum while we do it.

If someone sues me for an opinion that appears in these pages, it would be reasonable for me to expect The New European to help cover those costs. The article was commissioned by an editor, reviewed by them, checked by the production team, prepared to go online (and in the paper), and a headline chosen. That would be the course of my regular work.

Alternatively, if I decided to tweet out a mad and defamatory opinion, the newspaper will quite likely, rightly, decide I am on my own. Just because it’s my job to have opinions doesn’t mean I’m doing my job when I have one. This is the row Michelle Donelan is going to find herself having time and time again over the next few weeks. What seems to have happened is that Donelan saw some thinly-sourced allegations against some UK academics and then repeated them on her social media account – before then directing her staff to engage in official activities against those academics.

If this is classed as how ministers should do their jobs, then Donelan is going to have to defend the indefensible – misallocating departmental resources first to persecute academics on weak evidence, and then misallocating them again to clean up the mess that causes. Rehashing badly-written accusations from think tanks is not in the ministerial job description.

It is possible that Donelan manages to convince appropriate authorities – given the way the UK cabinet works, those “authorities” all end up being Rishi Sunak – that it was somehow proper to spend public money on this. But she won’t ever convince either the public or the media that this is the case.

She is currently in a losing position, which will eventually either result in Donelan losing her job, the government losing still more credibility with the public, or both. If Donelan – or anyone on her team – has any sense whatsoever, she will realise that £15,000 is very cheap indeed to make this story go away.