When the home secretary, Priti Patel, arrived at the premiere of No Time to Die last September, you could be forgiven for wondering what on earth she was doing there. Was she secretly friends with Daniel Craig? Is she such a 007 obsessive that she has a massive portrait of Timothy Dalton tattooed across her back? Had the producers invited her along simply to gather ideas about the next Bond villain?
The answer, it turns out, is far less exciting. This week, a standards committee hearing learned that Patel attended the premiere as a guest of the Jamaican tourist board, who paid for her tickets. And this is interesting, because on the surface there is no clear link between Priti Patel, the Jamaican tourist board and James Bond.
To confuse the matter further, the standards committee brought the incident up because Patel registered the gift as a minister and not an MP. Had she done the latter, she would have had to register the gift within 28 days and declare its value. But by declaring it as a minister, the value didn’t have to be declared.
You might think that she did this because writing down “The Jamaican tourist board bought me a freebie for no clear reason” doesn’t look that brilliant. However, when the subject came up during the hearing, Cabinet Office minister Michael Ellis suggested that there might be another reason for Patel to declare the gift ministerially. “The nature of the film, one could argue, is connected to executive functions”, he said.
In other words, Patel declared the film as a ministerial gift because No Time to Die is a film about spies, and she’s in charge of spies. Now, clearly there is a long and important discussion to be had about how easily our elected officials can be bought by outside influences, but we’ll leave that for another time. Because the key thing here is that Patel can accept gifts to spy films, because she does spies as her job.
Now, it’s important to note that Ellis’s suggestion was laughed out of the hearing, with Chris Bryant barking a disbelieving “WHAT?” in response. But, nevertheless, this sets an important precedent. This effectively means that government ministers can accept gifts to see films, so long as the film is tangentially related to their department.
This is incredible news. It basically means that the entire hierarchical status of every cabinet position has been completely overturned. Until yesterday, you could be forgiven for thinking that every ambitious politician in government had designs on being the next chancellor of the exchequer. Well, not any more. Who’d want a job where you’re only allowed free tickets for films about economics? Your only chance at a nice night out would be if Oliver Stone decided to make a sequel to Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps, and heaven knows we’re all praying that that never happens.
Ministry of Health? Boring. You’d only get to watch sad films about people dying, such as Contagion or Million Dollar Baby. Imagine being the health minister, so bummed out from all the heavy films you have to watch that you spend your life praying for a theatrical rerelease of the Carry On films. And imagine how miserable Michael Gove must be. He’s the secretary of state for levelling up. Realistically, that means that he can only go and watch films based on video games, which is clearly a fate worse than death.
No, now that the rules have been rewritten like this, it’s clear that there are only two government departments worth a jot any more: defence and transport. The former lets you accept free tickets for any film involving war but, oh boy, the latter would pretty much just get you into anything with a car chase. Grant Shapps must be absolutely beside himself with glee. Until now his job has just been about tedious infrastructure. But now, next time there’s a Fast and Furious movie, he’ll get to sit there in the front row, stuffing popcorn into his face like an overexcited toddler, and all for free. They’d probably even let him do an Instagram with Vin Diesel, too. They’d probably do a fistbump in it. Vin Diesel would probably give him a promotional baseball cap. It would probably be Shapps’s favourite hat. What a lucky boy he is.
