The hysteria over Boris’s Dyson texts is pathetic. There’s Tory sleaze, but this is not it

Take yourself back to March 2020. The country was in a state of panic, the government had declared an emergency lockdown, ambulances were queuing up outside hospitals which were filling up with patients dying from Covid-19. 

Back then, the first line of treatment for the most critically ill patients was to place them on ventilators. But there was a problem – the NHS didn’t have enough of the machines to match the number of patients the medics were treating or expecting to care for. It was a case of beg, steal and borrow – and borrow they did, including ventilators from the TV set of Holby City. The German army donated around 60 machines.

While the NHS had 10,000 ventilators spread around the country, the medics reckoned they needed at least another 18,000 or so to meet patient demand which was shooting up on a daily basis.

Up went the cry for more ventilators. Boris Johnson called on UK manufacturers to see if they could start making them at speed while the plea went out overseas to see if more could be imported.

The government was flooded with offers, some promising, others not so. One potential device – called BlueSky- had been created by the Renault and Red Bull Formula One team. But after testing, it was soon discovered it had to be scrapped because the new ventilator was not sophisticated enough to cope with the more subtle symptoms of Covid-19. That was 13 April. 

After a mad scramble, the government went on to commission several companies to supply 10,000 new ventilators each. Contracts went to Dyson, Babcock, the defence company, and Sagentia, a Cambridge-based group subsidiary of the Science Group.

Sir James Dyson’s team of engineers had come up with a new machine – known as CoVent – which they had worked on day and night over a two-week period. And we now are told, cost £20 million in development time. After looking at the plans, the government gave Dyson a provisional order for 10,000 of the machines which was – like all orders – conditional on getting regulatory approval from the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA).

By 23 April, the government informed Dyson that his CoVent device had been abandoned – for a couple of reasons. The NHS’s need for ventilators had turned out to be much lower than the health department had anticipated plus other newer and far superior medical treatments for Covid-19  were being used in the care for patients.

One group did get regulatory approval – Ventilator Challenge UK, a consortium of manufacturers. They worked together on scaling up producing existing devices rather than starting from scratch. They went on to make several thousand new machines but the ventilator crisis was dying down.

When told of the decision to stand down at the end of April last year, Dyson was reported in the Daily Telegraph as saying: “[Our] people welcomed the government’s challenge. Mercifully they are not required, but we don’t regret our contribution to the national effort for one moment.”

“I have some hope that our ventilator may yet help the response in other countries, but that requires further time and investigation,” he said.

It’s against this backdrop – a period of heightened crisis, if not hysteria – that the text messages between Sir James and Boris Johnson which some are trying so hard to whip up into a media storm should be viewed. And judged.

What we are now told is that Sir James – who at that stage had won a provisional order for new machines – texted the PM to ask that if his staff, who were based in Singapore, needed to relocate to the UK for the project then they should be able to stay on the same tax rate.

Dyson was referring to the Statutory Residence Test which ensures that those who are working abroad for most of their time are not eligible to pay UK income tax.

The rules are tricky and not always easy to work out. Understandably, Dyson wanted to find out what the position of his staff would be. For example, if Dyson’s employees had to come to the UK for a period of time over that Statutory Residence period, they would have paid 45 per cent in the UK instead of 22 per cent in Singapore. Would they have to have paid double tax if they had been transferred, or would Dyson? Should Dyson have been willing to underwrite the extra tax costs to his company if his staff had been double-taxed? And is it such a crime to ask? Or indeed, to ask if they could be given preferential treatment?

Or is the perceived crime – which has brought fresh allegations of Tory sleaze – that people can’t bear that Dyson had Johnson’s mobile number and went direct to him? It’s not easy to tell from the critics what their precise criticism is homing in on.

Yet, Dyson having Johnson’s private number and vice versa is rather comforting – the PM should have all the phone numbers of Britain’s most successful entrepreneurs as it is they who will help create and bring wealth to the country, even if they were based in Singapore.

Luckily, the PM also had the number of Kate Bingham and had the wit to call her at around this time last year to ask whether she would take on the task of being the UK’s vaccine tzar.

There’s another big point to make in this confection of a scandal. Getting business – or deals done – in government takes forever. As anyone with even the slightest knowledge of how government goes about getting new business done will know, getting a manufacturer to create, produce and then supply new products can take months and months, if not years to organise. 

Even though Dyson’s ventilator was not needed, his point about tax arrangements hit a soft spot because the government did change the law regarding tax treatment of those coming from overseas to work in the UK. 

In Section 190 of the Finance Bill, it announced that working days between March and June 2020 would be excluded from the residence calculations for those working on treatment, prevention and medical products to deal with the pandemic. Quite right too.

At a time of national crisis, any delay or obstacle to procuring ventilators was truly a matter of life and death. Which is why Keir Starmer’s attacks on the PM for messaging Dyson direct to fix the tax issues as yet another example of Tory sleaze are horribly misjudged and frankly, pathetic.

Would Starmer have done any differently in such a crisis?  We all know the answer to that.

Johnson – for once – sounded genuine in the Commons when he brushed off Starmer, declaring that he was not going to apologise for texting Dyson and that he would have moved heaven and earth to help save lives. He killed Starmer’s attack stone dead. Starmer knows it too. This really is a storm in a teacup.

If Starmer wants to pin Johnson down on being too close to Tory donors or reliant on their funding, he should home in on the funding of the fancy No 10 flat. Now, that is Johnson’s weak spot.