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Efforts to free Alaa Abd el-Fattah regularly distracted Keir Starmer’s government from focusing on bread-and-butter domestic political issues, according to one of the prime minister’s closest former advisers.
Paul Ovenden, who stood down last year as the prime minister’s director of strategy, said the case of the British political prisoner became a “running joke” among those in government frustrated by the slow pace of change.
Abd el-Fattah’s case has dominated headlines since he was freed from an Egyptian prison to return to Britain on Boxing Day, only for a row to erupt over social media posts he wrote a decade ago in which he advocated killing Zionists.
Ovenden said the amount of time dedicated to freeing Abd el-Fattah was symptomatic of a government that has struggled to stay focused on voters’ core priorities in the face of pressure from “well-connected” activist groups and arms-length bodies.
“We would be having long meetings on the priorities of the government, and often they would be railroaded via any other business into discussions of this gentleman,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
“Most of us on the political side of government weren’t that aware of it – weren’t that tuned into it – because it didn’t impact us on a day-to-day basis,” he added. “It actually became a bit of a kind of a running joke within government that people would always find a way to bring it back to this conversation.”
Ovenden’s comments came in his first public intervention since he resigned in September, after it was revealed he sent inappropriate messages about the Labour MP Diane Abbott eight years ago.
As one of a handful of advisers close to the prime minister since his days in opposition, his departure was widely regarded as a blow to Starmer.
But Ovenden’s political analysis is shared by many in Downing Street, including the prime minister, who complained last month: “Every time I go to pull a lever there are a whole bunch of regulations, consultations, [and] arm’s-length bodies that mean that the action from pulling the lever to delivery is longer than I think it ought to be.”
Ovenden said Abd el-Fattah’s case was one of several areas in which he saw the government become distracted from its main objectives, including the rows over reparations to former colonies and banning smoking in pub gardens.
“At a time when the public is getting more and more frustrated, more and more fed up with inaction, more and more fed up with distraction, in my opinion, we simply can’t afford to be spending their time on what I consider distractions,” he said.
In a separate piece for the Times he calls on the government to roll back environmental regulations, cut welfare spending and even end the triple-lock on pensions, which guarantees the state pension will rise by at least 2% a year but is seen as untouchable by many senior politicians.
“We don’t have to keep picking the pockets of the productive parts of our economy in order to fund inflation-busting pension increases for millionaires or an unsustainable welfare system,” he writes. “We don’t have to strangle small businesses at birth with regulatory burdens.”
