Thread by @JolyonMaugham

How has The Times responded to the Government's grotesque denial of the existence of institutional racism? With a call for measures to improve black lives? By speaking truth to the power that delivered that report?

No, of course not.

This is The Times we are talking about: a newspaper so transphobic @GoodLawProject refuses to talk to it on any subject. It has responded with a hatchet job on the country's leading voice for racial equality, @RunnymedeTrust.

That piece takes particular issue with @RunnymedeTrust joining forces with @GoodLawProject to tackle this Government’s cronyism which is bringing international shame to the United Kingdom.

And it quotes a Government adviser - unnamed of course as these people tend to be - asking what the 'Jobs for the Boys' Judicial Review has got to do with tackling racial equality and asserting the answer is "nothing".

Well, here is a list of all the appointees that judicial review challenges. See if you can spot what the anonymous Government adviser and the punching down Times cannot: the racial equality implications of cronyism.

First up, Baroness Dido Harding, a Conservative peer, was appointed Chair of NHS Test and Trace programme on 7 May 2020 and appointed as the Interim Head of the new National Institute for Health Protection on 18 August 2020.

Next up.

Kate Bingham appointed Head of the United Kingdom’s Vaccine Task Force on 16 May 2020.

Then.

Mike Coupe - appointed to the role of Director of Testing at NHS Test and Trace on 29 September 2020.

Those are the three appointments the claim focuses on but my witness statement gives three further examples.

Lord Andrew Feldman, Baron Feldman of Elstree, was appointed as an adviser to Health Minister Lord Bethell

Former political editor of The Sun newspaper, George Pascoe-Watson, appointed as an adviser to health minister Lord Bethell from 9 April to 7 October 2020.

And Baron James O'Shaughnessy - another Tory peer and consultant for Portland Communications - was appointed as an adviser from early in the pandemic until August 2020.

None of these roles were appointed following open competition. But see if you can work out that which The Times and the Government denies. See if you can identify why having white people give jobs to their pals is inimical to racial equality?