RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: It's a squabble over a speeding ticket. Grow up

RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: It’s just a silly squabble over Suella Braverman’s speeding ticket. Grow up everyone. Nobody died

Twenty years ago, Tony Blair flew into Japan for an international summit, only to be confronted at a press conference by British journalists wanting to know about the mysterious death of government scientist Dr David Kelly.

That was a proper political story. Iraq weapons inspector Kelly had been found dead in an Oxfordshire wood. The news came through while Blair was at 35,000ft, bound for Tokyo.

Subsequent inquiries concluded Kelly took his own life, but that didn’t stop the conspiracy theorists laying the blame at the door of No 10 Downing Street.

Blair was visibly shaken and uncharacteristically lost for words. With the benefit of hindsight, it was the beginning of the end of his premiership. Journalists were right to bombard the Prime Minister with perfectly legitimate questions, which went to the heart of his decision to take our country to war.

Fast forward two decades and it’s Rishi Sunak’s turn in the ducking stool. In Hiroshima at the weekend, he too had to face a hostile media.

RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: Apparently, the Home Secretary asked someone on her staff to find out if there was any chance of arranging a one-to-one Zoom session with an accredited road safety instructor. Fair enough, she’s a busy woman

Here was the leader of the world’s fifth-biggest economy and UN Security Council member, at an important G7 summit, with war raging in Europe, China menacing Taiwan, and an immigration meltdown on the home front.

And what did the Boys In The Bubble want to ask him about? Ukraine, perhaps? The exciting opportunities opened up by our membership of the Trans-Pacific trade partnership? The chances of World War III breaking out in the South China Sea?

Nope, top of the news agenda was a speeding ticket given to Home Secretary Sue Ellen Braverman when she was Attorney General.

Led by that preening self-publicist Peston, from ITV, they tried to elevate this trivial, everyday incident into a major political scandal, proving the old Karl Marx adage that history eventually repeats itself as farce.

Here are the facts: Sue Ellen got a ticket last year and was given the option of accepting a fine and three points on her licence, or attending a speed awareness course. With some Covid regulations still lingering, she was also offered the chance of taking the course online.

Apparently, she asked someone on her staff to find out if there was any chance of arranging a one-to-one Zoom session with an accredited road safety instructor.

Fair enough, she’s a busy woman. If there was some way of avoiding spending a couple of hours in a roomful of strangers — either virtually or in the flesh — she had every right to explore the possibility.

When she was told that a one-to-one wasn’t available, she paid the fine and took the points.

Most people don’t. If there’s any chance of keeping a clean licence, the vast majority of motorists tick the box marked ‘speed awareness course’. I faced that choice last year when I received my first speeding ticket since I learned to drive more than 50 years ago. I was caught by a notorious speed trap in Elstree, Herts, where the limit switches from 30 to 40mph.

I wasn’t just my first ticket, it was my first time out in my new-ish Toyota hybrid. The motor had switched into electric mode as I went downhill and I had no idea I’d accelerated to 37.

(Some people think I’ve been going rapidly downhill for donkey’s years, so it probably served me right.) Still, the camera never lies, as Bucks Fizz once assured us, so there seemed little point appealing.

I, too, could have taken the online option, but that involved having to send your driving licence to the DVLA in Swansea.

Shamefully, Rishi Sunak’s Downing Street machine is distancing itself from Sue Ellen, refusing to give her full-throated support

Given the track record of that particular government agency, I had little expectation of ever seeing it again. So I plumped for the awareness course and turned up at an Alan Partridge-style motel on the A1, along with about 30 other ‘offenders’.

My fellow ‘pupils’ were an amiable bunch from all walks of life, and the women conducting the session were both professional and charming.

I emerged without a stain on my licence and may even have learned something. Plus, as the late, great columnist Alan Coren once remarked, you never know where the next 500 words are coming from, which is why he rushed into the street every time he heard the squeal of brakes.

So by writing this, the £90 it cost me has already paid for itself.

At the start of the session, the lead instructor said there may be some well-known personalities in attendance, so we were sworn to secrecy and should stick to first names.

We were bound by Las Vegas rules. What happens on speed awareness courses, stays on speed awareness courses.

So if Sue Ellen had been there, her identity would have been protected. Largely because, almost certainly, no one would have recognised her in the first place.

Still, she took the points and paid the fine. And that should have been the end of the matter.

But someone leaked the story and the Boys In The Bubble went into predictable interstellar overdrive. The Westminster Village, which loves nothing more than a bit of bloodsport, seized on it like a pack of foxhounds.

Yesterday, the BBC decided this was the most important issue ‘in the wuuurrld’, as Clarkson used to say, and it led all the major TV and radio news bulletins.

(Then again, the second story on the BBC’s lunchtime news was about a couple of daytime TV presenters called Phil and Holly, whoever they are. So it gives you some idea of the less-than-Reithian news values that dominate the Broadcasting House agenda these days.)

Sky was just as bad, taking its cue from the Guardian and Mirror. The usual ‘When are you going to resign, minister?’ hecklers were on parade in Downing Street, once again confusing moronic shouting with journalism.

The ludicrous excuse for this overblown faux outrage was a claim that Sue Ellen had ‘broken the ministerial code’ by asking an aide to make a quick phone call and check out if she could arrange a one-on-one session.

This was blatant ‘abuse’ of a dedicated, impartial civil servant being ordered to carry out a ‘personal’ task for a minister.

Mind you, given that in Whitehall ‘bullying’ now covers asking someone to actually turn up for work these days, I’m surprised Sue Ellen hasn’t been hanged, drawn and quartered already — a la Dominic Raab.

The Bubble certainly scents another high-profile scalp. Gobby Angela Rayner has gone fishwife ballistic and Keir Starmer has come over all lawyerly (did he mention he used to be the DPP?) and demanded that Braverman does the decent thing — albeit with the charisma of a pox doctor’s clerk delivering an unwelcome diagnosis. So far, then, so predictable. But some Conservatives are putting the boot in, too.

An obscure MP called Jake Berry, who was apparently Tory chairman for about five minutes — blink and you missed him — has sided with Labour, insisting she has ‘questions to answer’.

In other words, time to fall on your sword, pet.

And, shamefully, Sunak’s Downing Street machine is distancing itself from Sue Ellen, refusing to give her full-throated support. Still, given the way Dishi Rishi threw Raab to the wolves, maybe we shouldn’t be all that surprised.

It is surely not coincidental that this story has emerged just as Sue Ellen is finalising her plans to tackle mass migration

Remoaners are chuckling into their frothy coffee at the prospect of toppling yet another prominent Leave minister.

It is surely not coincidental that this story has emerged just as Sue Ellen is finalising her plans to tackle mass migration — including driving through the Rwanda policy hated by the Blob.

She is everything the New Establishment despises — tough on crime, tough on illegal immigration, tough on all those who pretend a woman can have a penis, her rejection of ‘white guilt’. And, worst of all, she’s a Conservative woman of colour — therefore a race traitor, to boot.

Rishi was rightly irritated in Japan that the Boys In The Bubble homed in on Sue Ellen’s speeding ticket instead of asking him about the summit.

But he shouldn’t let his understandable anger cloud his judgment. He needs to show some leadership and restore a sense of proportion.

And that means coming out publicly and defending Sue Ellen to the hilt — against the bloodthirsty Left-wing broadcast media, the civil service Blob and the treacherous, defeatist Tory MPs in his own ranks.

He can’t go on hiding behind his ‘ethics adviser’. Good evening, I’m from Ethics, as if you couldn’t tell.

If a PM needs to employ someone to tell him what’s ethical and what isn’t, he’s in the wrong job. Try estate agency, or hedge fundery, guv. Sorry, I forgot. You already have.

This isn’t Profumo and it isn’t Lord Lambton, two Tories forced out for consorting with prostitutes. It certainly isn’t the odious ‘Lord’ Mandelson, the Labour minister forced not once but twice to resign in disgrace over financial scandals while in government.

Unlike Two Jags, Sue Ellen has never punched a voter on the campaign trail.

It’s not even a proper scandal, by any stretch of the imagination, just another flammed-up, hysterical manifestation of the political class’s unrivalled ability to disappear up their own backsides.

And it’s certainly not the death of Dr David Kelly.

It’s a silly squabble over a speeding ticket. Grow up, the lot of you. Nobody died.

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