The House of Representatives was allowed, he said himself, to ‘rub everything’ to Mark Rutte. That’s what you get, he also said, when you’re prime minister for twelve years. It was in the debate, Thursday, about the text messages he had deleted from his Nokia phone, so it was impossible to verify whether he should have kept them under the Public Records Act. For about twenty minutes it was about messages from him and mayor Femke Halsema about a demonstration on Dam Square, in the middle of the corona crisis. Rutte had said that he had forwarded it to an official. But they were no longer to be found at his ministry.
Very crazy, thought Jesse Klaver of GroenLinks, PVV leader Geert Wilders, SP member Lilian Marijnissen, Esther Ouwehand of the Party for the Animals. Or actually not: this fit exactly in the “pattern” of everything Rutte had no memory of in recent years? About the ‘job elsewhere for Pieter Omtzigt’ memorandum, the receipts in the Teevendeal, the bombing of Hawija, documents about the dividend tax?
Rutte’s voice sounded hoarse, his face was taut. And it was clear to everyone that he no longer felt like ‘rubbing’ at all. “Every event,” he said, “however unjustified, is wrapped in a see-you-see and all of that together makes a pattern. A sticker is then put on it.”
‘Bottled and cheated’
It was not so strange, he said to Caroline van der Plas (BBB), that confidence in politics then declines? “We do that together, don’t we?”
He folded his arms and talked about the mistrust of many opposition parties against his cabinet. “Whatever the subject is. Again and again it is about the feeling that things are being bottled, cheated, etcetera. Can you imagine that people no longer feel like watching it on television?”
He sighed and said that he also heard it in the Council of Ministers: “People say there: we like the job, but those debates in the House of Representatives are so unpleasant. What are they going on about.”
One of those colleagues is almost certainly Minister Hugo de Jonge of the CDA. After the debate about the face mask deal with Sywert van Lienden last month, De Jonge complained to journalists about “the ease” with which MPs doubted his integrity. “I sometimes think that distrust is given too much room.”
Rutte then said that he would have chosen other words himself, that you “got the chance to tell your story” in the House of Representatives and that it was of course also the task of MPs to be suspicious.
But Rutte also seems to see things differently now. In difficult debates in the House of Representatives, he is almost always accommodating and sometimes even extremely willing to admit just about any shortcoming. Not at all this time. Rutte believes that he has complied with the law, and also with the ‘spirit of the law’. He had forwarded every substantive message to officials and if his Nokia 301 couldn’t handle the forwarding, with long text messages, he had passed on the contents.
Now he has an iPhone. On holiday in New York, during the May recess, he had noticed that you are sometimes unreachable with a Nokia. “In retrospect,” he said, “I think, why did I hold on to that crazy little device for so long?” To then give the answer myself: “I’m fiddling with that smartphone now, I think it’s hell.” Even at that moment Rutte couldn’t help but smile.
‘Zero added value’
In the course of the debate, messages came out between him and Halsema. He texted Rutte on June 1, 2020 that she wanted “just contact”. Things got out of hand on Dam Square, it was so busy that no one could keep the one and a half meters away. Rutte, his closest colleagues knew on Whit Monday, was furious about the enormous crowds.
He was curt in his message to Halsema. She was already in contact with then Minister of Justice Ferdinand Grapperhaus (CDA). He thought it had to stay that way: “I see zero added value sitting in between.” He found the images from Amsterdam “extremely intense”. Halsema thought that Rutte put her “in the cold”.
On Thursday, Jesse Klaver wanted to know exactly how many messages Rutte had received and sent in recent years, and how many of them had been thrown away or saved.
But Rutte said he didn’t feel like it. “The answer is no.” To the astonishment of Klaver, who pointed out the Constitution to Rutte: if the House of Representatives wants information, the government must provide it. Unless it’s “in the interest of the state” not to. “So tell me, what is the ground for this refusal?”
Rutte didn’t seem to know anymore. According to him, it was “not so black and white”. He said: “I will get back to you in writing.”
He remained serious until the end of the debate. According to Wilders, Rutte looked “unhappy”, he thought that the prime minister “stumbled and stumbled”. The PVV, as very often, submitted a motion of no confidence against Rutte – which was supported by SP, Denk, PvdD, Van Haga, BBB, FVD, JA21.
Rutte was long gone by then, he was visited by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. His Ministry of General Affairs sent a letter to the House of Representatives in the evening: Klaver gets his way “insofar as it is possible to obtain factual information.”
And whether everything has really gone so well with Rutte’s messages in recent years? The Government Information and Heritage Inspectorate announced on Thursday afternoon that an investigation will be launched.
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