LABOUR TACTICS THREATEN TO BLOW UP IN THEIR FACE
BY an eerie quirk of fate, Boris Johnson will tonight be encamped close to the spot where the first blood was spilled in the English Civil War. Back in 1642, the Siege of Manchester marked the beginning of hostilities between the parliamentarian Roundheads and the Cavalier upholders of the Crown prerogative. As a setting for a Tory conference at a time of combustible national division, the city has some uncomfortable history.
Certainly, an air of besiegement will surround the PM and his party in the North-west this week. The steel ramparts of the security cordon have already been erected around the conference zone.
Battalions of Left-wing protesters are mustering for a mass demonstration under the slogan: “Shut down the Tories!” Party members would be wise not to expect the outcry about angry behaviour and poisonous language in the Commons to temper the abuse and intimidation they routinely suffer from the hard-Left outside the security ring of steel at their annual get-together.
This year’s Tory conference threatens to be the most chaotic the party has held. Some members feared the gathering would be cancelled when Labour and other opposition parties voted against a three-day parliamentary recess to free Tory MPs to attend. Ministers and backbenchers could be forced to race back to Westminster should the opposition spring any mischief in the Commons.
Yet the attempt to wreck the conference appears to have only hardened the mood among the Tory faithful. “Party members are furious about the way the opposition have behaved,” a Tory backbencher told me, adding: “This was pure political spite.”
If grassroots Tories are angry about the recess vote, they are incandescent about the latest Westminster manoeuvres to block Brexit. Tory MPs report that while some members have misgivings about the Prime Minister’s tactics there is an overwhelming feeling that he is doing his best to get the UK out of the EU in the face of a relentless campaign of obstruction by Parliament and the judiciary. Mr Johnson was elected Tory leader with the support of two thirds of party members in June on a promise of delivering Brexit on October 31 “do or die”.That mandate seems to have been ignored by the rebels now stripped of the whip for siding with Labour against his plans.
Last year, conference fringe meetings addressed by Mr Johnson and his Brexiteer ally Jacob ReesMogg were packed with members fired up for the battle to deliver on the 2016 referendum. This year, that insurgent energy can be expected to transfer to the conference floor itself with them at JEREMY Corbyn’s decision to block a parliamentary break for next week’sTory conference is another sign of how the traditional courtesies of the parliamentary game are being abandoned for no-holds barred combat.
Backroom contacts between the two main parties through their whipping teams, known at Westminster as the “usual channels”, always used to be civilised even if the ideological battles across the Commons chamber were bitterly fought.
In the past, both sides realised they the helm rather than shouting from the sidelines.
MANCHESTER should be braced for a raucous rally for the general election that Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn and other opposition leaders are currently denying the voters. The conference is set to record the highest attendance in party history and cash is pouring into the election war chest at an extraordinary rate. The Tory faithful are clearly readying for a campaign had a mutual interest in ensuring the rules of engagement were fair and properly observed. Mr Corbyn and his allies have decided to call off any pretence of cooperation and make life as difficult as possible for the Government.
“We want to kill the Prime Minister slowly,” one shadow cabinet minister told me during the Labour conference in Brighton this week.
Their plan is to make Mr Johnson look as enfeebled as possible at every turn, leaving him to suffer in office but not in power.
The result is only worsening the paralysis that is destroying public trust inWestminster. that will give voters the ultimate choice between the Prime Minister seeking to deliver Brexit and the parliamentarians hellbent on blocking it. Mr Johnson’s debut conference speech must leave voters in no doubt about why his appeal to resolve the deadlock through an election is being blocked.
At the 1642 Siege of Manchester, it was parliamentarians who took victory as they ultimately did in the Civil War. Mr Johnson wants a very different outcome in his tussle with the current parliamentary ironsides.This week, the Prime Minister and his troops have a chance to show they are ready for the fray. Parliamentary trickery designed to string out proceedings for hours is fuelling the sense of exhaustion and ill temper across the House.
The last timeWestminster witnessed such a long campaign of parliamentary attrition designed to ground down the other side was during the minority Labour governments of the 1970s.
Voters were repelled by the spectacle and turned to a strong leader, in the shape of MargaretThatcher, to sort out the mess.
Labour MPs revelling in parliamentary point scoring appear to have forgotten that lesson. MARK Harper was shocked to hear himself named in this week’s historic Supreme Court judgement as one of the privy councillors who went to Balmoral to formally request the Prorogation of Parliament. Court papers had mixed up the former Tory chief whip with Mark Spencer, the current holder of the post. “I was eating my toast and marmalade, and I almost dropped said toast and marmalade,” Mr Harper said of the moment he heard his name read out in the television broadcast of the court proceedings.
DAVID Gauke was amused to read in David Cameron’s memoirs that he was briefly lined up as a candidate to be chancellor in a reshuffle planned to follow the EU referendum. His career move was scrapped when the former prime minister lost the vote and quit Downing Street. “The suggestion that I was under consideration as the next chancellor would have come as a surprise to me and nearly everyone else,” Mr Gauke admitted in the New Statesman magazine.
WHITEHALL officials spent £3,600 on lanyards in rainbow colours to celebrate Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender rights, according to figures released in response to a Freedom of Information request from the TaxPayers’ Alliance. Bizarrely, the Department for Exiting the EU paid 49p per lanyard while the supposedly penny-pinching Treasury forked out £1.94.
MOMENTUM, the hard-Left campaign group that backs Jeremy Corbyn, is advertising for a “finance officer”. Presumably the winning candidate will be put in charge of the magic money tree that funds all fantasy socialist spending plans.
A STRING of Labour MPs complained about the use of the word “traitor” in political debate after Wednesday’s furious Brexit row in the Commons. Such qualms did not stop them belting out The Red Flag at their conference the previous day. The words of the socialist anthem say: “Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer, we’ll keep the Red Flag flying here.”
JOHN Bercow broke his own record for uninterrupted sitting in the Commons Speaker’s Chair this week. He remained at his perch, without so much as a comfort break, for 11 hours and 28 minutes on Wednesday when the Commons returned. No wonder he sat with his legs crossed.