Insulted Angus reacted like a goosed dowager
AT 12.35pm, Theresa May began her Commons statement with a second’s pause – unrehearsed, I think. A gaze from a lofty divingboard. Mrs May can seem a chill figure but there must have been inner surgings, an awareness that this was a stonking moment.
Then we were into something almost 1930s-newsreel in flavour: ‘A few minutes ago in Brussels, the United Kingdom’s Permanent Representative to the EU handed a letter to the President of the European Council on my behalf, confirming the Government’s decision to invoke Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union.’ Cheers. Hubbub. Waved Order Papers. Scottish crotchetiness. We had a lot of that.
From Labour and the Tories’ hardened Remainers, there was merely glumness. Barry Sheerman (Lab, Huddersfield) wiped his eyes. Anna Soubry (Con, Broxtowe) sucked in her lips and twitched. Some Labour MPs (among them Cardiff South’s Stephen Doughty and Leicester South’s Jon Ashworth) tapped feverishly on their phones. Displacement activity?
‘The United Kingdom is leaving the European Union,’ said Mrs May, snowploughing through the noise.
‘This is an historic moment from which there can be no turning back.’
Ed Miliband (Lab, Doncaster N) clutched the right side of his long face. Angus Roberston (SNP, Moray) shook his head.
Mrs May continued: ‘At moments like these – great turning points in our national story – the choices we make define the character of our nation. I choose to believe in Britain and that our best days lie ahead.’
THIS earned more neck-tweaking from the SNP. From behind the Speaker’s Chair came laughter as Chris Bryant (Lab, Rhondda) and Robert Flello (Lab, Stoke South) tried to signal hilarity at Mrs May’s tone.
She was aiming for a high oratory brushed by destiny and national unity. The latter may have been impossible in the Commons Chamber, with the Scots Nats in such a jumpy mood, but it may well have worked on television.
That was why she kept talking, even when she was being heckled. Shouts and squawks in the House are not always picked up by the TV microphones.
The EU referendum was an event bigger than Parliament. That was true, also, of yesterday’s speech from Mrs May.
Ben Bradshaw (Lab, Exeter) ran an elegant finger down the sinews of his onetime matinee-idol neck. Lucy Powell (Lab, Manchester C) yawned. Drew Hendry (SNP, Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch & Strathspey) shouted abuse, even when Mrs May was mentioning last week’s deadly terror attack on the Commons.
Jacob Rees-Mogg (Con, NE Somerset) quoted my late kinsman Sir Francis Drake and compared Mrs May to Gloriana. Younger MPs may have misheard this for Gloria Gaynor.
Tim Farron and his knot of desperadoes had a thrilling moment when Mrs May said ‘the world needs the Liberal Democratic values…’ One Lib Dem MP punched the air in triumph. But it turned out that Mrs May merely meant ‘the liberal, democratic values of Europe’. Laughter.
Mrs May continued: ‘It is my fierce determination to get the right deal’. Pleasing use of ‘fierce’, I thought. Almost Celtic.
Jeremy Corbyn, for Labour, said that his party ‘respects the decision’ of the EU referendum, and thus won his own frothing boos from the Scots Nats who were by now moving their heads from side to side like sheep waiting to cross a busy road. The more noise they made, the more Mrs May enjoyed baiting them. Enormous, desert-booted Chris Law (Dundee W) was so energised on the SNP front bench that I feared he was going to punch someone.
YET when Angus Robertson was speaking and the other parties gave him some very mild what-for, he reacted like a goosed dowager, shocked by their discourtesy.
‘Scawtland voooted to stay in the EU,’ we kept hearing from our Caledonian beauties. Mrs May said, well, tough. Her constituency of Maidenhead had voted Remain, too, but in a democracy you accept the majority verdict.
Naturally, this only ignited further SNP grievance-taking. She had ‘equated Maidenhead to the nation of Scotland’!