So MPs can ditch ties ... what next? Keith Vaz dressed as a washing machine engineer?
SPEAKER Bercow ruled there was no strict need for male MPs to wear neckties. He said so after a point of order from Peter Bone (Con, Wellingborough) who was surprised an open-collared MP had been admitted to Wednesday’s discussions.
The scruff in question was Tom Brake (Lib Dem, Carshalton and Wallington), a figure of sparse substance and hardly one of life’s pioneers.
It is quite possible Comrade Brake simply forgot to don a tie rather than was seeking to make some bold statement. But old Bone’s point of order forced Bercow to come to a decision.
The Squeaker rolled the matter round his chops, tasting it for tannin and acidity. Hmmm. After a certain amount of this selfregarding baloney he concluded that MPs should wear ‘businesslike attire’ but a tie was not essen- tial. ‘Am I minded not to call a member because he is not wearing a tie? No,’ declared Bercow.
‘ Businesslike attire’: a very Bercowish phrase, full of middlemanagement grandiosity (he speaks the English you used to find on Trusthouse Forte menus). What is ‘ businesslike attire’? Would the attire of a welder be permitted? The attire of a chef? Or of a Berwick Street temptress? ‘Hello, darling, looking for business?’ Perhaps Keith Vaz will turn up in the garb of a washing-machine service engineer.
Some will see yesterday’s announcement by Mr Bercow as a moment of shattering significance. Cue discussions of ‘is this the end of the tie?’
Those of us who have been in Westminster more moons than is healthy may reflect that we have been here before. At the start of the 1990s I saw a brutish Labour MP, Tommy Graham, come bowling into the Chamber on a Thursday afternoon wearing a windcheater and no jacket or tie. He was ignored by the then Speaker, Bernard Weatherill (who was by trade a tailor).
It will no doubt start a craze. Barely an hour after the decision yesterday, Angus MacNeil (SNP, Western Isles) was on his hind legs, contributing to proceedings without a tie round his neck.
MACNEIL is chubby enough to get away with it. On younger MPs the lack of a tie may not much matter, though it can look untidy and ill-mannered. On older men it invariably becomes pretty horrible – scrawny, tortoisey dewlaps. Is there anything more pitiable than a wrinkled groover?
The day’s chief event was the clash of Chancellor Philip Hammond and his Labour shadow John McDonnell in the Queen’s Speech debate.
Mr McDonnell had his hyperbole dial set to maximum. After a goodish opening dismissal of the Queen’s Speech as ‘this vacuous notelet’, he went madly over the top as he talked about the Government wanting to ‘ take food from the mouths of infants’, the ‘grotesque’ levels of inequality in Britain, nurses surviving only thanks to food handouts, the ‘brutality’ of our country, etc.
Mr Hammond was on top Spreadsheet Phil form, rising to ask Mr McDonnell factual questions he was unable to answer (e.g. about capital gains tax – which was lower in the last Labour years than it is now), and doing some impressively quick mental arithmetic on Labour’s airier proposals. Being robotic has its uses sometimes.
Sir Edward Leigh (Con, Gainsborough) gave the House the sobering statistic that in the ten minutes Mr Hammond was on his feet, the national debt increased by £900,000.
Mr McDonnell waved away criticism of his mass-nationalisation plans, saying it would be easy to borrow the c.£120 billion that would be needed for some of those plans because the Government would be buying assets which would generate some income. Mr Hammond was not convinced any international banker would be willing to lend money to Mr McDonnell.
The remark that struck me most was Mr McDonnell’s allegation that this was ‘a Government that cannot feed its population’. A sharply Leftwing person may indeed think that a scandal. Others will perhaps feel that feeding oneself is the duty that falls to the citizen, not the state.