Emily Thornberry’s chubby little fingers clawed in and out
HERE in the fever zone we had a crazed to-do as Opposition MPs attacked Boris Johnson for making a mistake about a British-Iranian woman jailed in Tehran. Last week Mr Johnson infelicitously said he understood Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe (imprisoned last year) went to Iran in order to train journalists. Her family says she was just on holiday.
Plainly, diplomacy and tact was called for. In which spirit, er, Labour’s Paula Sherriff sat in a vast puddle of outrage and SCREAMED abuse at Brexiteer Boris. I call him Brexiteer Boris because it is partly his support for Leave in the EU referendum that has made the Foreign Secretary a hate figure for the Establishment. They want, more than anything, to damage him.
Brussels can’t stand him. Nor can Whitehall. Nor the diplomatic corps, the BBC, Remainer MPs and Tories with leadership ambitions. Boris is different, unpredictable, untidy and he must pay for it! It is often ‘Get Boris’ time these days, seldom more so than in the Commons yesterday when he was delivering a regular update on antiterror policies in Syria and Iraq.
Labour foreign affairs spokesman Emily Thornberry came over all breathy as she deplored his ‘foolish words’ about Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe. ‘How many more times does this need to happen?’ she sighed. Boris should ‘admit that Foreign Secretary is simply not the job for him’ and quit. As her ladyship resumed her seat, her chubby little fingers clawed in and out, the painted talons of a Persian cat. From the benches behind her came a wailing and ululating as Miss Sheriff, Yvette Cooper, little Wes Streeting and others signalled delight at Miss Thornberry’s galloping lunge with the jousting pole. Boris could have dealt placidly with this. He could have poured honey over controversy. He chose instead to go sharply on the attack, blowily arguing that Miss Thornberry should blame Iran for its outrageous behaviour rather than choosing ‘to heap blame on to the Foreign Office’. Labour MPs: ‘We’re blaming YOU!’
Boris said Miss Thornberry was ‘deflecting blame and accountability’. Labour MPs gasped and clucked so much that Deputy Speaker Eleanor Laing had to call order.
Miss Cooper (Lab, Normanton, Pontefract & Castleford) stood all a-quiver. The Foreign Secretary should ‘a-POL-ogise’. At that second syllable, Yvette inflated her cheeks, as though extinguishing an altar candle. ‘He really should resign,’ she claimed, doing that characteristic nannyish head wobble. From Miss Sherriff, again, came a sound so loud and shrill that passing cabbies must have though they were being hailed.
Mr Johnson rejected the ‘posturing and party-political point-scoring’ of the Labour benches. Cue, oops, two attacks from his own benches, first from Europhile Anna Soubry (Broxtowe), who wanted Boris not to make public utterances about Brexit because that was not his job. Eh? A Foreign Secretary must not discuss foreign policy? Miss Soubry was so cross that she hurled her pen on to the green leather bench as she sat down. Tom Tugendhat (Tonbridge & Malling), a pro-Brussels Cameroon who chairs the foreign affairs committee, had a more subtle dig at Boris’s Iranian policy. Boris, his shirt by now coming untucked from his trousers, had a dig right back.
LA Thornberry was cackling away alongside Angela Rayner. This was noticed by Nadhim Zahawi (Con, Stratford on Avon) who said the Ratcliffe case was serious enough for Labour frontbenchers not to be ‘giggling’. The switch from laughter to gravity on Miss Thornberry’s face was instant.
How suddenly she looked funereal. What a wonderful fraud!
Ben Bradshaw (Lab, Exeter) had a question about Russia. It has become his latest obsession. ‘Come on!’ he bawled at Boris. Aesthete Ben is so furious with Boris about the EU.
Mr Streeting ( Ilford N) dolefully announced that Mr Johnson ‘ didn’t take ownership of his mistake’.
But to Labour’s disappointment, he did in fact speak a rather softly delivered and persuasive apology to a Lib Dem whose constituents included cousins of the jailed Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe.
See? He can do tact when he tries.