Jaws sagged all across the House
ABROTHER scribe, leaving the gallery after PMQs, had never known the Conservatives so flat. This was not the full truth. Flatness was everywhere. It wasn’t just Tories whose jaws sagged. The whole House – Lab, Libs, SNP, DUP, Plaid, clerks, visitors, journos and even passing moths (I heard one go into a Stuka nosedive, having malfunctioned mid-flight) – had drifted into a deep, horrible hebetude.
Theresa May does that to you. She is doing it to the country. Is Donald Trump sure he wants to come for a sleepover? Don’t expect a fun time, Mr President.
Speaker Bercow never helps. That little goblin extends PMQs by 20 minutes simply because it is in his power to do so and he knows it irritates Andrew Neil on BBC1’s live politics show. Bercow doesn’t let sessions over-run because the crowd is baying for more. Has Mrs May won an ‘encore’ in her life? The stalls would more likely bawl ‘assez! moins!’
The ordeal began just after midday. By 12.42pm the Commons was half- empty. Scores of MPs had scarpered. Gone to the bar for trebles of electric soup. Those left behind were yawning. Arms were crossed. So, too, eyes. The Serjeant-at-Arms was practically stabbing himself with his sword. Somnolence Central. How does the Prime Minister do it? Partly by failing to answer questions and doing that at great length in her school-marm warble. She also has a deadly habit of stopping when she is heckled and waiting for the noise to abate; then continuing with the sentence she intended all along. Other parliamentarians master the extempore put-down. Mrs May just rolls into a ball like a woodlouse until the danger has passed. Then she uncoils her spine (it is surprisingly pliable) and toddles along her way.
Jeremy Corbyn asked an entirely predictable question about the long-promised White Paper on Brexit negotiations. When would it be published? (Brexit Secretary David Davis allegedly wants to get it out but is being stymied by Mrs May’s Downing Street controllers). Mrs May did not produce an elegant formula that would hold the line. She tried a counter-attack, asking Mr Corbyn if he wanted a second referendum. It was done clumsily. There was a punchier moment when she confirmed – with a single ‘yes’ – that it was still her intention we will leave the EU in March 2019 and complete the transition by 2020. But the House was unmoved. In fact there was open derision. TWO pro- Leave Tories ( Henry Smith and Andrea Jenkyns) felt the need to press Mrs May to provide more reassurance that we will indeed be getting out properly on time. Her replies? Burble burble, mashed potato. We are, it is said, living through the most exciting time in British politics since 1940. We have (or had, until Mrs May got to work) a chance to reinvigorate our jaded parliamentary democracy. We had a moment when we could push a fist through the convertible’s canvas roof and seize the day.
Feel the hippie love! Get rid of all that bureaucratic blether! Boris would have done that. Perhaps he still could.
Mrs May may not have killed Brexit but she has almost squashed its spirit. The only ones who are palpably taking back control at present are the Whitehall mandarins, the inspectors, the finger-wagging classes who were so terrified by the Leave vote.
You see it with that depressing revival of the Heathrow expansion plan (Mrs May dodged a question on that from Justine Greening). You see it in the revolting torpor on prosecutions against British troops who served in Ulster (she was pressed on that by Mark Francois and her answer was pathetic).
You see it in things such as the revived part- privatisation of the Forestry Commission, the swagger of the Blair-Soubry-Grieve-Mandelsons, the conceit of the House of Lords, the cockiness of the activist judiciary, the naked politicking of bishops, and maybe even the awful violence on our summer streets, where criminals scent that the land lacks a leader.