Grieve pulled on the khazi chain... yank, clang, splosh
REVERSE ferret by Dominic Grieve! Yes, he was still going to put his rebel amendment but – and at this point certain eyeballs in the House rotated in opposite directions – he himself was going to vote against it.
Not so much a reverse ferret as an inverse rabbit. Let us put that in the language which half-French Mr Grieve might prefer: Un lapin en sens inverse. Ferrets are determinedly bitey but rabbits flop. And flop is what Labour Europhiles angrily felt Mr Grieve had done.
His unexpected submission came at 2.57pm, during a short speech he was making as MPs debated the latest attempt by peers to delay the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill.
‘The Grieve amendment’ had been talked about all week. ProBrussels bods in the House of Lords had invoked Mr Grieve’s name as the Kastom people in Vanuatu marvel at mention of their living god, the Duke of Edinburgh.
Yet here was the same Grieve pulling the khazi chain – yank, clang, splosh – on his very own amendment. You vote for my noble gesture if you want to, mes braves, but you must do so without me.
His capitulation meant that Theresa May and David Davis would have their Bill.
MPs on all sides, sensing the magnitude of the moment, went ‘shush’ as they tried to compute the implications.
With one swoop the way to a firmer Brexit was clear. Ministers could contemplate their summer holidays without that faint queasiness which had infected their recent weeks.
As the news sank in, a hum of amazed gossip began.
Behind Mr Grieve sat a knot of Remainer women wearing expressions of moist concern: Nicky Morgan, Sarah Wollaston, dotty old Anna Soubry (reduced by the lurgy to a froggy croak) and Heidi Whatnot from Cambridgeshire. Dr Wollaston (Totnes) narrowed her gaze in what looked like disbelief. She and a few others, including hapless Philip Lee (Bracknell) who bunged in his Government job last week, went ahead and rebelled anyway.
The head lemming had done a handbrake turn but these others still went sailing over the escarpment. Miss Soubry voted the other way from Mr Grieve, yet she still clapped his speech. Baffling. Or just baffled.
At 3.17pm, Mrs May entered the Chamber to savour her moment. At PMQs, earlier, she had looked joyless. Now she was haloed with smiles. Bob Neill ( Bromley & Chislehurst), Grieve’s chief hobbit, stood yacking to the PM behind the Speaker’s Chair before she made a regal progress to her seat. Licky, licky Bob.
Mr Grieve had concluded his oration with a riff about the need for greater civility in the public discourse. Yet when Philip Davies (Con, Shipley) made a speech complaining that Europhiles wanted to frustrate Brexit, Mr Neill turned on him and, with a ‘Pah!’, told him he was ‘always wrong’.
Bnow there was sniping between the Remainers. Speaker Bercow invited Miss Soubry to make a speech. Directly in front of her, Ed Vaizey (Con, Wantage), another Grieve groupie, ejaculated, ‘Oh no!’
Antoinette Sandbach (Con, Eddisbury) sounded distinctly wobbly as she indicated she was still going to rebel against the Government. Went to the same school as me, did the resolutely pro-EU Miss Mackeson-Sandbach (as she used to be). Some years after me, though. They must have changed the water pipes by the time she got there.
The vote went Mrs May’s way by 303-319. The Government’s tangle- limbed Chief Whip, Julian Smith, allowed his Jeremy Thorpeish eyebrows to rise an eighth of an inch with pleasure. Victory with room to spare. Enough room, perhaps, for Mr Smith to have been more courtly and to have allowed his opponents not to have to wheel a visibly stricken Naz Shah (Lab, Bradford W) into the Chamber to vote. Her wheelchair got stuck between the front bench and the table.
Now that we have Brexit ahoy, indubitably so, and the will of the people seems likely to be achieved, can we please have back some of the old decencies?