Old Chuka is a model of sterile urbanity...
WHILE the Prime Minister dirtied his mitts wooing Welsh farmers, Chuka umunna chose to attack him from a cosy hospitality suite at Watford Football Club.
Good old Chuka. You wouldn’t catch him floundering in the hay shearing a sheep’s backside, as Boris gamely did
yesterday morning. Even money says the old smoothy’s never so much as owned a pair of wellingtons, let alone felt the squelch of bogland around the ankles.
Yesterday, the Lib Dem foreign affairs
spokesman was his usual model of sterile urbanity. Crinkle-free white shirt, shoes polished to a mirror-like buff.
His taut blue suit, adorned with a little
Lib Dem lapel badge, was so spotless he could almost have performed open heart surgery in it. Everyman he is not. His wish, apparently, is to become Foreign Secretary, or so he had told a newspaper interviewer the day before. Chutzpah and steely-eyed ambition have never been in short supply chez Chuka. He entered the room quieter than a shimmering panther, so much so the audience, composed mainly of journalists, barely noticed him at first. From his wrist I spotted dangling a bejewelled diver’s watch as chunky as a gold ingot.
We got some boring preamble about the role of Nato, sprinkled with some to Churchill, high-minded Attlee references and NHS founder Aneurin Bevan, which he appeared to have fished out of a quotations book.
At first I thought we were getting one of those lofty foreign-policy speeches Tony Blair used to give as PM to show us how above trifling domestic affairs he was.
Wearily, my eyes wandered on to the pitch outside, where groundsmen were digging up the penalty spot. The chilly suburban drizzle suddenly appeared quite enticing.
Then came the attacks on Boris. The PM, Chuka said, was the epitome of Right-wing populism, his authoritarian style as bad as Vladimir Putin of Russia and Turkey’s President Erdogan. This, presumably, is the same President Putin widely believed to have ordered the poisoning of the Skripals in Salisbury last year. Do people really buy the idea of Boris as some sort of deranged despot because he prorogued Parliament a few days too early? I have to say I’m not feeling it out on the stump at the moment.
CHukA
continued laying it on thick. He accused the Prime Minister of copying from the ‘ Trump playbook’ ( horrible Americanism) by engaging in ‘bigoted, sexist and Islamophobic behaviour’.
Oh, and Trump gave the order for the Conservatives to ally themselves with the Brexit Party, apparently.
There was an inevitable mention of Trump’s scruffbag election guru Steve Bannon. Ever since Bannon exchanged text messages with the PM last year, rumours have sprouted he is now controlling each move the Prime Minister makes from his bat cave in Washington DC.
Oh Chuka! You always seemed such a sensible fellow – if mildly absurd at times. This speech, though, was desperate, flirting with conspiracy theory and unworthy of mainstream politics.
To me it merely suggested just how far the Lib Dems have retreated in recent weeks from their ludicrous early declarations that their leader Jo Swinson could be Prime Minister. ‘Stop Boris’ now seems to the be the sum of their ambitions.
Outside, Chuka’s chariot awaited him in the form of the Liberal Democrats’ Chinesebuilt electric election bus. The battery is said to be holding up just fine, which is just as well because the party’s campaign is totally zapped.
Earlier that morning Chuka’s mentor Tony Blair had been giving a suspiciously similar talk over at the news organisation Reuters. He was white of hair and thick of smarm, his face now as bronzed and lined as a mahogany wood carving.
He described the global political scene as crazy ‘ but I still believe British politics is unfortunately ahead of the pack’.
Boris Johnson was someone he said he wouldn’t trust with a blank cheque. Phoney Tony accusing others of untrustworthiness? I almost choked on my boiled egg.