Flashman was back, picking a fight with TV audience

FOR almost three days the Establishment tried to smother the issue but on BBC1’s Question Time last night, immigration kept coming up – and David Cameron hopped about like a bather on a hot beach. The Milton Keynes audience pressed him: What could he do to limit it if we stayed in the EU? Would he veto Turkey’s application to join? How could schools and hospitals cope with the incomers?

The people asking this were not, as some have recently tried to suggest, skinheads or nutters. They were middle-class, respectable, eloquent, smartly dressed Milton Keynesians. And it was immigration that gripped them.

Mr Cameron became agitato. After a while he snapped at them. And he felt good about that. Hell, yeah.

He started saying ‘right? right?’, as top bods do when they are in a hard place. His Flashman character emerged and he started shouting about how Britain was a fighter, not a quitter (this is an old Peter Mandelson line). Maybe he thought he was in the Commons.

A man in a stripy shirt compared him to Neville Chamberlain, the 1930s appeaser who came back from Munich with a piece of paper. Mr Cameron, vexed, preferred to compare himself to Winston Churchill. This went down well with his supporters and a few of them cheered. But did it not look as though Mr Cameron was picking a fight with a TV audience?

After the Jo Cox killing, one expected this to be a more sombre event but presenter David Dimbleby said at the start that the democratic process must be honoured. It demanded thorough scrutiny. He is right.

WE went straight into questions about whether or not the EU debate had been ‘soured’ by the hyperbolising politicians. Mr Cameron claimed that the Leave campaign had made ‘an attempt to frighten people’. This went down badly in the room, earning scoffs of dissent as people perhaps reflected that Mr Cameron and George Osborne have run ‘Project Fear’. The Prime Minister was standing on that Q shape that Ed Miliband stumbled off a year ago. He kept his footing but he was losing his grip on the banked spectators who were soon asking him how he could possibly contemplate remaining in office if his side lost Thursday’s vote. He replied that his general election mandate would be unaltered.

Then we hit the immigration stuff, and all sorts of verbal aggro ensued. ‘I don’t want to baffle you with statistics,’ said Mr Cameron breezily (this after saying the public were ‘confused’ and that we should listen to ‘experts’).

A woman called Jane said: ‘You knew very well you couldn’t control the numbers (of migrants)’. A man at the back, pointing as he spoke, noted that unemployment in the EU was hellish. ‘You wanna spend five minutes with me and I’ll tell you all about it,’ he cried. Laughter. A lass with spectacles said ‘everything is going to get flooded’. She wasn’t talking about rivers.

Mr Cameron kept being met by querulousness, a doubting, high-pitched chuntering from the spectators. It was like hearing a crowd of shoppers demanding their money back at a market stall. ‘There’s no silver bullet on this issue,’ said Mr Cameron. Whoompf. More dissent.

DIMBLEBY joined in: ‘If you left the EU, there WOULD be a silver bullet because you’d control immigration.’ Aiee. Downing Street won’t have been happy with that. ‘It’s difficult,’ said Mr Cameron quietly. Dimbleby: ‘Why is it difficult? It’s your decision as prime minister.’ Silence.

Then a chap at the back asked if the EU would veto our renegotiation. ‘They’ve all agreed they won’t,’ said Mr Cameron. The audience plainly found this limp. There was shaming, mocking laughter.

He rallied a bit towards the end, accusing Leave of lying about Turkey’s EU application. Turkey would not be joining for at least ‘30 or 40 years’ time’, he claimed. Mind you, that’s rather sooner than the year 3000, which is what he said a few days ago.

Game back on, bigtime.