Cooking up a ruse to keep us mired in EU gluepit
LABOUR’S Kate Hoey (Vauxhall) cut through the bluster to describe yesterday’s Commons debate as ‘lawyer versus lawyer’. More accurately, however, it was ‘lawyer after lawyer’, for nearly all the MPs who spoke in the debate were Remainers.
Miss Hoey was using ‘lawyer’ in the disparaging sense. Here were puffed-up, prolix scriveners, fluffing out coat-tails as they sought to complicate, entangle, embugger and ensure that only they are the ones who run our country. No others need apply. We’re the ruling class. We jurists are the ones who decide and you, the dirty-fingernailed electorate, can get stuffed.
Each time the Government seems to taken a substantial step towards getting us out of the Brussels gluepit, as happened with Mrs May’s December 8 agreement in Brussels, Remainers cook up another ruse to create a sense Brexit might yet be stopped. That was their purpose yesterday: To prolong the unease.
Some pretended to be consumed with anguish about ministers imposing laws without Parliament’s say.
They never protested much about that all those decades when we had our laws dictated by the EU.
Yvette Cooper (Lab, Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford), opening the hours of debate, wobbled her head and said the country ‘should trust Parliament to be mature and sensible’. Ha! She wanted the Commons given the power to delay Brexit, though only by ‘a couple of months’. The few Brexiteers in a sparsely attended Chamber did not believe her. Nigel Evans (Con, Ribble Valley) suggested she wanted Brexit stopped ‘for years’. Miss Cooper shook her head most forcefully and shot Mr Evans a warty stare.
Europhile lawyer Ken Clarke (Con, Rushcliffe) was at his most dismissive of the ‘scurrilous Right wing’.
HE foghorned and reminisced, moving his forearm sideways like someone barging clutter off a table. He didn’t much like it when a Brexiteer, Yeovil’s Marcus Fysh, suggested Mr Clarke was misleading the House in some of his claims.
John Baron (Con, Basildon & Billericay) also told the old buffer ‘he does risk sounding very condescending’.
By the time Mr Clarke sat down he was a touch magenta round the chops. Sir Oliver Letwin (Con, W Dorset), all conversational cornices and congenial gaseousness, said the ‘only logical possibility’ stemming from the Remainers’ manoeuvres was that they wanted to force Theresa May to ‘leave Brexit aside’.
Philip Davies (Con, Shipley) put it more bluntly. These Remoaners wanted ‘to overturn and frustrate’ last year’s EU referendum.
Mr Davies said it was a pity anti-Brexit egghead Dominic Grieve (Con, Beaconsfield) ‘hadn’t got the courage of his convictions to admit that’.
There would be a fearful backlash from the British public if the Grieves of this world had their way, predicted Mr Davies. Around Mr Grieve a doughnut of Europhile aesthetes had formed: Sarah Wollaston, veritably haloed by saintliness, Bob Neill, jumpy as a novice parachutist, serial rebel Heidi Allen, and lawyer Antoinette Sandbach, who would later wail to the Chair that some beastly person behind her was talking too loudly. Jacob Rees-Mogg (Con, NE Somerset) squinted at them from a safe distance. Ed Vaizey (Wantage and Didcot) was in orange socks and, like George Freeman (Mid Norfolk), wore the sort of horizontal-striped tie favoured by middle-aged groovers going through a crisis.
Mr Freeman nodded sagely as Mr Grieve said how horrible some Eurosceptics had been about him.
MIND you, Grieve himself took a pop at Iain Duncan Smith, who had apparently accused Mr Grieve of ‘grandstanding’. Ye gods. Cause for a duel on Hampstead Heath at the very least. Mr Grieve made plain he did not think IDS had been much cop when he was Tory Party leader.
On the Labour benches, Ben Bradshaw and Helen Goodman cackled as Mr Grieve worked himself into ever greater indignations. Anti-Brexit lawyer Anna Soubry (Con, pro-Brexit Broxtowe) made repeated interventions against the Government and each time ended by massaging her lips like a trumpeter. Mr Grieve, after accusing Eurosceptics of being ‘fixated on getting us out’, ended by comparing himself to Sir Winston Churchill.