Not present in the House, but Boris can still draw a gasp
Hush for one politician... and groans for a Scot
GREG Hands, newly selfexiled to the backbenches in protest over Heathrow, caught the Speaker’s eye in PMQs. Speaker Bercow may have expected Mr Hands (Con, Chelsea and Fulham) to attack the Government. The House gave a quiver of glee. Lots of ‘hear hears’.
Here was that rarest of creatures – a man who had honoured an election pledge. The place hushed.
Mr Hands: ‘Mr Speaker, we all need to keep our election pledges.’ Another ripple of anticipation. Someone whooped.
‘And that, Mr Speaker, applies whether we made those pledges one year ago – or nine years ago.’
The House took a second to realise that Mr Hands had just taken a swipe at both Boris Johnson and – ha! – at John Bercow.
In June 2009, when becoming Speaker, Bercow promised to retire after a maximum of nine years. He has broken that promise. Don’t they nearly all? Politicians, why we hate them, Part XCIV.
Mr Hands went on to remind Theresa May that the Tories stood on a 2017 manifesto promise to run our own trade policy after Brexit. Was that still the case? In reply, the PM uttered these words: ‘We will be leaving the single market and the customs union and we will negotiate our own trade deals with the rest of the world.’
Some of us, seeing Civil Service stroppiness and Remainers’ recalcitrance, find it hard to trust Mrs May on this. Yet she does, in her plodding monotone, keep saying it. Are we too sceptical? Are we so jaundiced by the slipperiness of other politicians that we disbelieve our Prime Minister? Er, yes.
Mrs May’s lack of communicative crispness worsens the problem. If she said ‘we’re off!’ with more brio, we might relax and even Boris might not feel the need to hammer in the guy ropes on the Brexit side of the argument.
If Mrs May delivers a proper Brexit, it could do something to restore voters’ faith in the ballot box.
MANY Cabinet members were absent from PMQs. They included: Sea Cadet Gavin Williamson, Home Secretary Sajid Javid, Transport’s Chris Grayling (stuck on a handcar in a railway siding near Esher, probably, knowing his luck), Defra’s Michael Gove (almost never turns up), Trade’s Liam Fox, and both Boris Johnson and Philip Hammond (on foreign trips).
Brexit Secretary David Davis was briefly in attendance but was sitting a long way down the bench, next to Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt. The latter’s increasingly proBrexit stance suggests a man keen to impress his party’s membership. He looked somehow furtive yesterday.
Business Secretary Greg Clark, who has become the new Dominic Grieve, was markedly prominent on the front bench. The more Mrs May accommodates him, the more she may bleed support from Mr Hunt and others. Their number might now include Treasury Chief Secretary Liz Truss, who like Mr Hunt is making noises that will impress Conservative activists a great deal more than Mr Clark’s bland corporatism.
In other developments: Nick Boles (Con, Grantham and Stamford) secured Mrs May’s agreement to fly the England flag from No 10’s pole on World Cup match days; Johnny Mercer (Con, Plymouth Moor View) managed to put the case for defence spending with easily more felicity and briskness than Cadet Williamson ever manages; and when Joanna Cherry (SNP, Edinburgh SW) was called, the House gave a light groan – evidence that froggy-eyed Miss Cherry is starting to be recognised for the champion bore she is.
Heidi Allen (Con, S Cambridgeshire) put a long question about the uselessness of her constituency’s railway service, yet in doing so failed to follow the niceties of parliamentary address – more brave than she is bright, perhaps – and Ian Austin (Lab, Dudley N) mentioned fears of a national beer drought owing to a European CO2 drought. MPs gasped.
Most Premiers, if asked about beer, would produce some zippy wisecrack. It is a mark of Mrs May’s genius for joylessness that she replied to Mr Austin as if he had asked her about mechanical gearwheels.