Doing the horny gorilla is not a great image for global Britain
It was hard to know whether to laugh or cry. It was a normal Thursday, except that Ukip’s leadership favourite, Steven Woolfe, was sitting up in a hospital bed, recovering from a bout of fisticuffs with a fellow MEP. ITV then published an image of the man splatted on the floorboards of the European Parliament building.
That picture. The pathos; the absurdity; the navy suit; the dropped overcoat; the plaintively clutched briefcase splayed beside him. The calm flatness of his stance, mid-stride, like a bowler-hatted businessman in a Magritte painting falling to Earth. “Knock-out im EU-Parlament!” exclaimed the front page of Germany’s most popular tabloid, Bild, over the photo the next day.
What an image of Britain in Europe. Collapsed on the floor after a bout of political infighting. That was before our currency crashed six per cent in two minutes overnight. When Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, after the Brexit vote, said that “England has collapsed politically, monetarily, constitutionally and economically”, he hadn’t meant it literally.
Of course, Mr Rutte’s assessment was as absurd then as it is now. But large numbers of Brexit-watchers abroad look at that picture and no doubt think Mr Rutte had a point.
That is not helpful. To many people outside the UK, Ukip is the public face of Brexit. So when the party’s leadership is a shambles and two of its MEPs take leave of their senses in public, it lets down not only their voters, but the whole country.
It probably won’t affect Ukip’s poll ratings in the UK. After all, it was just a bit of “handbags at dawn” and “girl on girl” action, according to a breezy account from Mike Hookem, the other MEP involved in the scuffle. Politics is a rough game and Ukippers have never played by the rules. It would be easy to think it didn’t matter at all.
Except that Britain’s image does matter, especially at the moment. We’re about to enter a highly charged and complex negotiation. Getting what we want will take guile, daring, toughness – and friends in the right places. It’s not helpful if Europeans, most of them unfamiliar with Britain, agree with some of their leaders that this is an irrational country run by maniacs, cruising towards destruction. It would be nice if Bild-readers, who will be voting in Germany’s elections next year, think it’s important to do business with Britain, rather than chortling at us over their bratwurst.
And there’s a second reason why that picture is bad for the UK. It caps a week in which the Government appeared to attack “foreigners” living here in two policy announcements. We saw Jeremy Hunt boasting that he would send home foreign doctors, and then Amber Rudd suggested that companies could be forced to publish their numbers of foreign employees.
Many Britons want to reduce immigration, but not by making the country seem so unwelcoming or ridiculous that talented foreigners don’t want to come here any more, or feel uncomfortable when they do. We still want skilled migrants and foreign companies to invest in the UK.
Immigrants in Britain read these headlines and watch Ukip’s brutal antics in disbelief. They see an MEP who represents Britain’s largest party in the European Parliament brawling inside an official EU building. A preposterous picture, they think, for a preposterous country.
At the Conservatives’ conference in Birmingham this week, I met Steve Baker MP, a Tory and prominent Brexit campaigner. He told me a story. While Theresa May was making a speech about Brexit last Sunday, Mr Baker was skydiving. He’s an experienced skydiver and this was no ordinary jump. On the way down, Mr Baker and his friends were doing a manoeuvre called “the horny gorilla”.
The “horny gorilla” is a tricky move. It involves several divers linking their feet tightly and, as they hurtle towards the earth in the buffeting wind, leaning back and hammering their chests at each other in the manner of a horny gorilla.
Mr Baker is entitled to his hobbies and, unlike most MPs, has a thoughtful strategy for Brexit. But the horny gorilla stuck in my mind. “This,” I thought. “This is what half of Europe is thinking when it looks at us!” They think we’ve jumped out of a plane, we’re hurtling to the ground, and instead of deploying a parachute we’re beating our chests at each other like a troop of crazed gorillas.
They’re wrong, but Britain still needs to convince them of that. Ukip should be bending all of its wits towards serving the national interest and its voters.
Instead, it’s kicked off a leadership battle fit for angry apes. It’s enough to make Labour look mature.