Off with his head! Paterson invokes spirit of Civil War
DIARY clash: in one part of this fevered citadel, ramrodspined Owen Paterson was making a Brexit speech accusing David Cameron of being as out-of-touch as Charles I; on the other side of St James’s Park, Theresa May was making a rival speech which, up to a point, said we should remain spliced to Brussels.
Mrs May, in primped new hairdo, sounds to have been pretty half-hearted about the EU and its dingbat institutions. She said we needed a ‘more mature’ debate. That will have been a dig at both George Osborne and Boris Johnson.
Having been to a few May speechezzzzz, I opted for the Paterson event. It was held at the British Academy building near Admiralty Arch – big chandelier, cream carpet, modern art on the walls, spanking shortbread. A crowd of about 50 leaned to the male and wonkish.
Former environment secretary Paterson was introduced by Iain Duncan Smith, making one of his first big forays since his resignation from the Cabinet. He was full of beans. They always do look happier after they have quit.
IDS, trousers creases so sharp you could have cut smoked salmon with them, noted it was Anzac Day (when we remember the Antipodes’ war dead). This was ‘a timely reminder of our links with the Commonwealth’. He took a pop at Peter Mandelson for ‘glibly’ saying Brexit campaigners were xenophobic to talk about immigration. IDS said: ‘No, Mr Mandelson, in your cashmere coat, it is not xenophobic to talk about jobs and a decent way of life.’
I always had Peter down more as an astrakhan- coat man – to match his inky eyebrows.
Mr Paterson was less martial than sometimes. This is a man often so abrupt in his speech patterns that his marriage proposal may well have sounded like a plan to attack enemy pillboxes on a distant ridge. But I love old Paterson. He tonks it straight off the meat of the bat.
The United States of Europe was going to be a bloody disaster and the real risk would be voting to stay in the EU, he said. Otherwise, future British PMs would be like Roman governors, handing down decrees from the Empire (ie Brussels).
HEwas wearing a pair of almost professorial half-moon spectacles but his back was as straight as that of a novice waterskiing behind a super-fast speedboat. There was a danger we were going to be sold the same ‘deception’ as in the 1975 referendum by the ‘notoriously slippery’ prime minister (he meant Harold Wilson, not Mr Cameron). The Cameron renegotiation was ‘an ill-defined sham’.
The Germans’ migration policy was ‘out of control’. If we stayed in, the EU would be ‘ruthless’ and would milk us dry. As for that Obama man, pah, he had ‘just months left in the White House but plenty of golf to play’. This was a scornful reference to Mr Obama’s matey photo opportunity on the greens with Mr Cameron.
You don’t get much daintiness from Paterson. He serves up truths like a dinner lady slapping mince into a bowl.
He was asked about smokers’ rights and replied with a tremendous, prolonged funny attack on Brussels’s ‘ghastly precautionary principle’ (basically, how they try to nanny us).
For years Eurosceptics had been depicted as ‘ heretics, nutcases, cranks and odd members of the Tory right’ by the Establishment. In future it would be ‘a very, very respectable point of view’ to be a Brexiteer. We should seize the moment and ‘boot the elite’.
Some metropolitan Herbert from the Press (not in a cashmere coat, as it happens) suggested Mr Paterson was being ‘anti-Westminster’. Mr Paterson snorted that there was a quite different feel outside London.
‘It’s a bit like the Civil War when Charles I sadly completely lost touch with what was happening in the counties,’ he said. ‘Get out of the Westminster bubble,’ he told his questioner.
Beside me, IDS growled: ‘Yeah, go and talk to people.’