Clong! Pesto and Marr bounce off Battleship May
FAVOURITE red suit: check. British Caledonian stewardess scarf and blue eyeliner: check. Dead-bat answers: check, check, check. Theresa May did two of TV’s Sunday politics chat shows yesterday morning. While her campaign slogan for this general election may be ‘strong and stable’, she herself was steady if stodgy. Quite impressive, if you are in the market for stability. But I bet she’s rat poison to ratings.
The BBC’s Andrew Marr was first to throw himself against dreadnought May’s outer bows.
He bounced off. Clong! It must have been like headbutting a dumbbell.
ITV’s Robert Peston went next. Clong! Another 20 minutes of airtime passed at glacial speed. ‘This election is about the national interest,’ she intoned. ‘Strengthen the economy. More secure jobs. Jeremy Corbyn’s policies simply don’t add up. Exterminate. Exterminate.’
Actually, Peston did get a little further than Marr, managing to persuade Mrs May to commit an act of news: she will probably not raise VAT if she wins the election. But did anyone really expect her to?
Watching these interviewers hurl themselves into the fray, one felt twinges of sympathy on two fronts.
The first was for the TV presenters themselves, Marr and Peston, who must have been up at dawn to practise their killer questions, only to see most of them ignored.
The second twinge was for the European Union negotiators who at some point in proceedings, after their preliminaries with our Brexit Secretary David Davis, will have to be ushered into a room on neutral soil and do the business with Theresa, if we can put it like that.
The Europeans will hope to extract concessions from her. They will come up with all sorts of ruses to provoke her, to smoke out her position, to make her give away more than she attended.
She will gaze at them with those weary schoolmarm eyes and be no more forthcoming than yesterday morning.
To the Barniers and Verhofstadts and Junckers and Tusks I say, bon chance, laddios, but don’t give up the day job.
Already it seems she had driven M Juncker to the bottle. Not hard, admittedly, but there were several reports yesterday that after meeting her last week EC president Juncker raged that she was ‘ in a different galaxy’ from the Europeans.
‘I am not in a different galaxy,’ she told Marr yesterday – in the tone of a Vulcan. Marr, plainly something of a linguist, referred to Brexit as ‘ l’elephant dans la chambre’. He speculated that the first thing Mrs May would do if she won a healthy majority on June 8 would be to go to Brussels and ‘sign the cheque’ for billions of pounds the EU is demanding.
Yet Mrs May yesterday twice said that ‘no deal is better than a bad deal’.
LITTlE
Tim Farron had earlier told Marr that Mrs May was ‘heading for a colossal coronation’. He wanted people to vote lib Dem for a ‘strong and stable opposition’. Oh no. Not him, too.
Marr possibly tried to throw Mrs May by preceding her arrival with a segment about actor Damian lewis and his new role, playing a man who makes love to a goat. It gives new meaning to the phrase ‘nanny state’. Talking of which, Marr asked Mrs May what we can now perhaps call the Farron question: was gay sex sinful? ‘No,’ she replied instantly.
The BBC man then went into prolonged questions about nurses allegedly visiting food banks because they were too poor to afford to eat.
Mrs May did not ask for details of that claim but less trusting souls might have done.
The morning’s studio ‘sofa guests’ were markedly anti-Brexit. Marr had freelance journalists Owen Jones and Rachel Johnson (both said they would be campaigning on the doorsteps) and the Spectator’s Fraser Nelson. Peston had Cameroon lady Cavendish and Tony Blair’s old propagandist Alastair Campbell.
Only one of those five (Nelson) is proBrexit. Mind you, if Mrs May makes for predictable telly, grumpy Alastair is even worse.