Wailing Phil made one long for a gin and hemlock
TWO speeches, two approaches to life. One (from Philip Hammond) was baleful in a mechanical sort of way but so defeatist it made one long for a prelunch gin and hemlock.
The other (from Environment Secretary Michael Gove) could have been chirruped by a plump nuthatch. He made the hall laugh and cheer. We were going to be free of the EU and as a result we’d be able to make the countryside greener. The hall was lifted by his optimism and thanked him with cheers and laughter.
Mr Hammond ambled to the lectern with two intentions: to rough up Labour’s Marxists and to accept the Brexit result in a grudging way. Sulky. That’s the Hammond forte. He could make Ted Heath look positively gay.
Mr Hammond ceded ground to Boris Johnson and the Brexiteers when he said that the EU referendum result was a vote for ‘independence over integration’. This tacitly accepts that the sovereignty aspects of Brexit trump short-term commercial convenience. ‘ Our political future will be our own,’ he admitted.
Being Hammond, he went on to wail that it was all going to be terribly ‘ complex’. Eek. Grind. Moan. That’s the man he is: a member of a British political establishment which, in various silos of inertia, has gone on dirty protest and grumpily yearns for Brexit to fail so that it can stick out its lower lip and say ‘told you so’.
Pet shops should sell Essence of Hammond in droplet bottles, to be administered to overexcited terriers too fond of biting postmen’s ankles.
One pipette of Eau de Phil and Fido would be stunned for hours.
The conference ( already pretty moribund) listened to Mr Hammond with politeness but little evident delight. I watched faces. Few smiled. Hardly anyone nodded. Several played with their mobile telephones.
And
yet his speech contained an assault on Corbynism that in anyone else’s voice could have been riotously combative. ‘Politics is the clash of ideas, so we say to Corbyn “bring it on”,’ he croaked in his lightly nasal voice. Weybridge accountant puts down his briefcase, folds his jacket and challenges skinhead to a fight. Show us your dukes, yobbo, if you wouldn’t awfully mind.
The Hammond larynx? A dry clarinet reed. You wish he would drink port or eat creamier food or start smoking Gitanes – anything to lend him richer vocal resonance.
For part of the speech I watched his black shoes, shiny as a 1960s ministerial Humber. Any orator who was truly immersed in the moment would jump up and down, bouncing at the lectern with the emotional effort. Mr Hammond’s feet barely moved save the odd inch forward and back. King Henry at Harfleur, this was not.
Labour’s ‘back-to-the-future socialist fantasy’ was a ‘clear and present danger’ to our economy, he said. It was ‘wicked and cynical’. Strong words. He delivered them with no more theatricality than a Marks & Spencer finance director announcing the dividend.
The moment he finished, Theresa and Philip May leapt up to clap. Relief that the speech was over?
They were even faster to their feet than special adviser Poppy Trowbridge, the sharp-clawed young madam who does Mr Hammond’s behind-the-arras work for him.
She went clack- clacking off, beaming, though her triumphant satisfaction was not universally shared by the tranquilised Tory tribe.
How much better Mr Gove was when he spoke mid-afternoon. He had an opening gag about how he was in favour of recycling (he himself being a retread) and then a biff at Tony Blair and Vince Cable for trying to overturn the result of the EU referendum.
He proceeded to point out that once we had ‘taken back control’ (cheers at this) from the EU we will be able to do more to give agricultural subsidies to farms that really need them; we will also be able to revive British fishing – ‘a sea of opportunity’.
Was fishing mentioned even once at Labour last week?