I’ve known undertakers more fizzy than the SNP’s McEeyore
RUTH Davidson, leader of Scots Conservatives, made some remarks this week about how the Tory party should cheer up and try to project a bit of can-do pzazz and pffiff and general gaiety.
She was right to do so. Living with the Scots Nats, Miss Davidson must understand more than others how lifedeadening political gloominess can be. She may have been aiming her comments at our glumbucket Prime Minister but the SNP are even worse.
Take the tone with which a chap called John McNally (SNP, Falkirk) opened Transport Questions in the Commons yesterday. Mr McEeyore! Just to look at the fella was enough to plunge you into a Thursday morning pessimism. That is unfair, I know. We can not help how we look. Or can we? Would at least a smidgen of energy in the shoulders, a glint of effervescence in the eye, a pinch of salt in the general bearing, have been a help?
But Mr McNally conveyed none of the these. His whole apparatus, from beak to claw, shouted: ‘Misery! Misery! Me porridge is cold and me oatcakes is stale.’ I have known undertakers more fizzy. Mr McNally wanted to know what assessment had been made by the Department for Transport of Brexit’s effect on the rail industry. He was determined to be downbeat.
Franz Kafka, setting out from his lodgings on a misty Prague morning, or the young Keats, dipping his quill into his breakfast fried egg, could not have been more melancholy. He was the photographic negative of the late Ken Dodd.
Why, he intoned in a voice dank as an old mill, was the Government not promising to freeze rail fares? Was this not testament to the May administration’s ‘inability to provide even basic certainty over Brexit’?
Er, nope. Rail ticket prices really have nowt to do with Brexit, said Transport Secretary Chris Grayling. The obstructive behaviour of the rail unions had much more impact on railway economics.
Mr McNally did not look convinced. On his chops there fell an expression of fatalistic disgust. He was haloed by a sense of creaking defeatism. Nothing was good in the world. Nothing would ever prosper until the hated English and the hated Tories were gone. Brexit was but a peg for his world-weariness. He was entirely determined to be unhappy.
Mr McNally was not the only SNP shroud-waver. Alan Brown (Kilmarnock and Loudoun) had a couple of sallies. More despair und drang. How were we ever going to survive after Brexit? Nothing beneficial could be discerned anywhere.
And they call the Tories ‘the blues’! Mr Grayling is, despite his worst efforts, quite an interesting figure. He is the forgotten Brexiteer – the least prominent of the Cameron-era Cabinet ministers who came out for Leave. He has done little of the Brexit heavy-lifting. Crafty or cowardly? Yet he has survived, even though the railways have been in disarray. How did such an ineloquent politician become so good a survivor?
He was actually quite confrontational yesterday. Labour attacks on train service were knocked straight back at the bowler. It would not be right to say that he commanded the Chamber effortlessly but this was certainly a minister who was on top of his brief and was happy to depart his Whitehall script. I never thought I would say that about the old donkey.
CAN we say the same for his fellow ministers Jesse Norman, Jo Johnson and Nusrat Ghani? Ms Ghani is, let us say, not taciturn. Where ten words might suffice, she uses 50. There is no great indication there of brilliance.
Mr Johnson, younger brother of Boris, stuck assiduously to his official script – even saying ‘stakeholders’, dear oh dear.
Mr Norman was much better: succinct, direct, mildly uninterested, very tall. Dimmer Labour questions were put in their place with an attractive efficiency – a vet euthanising a gerbil.
Had Miss Davidson been watching she might have understood that sunbeaminess, though helpful, is not everything. A stooping, drawling derision also has its appeal.