Soubry threw her eyeballs around like dice in a cup
DAVID Davis had to wait quite a long time to make his first post-resignation Commons speech. It came after six o’clock in a debate on cross-border taxation. The House had earlier been subjected to a long, husky, emotional contribution from hardline Europhile Anna Soubry (Con, Broxtowe).
She went off on one: Rude to fellow Tories, high-flown about the terrors of Brexit, throwing her eyeballs round their sockets like a couple of dice in a cup. She spoke possibly twice as long as was advisable.
The contrast presented by Mr Davis ( Con, Haltemprice & Howden) was marked. He was calm, civil, factual, selfdeprecatory. ‘I will not be firing any jibes off,’ he said, looking briefly over his spectacles in the direction of Miss Soubry.
The rest of his speech was assiduously low-key. He did not attack Mrs May, though he would have been quite justified in doing so. He said many of the difficulties over Brexit were ‘eminently soluble’. Most objective onlookers would have listened to him and thought ‘there speaks a voice of sanity’.
When he reached the end of his brief remarks he simply said ‘there we are’ and modestly resumed his seat.
The man to restore composure to our public life?
Earlier, Mrs May was at the despatch box, laying down assertions, presenting what is supposed to be the long-term view of Her Majesty’s Government. But how much does it matter any more? After that Chequers stitch-up, when she plainly misled Mr Davis badly, how much is her word believed?
A few desultory members of the May Cabinet sat on the Commons front bench. Jeremy Hunt, newly-promoted Foreign Secretary, inspected his patron from an angle, chewing his cud, his stare one of curiosity rather than palpable admiration.
Mr Hunt suddenly looks a little broader. Are his shoulders preparing for new burdens? Between him and Mrs May sat the Chancellor, Philip Hammond, his nearcentral parting accentuating the vertical sweep of his beak. A vulture out on the limb of a leafless tree in Africa. So much of the last week or so’s wreckage is his fault. On Mrs May’s other side: Her deputy, David Lidington, a bag of twitches.
HERE they were, Misery Central, all of them one-time Remainers, none of them a gut Brexiteer. Vegetarians at a pig roast. Home Secretary Sajid Javid attended for a while but he soon scarpered. Good call, Saj’.
Mrs May had been there to report to MPs about last week’s Nato summit. She burbled away but few were really listening. Jeremy Corbyn had a joke about how the real ‘ever-present threat’ to Mrs May was not Russia but Jacob Rees-Mogg. Mr Javid became very cross about that. Labour’s Yvette Cooper was peeved that President Trump had insulted the mayor of London. ‘Our democratic values are under attack,’ said Miss Cooper.
Our democratic values? Remind me. What are they? Do they include respect for a clear referendum result or do they now embrace ignoring 17.4million voters so that a few multinational firms and a few civil servants can have an easier life?
Mrs May was repeatedly teased about her latest alleged cave- in, this time to Eurosceptics.
She said she was always ‘happy to hear from colleagues’ and she denied that the latest developments made any difference to her Chequers White Paper. It is hard to square that with reality. But no one bothered to mock her claim that nothing had changed.
Parliament does not mock faders for whom it feels pity.
Time and again, Remainer MPs dismissed Brexit-supporting MPs as being ‘unrepresentative’ and ‘extreme’. The direct opposite may well be the case.
Brexit has sent Westminster so daft, its wilder fanatics on both sides can no longer comprehend how ridiculous they sound. Miss Soubry was furious with Tory Eurosceptics for refusing to agree with Mrs May. She thought their rebelliousness was dreadful. This from an MP who herself just a few hot days ago was rebelling against, er, Mrs May.