Like a dying bull in the ring, the PM kept fighting
FEW of you will have been to a bullfight, I suspect. You haven’t missed much. My late uncle, who lived in Spain, took me to a corrida a few times and for all the stuff about Iberian culture, I used to find the shows predictable. The bull was always going to lose.
It would arrive in the ring snorting, kicking its heels. We’d be invited by the brass band to admire the magnificence of the beast.
Yet for me the closing moments of each bout were when the beast displayed even greater nobility, for that was when it had been much speared, blood streaming down its flanks, mucus spilling from its nose.
All was lost, and its bovine brain must have registered that, but the bull would go on throwing its head, still charging, still doing its thing. It knew it was doomed but it refused to stop fighting.
Theresa May had something of that yesterday. Some 27 hours before the vote on her EU Withdrawal deal, she came to the House to make a Statement about letters she had received from Brussels offering alleged assurances. Everyone was sure her deal was a goner. Yet still she threw herself into the task. Still she tried.
When she entered the Chamber at 4.13pm, the Tory benches were only half full. Cabinet ministers dribbled in to sit on the front bench but they did so without much indignation on her behalf. What gutless weaklings. The odd thing is that Boris Johnson and David Davis and other Brexiteers used to be far more of a support to her than these sponge-palmed dullards. Brokenshire, Bradley, Hinds, Mundell – you wouldn’t want them in the House 3rd XV scrum. It is Mrs May’s fault, alas. She chose the wetlings.
Standing at the despatch box – for how many more times? – she summoned her energies one more time to trudge, politely, through the spiel: A future trading deal could be agreed swiftly, the EU liked the backstop no better than we did, this was ‘the best deal’ available, etc.
To stop Brexit, as Labour and Tory Remainers wish to do, would be, she said, ‘a subversion of our democracy’. That won her the biggest hear-hears of the day. Most of the cheers came from the proper Tories (ie, those who sit beyond the gangway) but a few came from the Labour side.
JEREMY Corbyn left little impact. ‘The Government is in disarray,’ he yelled. ‘ So are you,’ shouted Simon Hoare, a Tory heckler. Mr Hoare’s repartee is pretty juvenile but he and Corbyn deserved one another yesterday.
Kenneth Clarke (Con, Rushcliffe) said the PM was caught between ‘ hardline Brexiteers’ and ‘hardline Remainers’.
Few have been such zealots for a cause as Mr Clarke has been in his career for the undemocratic Europe. Sir Vince Cable, Lib Dem leader, tried to create political room by claiming that Mrs May and Mr Corbyn were ‘essentially two peas in a pod’ (ie, they both wanted us to leave the EU). ‘Definitely not!’ said Mrs May, with a ghost of a smile.
Ed Miliband, talking of ghosts, claimed that the Government was ‘a servant of this House’. Mrs May replied that ‘the Government is a servant of the people’. This is an increasingly vital distinction. Today’s parliamentary class regards voters with contempt.
A large belt of the population wants us to leave the EU with no deal, yet hardly anyone in this Commons, save for a few Tory Brexiteers, reflects that view.
Nigel Dodds of the DUP said the letters from Brussels had ‘ changed nothing’. Various Remainers wanted Mrs May to delay Brexit. Windy Labour Europhile Barry Sheerman: ‘Why should we rush it?’
Rush it? By March 29 it will have been almost three years since the people spoke. Yet still our elite has its fingers in its ears.
Sir David Natzler, the Commons Clerk who was treated so contemptuously last week by the odious Bercow, was not in his place. Don’t blame him.