Called to matins, the room filled in reverential silence
FIRST call of the day: a library off Whitehall, near the spot where Brandon’s axe severed Charles I’s head in 1649. Yesterday morning Brexiteers of the European Research Group were there to publish their suggested solution to the Irish border impasse.
Jacob Rees-Mogg (Con, NE Somerset) said ‘any reasonable person’ would see that his group’s detailed document met the EU’s concerns.
Beside him sat former Nobel prize winner Lord Trimble, two former Northern Ireland Secretaries and former Brexit Secretary David Davis. The tone at the event was initially almost ecclesiastical, the room filling in reverential silence. Bishop Rees-Mogg had called us to matins.
The meeting remained courteous. Although scurvy reporters kept trying to get these Brexiteers to say Theresa May was a useless clunker who should resign – a view taken, I have to say, with increasingly raw vehemence by most Tory party activists I have met recently – Mr Rees-Mogg and Co declined to comply.
He and Mr Davis praised Mrs May as ‘dutiful’. They just happened to think she was wrong with her Chequers plan and they hoped she would change that policy, which most observers thought was doomed.
‘There’s nothing in this paper that people could object to,’ said Tory MP and part-time nurse Maria Caulfield (Con, Lewes). ‘If there’s a political will, these measures can be implemented.’ Yes, but. But. But. There is no political will, not in Downing Street.
Mrs May’s gunpowder-sooted, torn-tunic desperadoes behind the No10 sandbags hate the idea of anyone actually solving the Irish border row. It has been jolly
useful to them in excusing their Chequers capitulations.
Mr Rees-Mogg ended the meeting in time, he said, for pre-sitting prayers at the Commons.
A few minutes later we heard that Downing Street was not remotely interested in Mr ReesMogg’s constructive suggestions. Did they say this with their fingers in their ears and their faces turned to the wall?
At noon came PMQs. What an unholy din. Perched above Jeremy Corbyn in my gallery seat, I was unable to hear what the old boy was saying in his last volley of questions. He was rendered inaudible by Conservatives who were screaming at him.
One of the worst offenders was Morecambe’s David Morris, who must have bawled ‘what’s YOUR plan?’ five times at Mr Corbyn. Speaker Bercow did nothing to stop Mr Morris.
Mrs May must have better hearing than me, for she was able to cop enough of Mr Corbyn’s remarks to retort that he had reduced the Labour Party to the point that one of its own MPs (Chuka Umunna, absent yesterday) had accused it of racism. ‘That’s what he’s done to Labour. Just think what he’d do to this country,’ she mooed.
THE SNP’s Ian Blackford, who elicits groans rather than heckles, told Mrs May she was ‘unfit to govern’ because ‘she still wants to walk off the Brexit cliff face’. Oh, if only that were so. Plaid Cymru’s Liz Saville-Roberts claimed Mrs May wanted to ‘appease Brexit extremists in her own party’. Mrs May, laughing: ‘That couldn’t be further from the case!’
Formerly loyalist Tory backbenchers were mutinous. Chris Philp (Con, Croydon S), whose permanent frown and staccato voice call to mind Capt Darling in TV’s Blackadder, wanted the PM to stop any payments to the EU unless they cooperated on Brexit.
While Mrs May gave a formulaic reply, Chancellor Philip Hammond muttered out of the side of his mouth to his neighbour.
I cannot be sure but I think Hammond may hold the energetic if blowy Philp in low esteem.
Johnny Mercer (Con, Plymouth Moor View) asked what Mrs May ‘personally’ was doing to stop long-retired Army veterans being chased through Northern Ireland’s courts.
Mrs May’s reply, again arid and inconclusive, left Mr Mercer shaking his head bleakly.
When a party leader has such a despairing effect on young Centrist MPs, you have to wonder how she is ever going to get that Chequers rubbish through the Commons.