May’s hoping future looks pants for Boris
It was the most bizarre sight of my political career. I was sitting by a grand piano in Ted Heath’s Salisbury living room surrounded by pictures of boats.
In waddles the former prime minister, then 73, wearing a shirt unbuttoned at the navel and a pair of skimpy hotpants.
Well, you could have knocked me down with a morning cloud.
I grant it was a hot summer day. But the width of his girth and the tightness of his shorts made him look none too comfortable.
Despite the unusual attire, we spent a jolly few hours rubbishing his successor Margaret Thatcher.
The Commons joke in those days was that Ted only stuck around as an MP for the satisfaction of witnessing Thatcher’s downfall.
Now I wonder for the future of Theresa May. Not that she might appear in her Maidenhead living room in hotpants, but that she’s also staying on just to watch Boris Johnson flounder, falter and fail.
He’s likely to implode quicker than Thatcher so Mrs May might not have long to wait. It would explain why she’s decided to stand again at the next election. And she kicked off her campaign to undermine the new PM last week by picking holes in his woolly jumper of a Queen’s Speech.
Mrs May said Johnson’s “oratory and arresting phrases” were not enough. He was doing nothing to improve mental health care or jail killer drivers for longer, two of her pet projects. She dismissed the proposal for a points- based immigration system as unworkable, just as she dismissed it in 2010 as Home Secretary.
And as for Johnson’s plan to lock up more foreign offenders in already overcrowded prisons... cripes, as he might say... total piffle.
Better to get rid of them instead, reasoned Mrs May. That means negotiating new prisoner transfers with the EU after Brexit.
Of the seven PMs who have passed through Parliament since I’ve been there, Mrs May was the worst – aside from the present one.
But I always admired her commitment, and her sense of duty and public service.
She tried to do the right thing, and only got it wrong because she wasn’t very good. Johnson doesn’t even try.
And as Mrs Thatcher discovered, to have a former PM backseat driving from the backbenches is always uncomfortable because they know how it works.
But when Boris Johnson becomes an ex-PM I can’t see him in hotpants.
I imagine his only interest in these reckless garments is when there’s a woman he fancies inside them.
Ex-PM tried but she just wasn’t very good. Boris doesn’t try That was a frosty walk Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn took to the House of Lords for Monday’s Queen’s Speech. Barely a word between them. My snout in earshot heard Boris plead with Jezza to perform for the cameras: “Let’s just chat about something.” “No,” snapped Jeremy over his shoulder.