Johnson fights back on aid front after going a goal down to Rashford

First, a correction. In recent sketches I’ve argued that Boris Johnson faces a dangerous new opponent. One with the intelligence, determination and skill to force the Prime Minister into embarrassing defeats and climbdowns. That much was true. What I got wrong was his identity. It isn’t Sir Keir Starmer. It’s Marcus Rashford.

Yesterday, after just 24 hours of campaigning, the England footballer forced the Government into a U-turn on free school meals. Mere moments after conceding defeat, Boris Johnson was on his feet in the Commons. It has to be said, by his usual sunlit standards he sounded just a tiny bit grumpy. Perhaps he was concerned that the Rashford row would overshadow the big announcement he’d come to make. In short: that he was folding the Department for International Development into the Foreign Office.

The Prime Minister insisted the Dfid was not being abolished; if anything, he made it sound like a promotion. He was creating, he blared, “a new super-department”. Far from axing Dfid, he was “enhancing” it, making its staff “part of one of the most senior departments in the country”.

Inevitably, opposition parties were up in arms. “Not Global Britain, but Little England!” cried Chris Bryant (Lab, Rhondda). Meanwhile, both Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, and Sir Ed Davey, the acting Lib Dem leader, claimed the plan was designed purely to “distract” the public from the Government’s myriad other woes.

Somewhat unfair, surely: the timing may have been sudden, but Mr Johnson was advocating this very plan six months before he became Prime Minister. It seems unlikely that in January 2019 he was thinking, “Hmm. Better suggest this policy now, just in case at some point next summer I’m PM and need to whip out a headlinegrabbing wheeze to distract the country from my struggle to contain a ruinous pandemic. Not to mention my defeat over free school meals by a 22-year-old Man Utd striker.”

Mary Foy (Lab, Durham) denounced it as “a populist stunt”. Again, somewhat unfair: the PM said the aid budget would stay at 0.7 per cent of GDP. A populist would have scrapped it altogether. So if Mr Johnson is a populist, he isn’t a very good one.

Either way, the criticism did seem to rile him. In his anger he ended up mangling his words. “We’re giving more money than any other country to the search for a virus!” he snapped. (Clearly he meant vaccine. As I’m sure the Prime Minister appreciates, the country already has quite enough viruses to be getting on with.)

Still, whatever the opposition thinks, this merger is one issue on which Mr Johnson is certain to get his way. Unless Marcus Rashford steps in to block it.