Low-energy PM better at liaisons than committees
With his taste for rhetoric and bluster, Boris Johnson never seems too comfortable in technocratic environments or sterile meeting rooms. He prefers the cut and thrust of the campaign trail or a full Commons, preferably backed by baying Tory MPS. How, then, would he fare in this, his second grilling of 2020 by the liaison committee, Westminster’s fearsome star chamber of select committee heads?
The results were at best anaemic, at worst toe-curling. Chairman Sir Bernard Jenkin began by trying to extract a promise to attend the requisite three sessions. “I’ll look carefully in my diary and do my utmost to oblige this distinguished committee before Christmas,” oiled the PM, with a roguish charm suggestive of someone more at home with liaisons than committees.
From then on, however, he spoke in repetitive staccato. His repeated expressions of “utmost respect” quickly proved tedious.
Hilary Benn asked if Lord Keen, the Advocate General for Scotland, was still in post. “Conversations on that matter are still continuing” said the PM, as if he were either absent or merely a passive participant in them. (In fact he must have been, since within minutes of the hearing’s end, we heard that Keen had been sacked).
When taxed on the Government’s target of 10million tests a day, he claimed not to recognise the figure.
Could there, in fact, be multiple Borises in play? In a futuristic powersharing agreement, perhaps the Boris of last week who spoke so ambitiously of Operation Moonshot had been given the day off, leaving one of the clones to face the committee’s wrath.
Particularly strident questioning came from Meg Hillier and Catherine Mckinnell of Labour; their red dresses presaging violence. “What are you going to do to support the children who are kept off school?”, asked Ms Hillier, emanating a cold fury usually only encountered at school after incidents leading to lines, detention and a letter to your mother. How can it be easier, pierced Ms Mckinnell, “for an expectant father to go to the pub or grouse shooting than to attend his own baby’s growth scans?” “We are looking at that”, answered the PM, evidently desperate to escape to the remotest grouse moor he could find.
This was a low-wattage PM, bereft of energy and answers. Perhaps in a hanger somewhere, the old Merrie England Boris lies dormant, waiting to take back control from his technocratic interlopers.
Alas! Probably not.