I, Maybot Page 3
Time for a breather and some lunch. Theresa switched on the news to find that, in his first address to Foreign Office staff, Boris Johnson had promised to re-colonise Africa and pose naked as Mr November for President Putin’s 2017 calendar. Maybe it hadn’t been quite such a good appointment after all.
Patrick McLoughlin came and went fairly quickly. He didn’t look nearly as pleased to be offered the post of chairman of the Tory party and chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster as Theresa had expected. ‘But you’ll be able to appoint a few vicars and magistrates, Patrick,’ she said to his departing back.
More of a problem was Stephen Crabb, who had spent the previous 90 minutes chained to a radiator, after being informed he was being sent back to the Welsh office from the Department for Work and Pensions. ‘I’m a Crabb,’ he pointed out, reasonably. ‘I’m used to going sideways, but I’m buggered if I’ll go backwards.’
‘The thing is this, Stephen,’ Theresa said. ‘Your sexting wasn’t a good look. It’s Wales or nothing.’
‘It’s nothing.’
‘As you wish. Consider yourself a hermit Crabb.’
Chris Grayling also appeared underwhelmed to be put in charge of roadworks on the A303 and making sure HS2 was indefinitely delayed. ‘But I was your right-hand man throughout your leadership campaign,’ he wept.
‘But Chris, you always said you weren’t doing it in the hope of any reward.’
‘I didn’t mean it, though.’
‘Tough. It’s the best I can do. They don’t call you Failing Grayling for nothing.’
Theresa’s phone rang. It was one of her special advisers, reminding her she had forgotten to appoint someone in charge of the Department for International Development. She groaned. There was just so much to remember. ‘Do we have anyone who has actively campaigned to abolish the department?’ she asked.
‘Yup. Priti Patel.’
‘Great. Give her the job.’
By now it was getting late in the day, but Theresa had got her second wind. Besides, she had been saving the best till last.
‘Bring me the head of Andrea Garcia,’ she commanded.
Andrea Leadsom duly trooped through the door.
‘You’ve been a right pain in the neck during the referendum campaign and since,’ Theresa observed. Andrea tried to get in a word to explain how she hadn’t meant any of it, but Theresa just showed her the palm of her hand.
‘It’s been brought to my attention that your extensive knowledge of farming has led you to state that hill sheep smallholdings should be converted into butterfly sanctuaries,’ Theresa said. ‘As a result of this, I have decided it’s only right to put you in charge of the environment, farming and rural affairs. Now go and explain to the farmers how they’re going to be worse off without their EU subsidies.’
‘But I hate the countryside …’
‘GO.’
The perfect end to the perfect first day.
Theresa could have reinvented herself as anyone – but she came as Maggie
20 JULY 2016
The Thatch is back. For her first prime minister’s questions Theresa May could have been anyone. She could have been Sensitive Theresa, Caring Theresa, Funny Theresa. Any Theresa she cared to reinvent herself as. Instead, she said: ‘Tonight, Matthew, I’m going to be Maggie.’ Why be your own woman when you can be the one whom large sections of the Tory party have never fallen out of love with?
Close your eyes and the years could have been rolled back to the early 1980s. An uncompromising, graceless and brittle figure at the dispatch box and a horde of semi-priapic backbenchers braying. The Tories might have a far better record at appointing female leaders than Labour but their male MPs still leave a lot to be desired.
The similarities with the mid-80s didn’t end with a female prime minister. The Labour benches are in as much disarray now as they were then, with a leader who fails to inspire any confidence in his own MPs. Jeremy Corbyn’s arrival in the chamber was greeted with barely a flicker of interest by even his frontbench. Corbyn tried to pretend this was all normal as he prepared for his first confrontation with May but he couldn’t conceal his humiliation.
Corbyn started promisingly by holding the prime minister to account for her speech outside Downing Street the week before, in which she had laid out her social justice programme. Yet somehow, despite holding all the aces – after all, May had been home secretary for six years in a government under which inequality had significantly worsened – Corbyn failed to land any killer punches.
For a brief moment, it had looked as if he might score heavily with a reference to Boris Johnson’s track record of casual racism and open insults to every country on the planet but he missed the opportunity to make the point stick. Instead, May was allowed to get away with just ignoring her foreign secretary. For now. Boris is going to come in for this kind of flak wherever he goes and his position as a serious diplomatic negotiator must be untenable.
Beginning to realise Corbyn had nothing to offer that could hurt her, May began to channel her inner, hardcore Thatch. ‘You call it austerity,’ she growled, in a voice chillingly reminiscent of her predecessor. ‘I prefer to call it living within our means.’ Here was the grocer’s daughter made flesh. The ordinary housewife – albeit one, like Maggie, who was also conveniently married to an extremely supportive millionaire – who looked after the shillings and pence on the nation’s weekly shopping bill. At the first sighting of Iron Lady 2.0, the more incontinent Tory backbenches had their first premature ejaculation.
Thrilled to have negotiated her first sticky patch, Theresa went for 110% Maggie. When Corbyn made the schoolboy error of bringing up job insecurity, May reached for her one pre-scripted gag. ‘I suspect that many members on the opposition benches might be familiar with an unscrupulous boss – a boss who does not listen to his workers, a boss who requires some of his workers to double their workload and maybe even a boss who exploits the rules to further his own career,’ she said.
Each word was dragged out with the comic timing of someone failing an audition for Britain Hasn’t Got Talent but the Tories greeted it with hysterical laughter. A mixture of creepy unctuousness and childhood regression to Mummy. ‘More,’ they cried. Theresa obliged. Lowering her voice to a register even Maggie might have struggled with and adopting an exaggerated, pantomime gurn, she added: ‘Remind you of anyone?’ Behind her, several other backbenchers rushed out to get some wet wipes.
Thrilled the Cameron shackles were now off and that the happy nasty party days were back in vogue, the Conservative Stuart Andrew celebrated by making a gay joke. ‘Growing up on a council estate, I found it tough coming out – as a Conservative.’ Boom, boom, Stuart. The old ones are the old ones. On the front bench, Boris looked rather annoyed that someone else was getting the laughs. Perhaps the Commons wanted to hear his one about the piccaninnies and Nurse Ratchet?
The nursery was becoming rowdier and rowdier. For May, this was all getting a bit too cosy and familiar. Time to remind people who was boss. She looked around for the weakest person in the Commons. After Tim Farron had offered her a gracious welcome, May responded by humiliating him. ‘My party is much bigger than yours,’ she sneered. It was classless, graceless and unnecessary but it still provoked roars of approval. Blessed are the meek, for they will be roundly trashed.
* * *
After the seismic shocks of the EU referendum and the Tory leadership election, the summer recess came as a welcome break for politicians from all parties. Theresa May chose to go walking in Switzerland for her holidays. Those hoping some mountain air might refresh the Supreme Leader’s rhetoric would be sorely disappointed, however. At the first cabinet after recess she said, ‘We must continue to be very clear that Brexit means Brexit, that we’re going to make a success of it. That means there’s no second referendum, no attempts to sort of stay in the EU by the back door, that we’re actually going to deliver on this.’ This lack of clarity might not have done her any harm in the polls – An IC
M/Guardian poll gave the Conservatives a 14-point lead over the opposition – but it wasn’t likely to impress any of the other world leaders at the G20 summit in China she was due to meet in a few days’ time.
* * *
So Brexit means Brexit means Brexit. Is that it?
5 SEPTEMBER 2016
The six-week holiday may have gone some way to concentrating the mind, but it has done little to clarify the thinking. Brexit remains as gnomic now as it did back in July. ‘The reason I’ve been saying Brexit means Brexit is precisely because it means it does,’ said Theresa May, pioneering a new branch of illogical positivism during a rather tetchy press conference at the G20 summit in China.
What Brexit had appeared to mean at the G20 was the prime minister getting shunted to the back row of the leaders’ group photo, being briefed against by the Americans and the Japanese and being left to big up the fact that Mexico, Australia and Singapore have expressed a vague interest in doing trade deals with the UK. It’s a start, I suppose. If not the one that May would have been hoping for.
Nor was there any real enlightenment on the meaning of Brexit to be found in the Commons as Brexit minister David Davis gave his first lack-of-progress report. This was Davis’s first outing on the government front bench for more than 19 years and he came to the house flanked by Boris Johnson and Liam Fox as his security blanket. This unexpected show of unity was quickly explained; none of them have yet actually done anything to fall out over. Give it time. Quite a long time, to judge by Davis’s statement.
‘Britain voted overwhelmingly to leave the EU,’ he began. In Brexitworld a 52–48 vote is a total landslide. ‘So Brexit means Brexit means Britain leaving the EU.’
It wasn’t long before the Labour benches started laughing and shouting, ‘Waffle, waffle.’ Davis took this as an instruction rather than a criticism. ‘We will be creating beacons and roundtables of organisations,’ he waffled on. ‘There will be challenges but these are opportunities and everything will basically be fine once we’ve got round to thinking about it with the brightest and best minds in Whitehall, though obviously there can be no room for complacency.’
‘Is that it?’ interrupted the SNP’s Pete Wishart. Davis nodded. That was about it, though he was more than happy to repeat himself for another five minutes or so before concluding that he would be returning to parliament at regular intervals to give updates on everything that wasn’t happening.
When Emily Thornberry was first appointed shadow minister for Brexit alongside her day job as shadow foreign secretary it looked as if the reason she had been made to double up was because Jeremy Corbyn hadn’t been able to find anyone else willing to do it. Now the duplication looks more like an act of genius. Why bother to have a separate shadow minister for a department that wasn’t likely to be doing very much for the foreseeable future?
‘So far all we’ve learnt about Brexit is that the government is not going to introduce a points-based immigration system or give £350 million per week to the NHS,’ she observed. ‘Both of which were two of the key Vote Leave promises in the referendum campaign. The government has gone from gross negligence to rank incompetence. You’re making this up as you’re going along.’
Davis took this as a compliment. A sign that he was really getting to grips with the job and that progress was being made. Even if only by a process of elimination. ‘We’re definitely not going to have a points-based system because that is what the prime minister said yesterday,’ he declared. ‘What we are going to have is a results-based system that might be even tougher.’ There again, it might not. It was precisely to sort out these kinds of details that he would be consulting roundtables and beacons.
Thereafter, the house divided on predictably partisan lines. Those on the Remain side wanted to get to grips with the nitty gritty of what access to the single market Britain would get, how EU laws would be repealed and whether Britain would remain signed up to Europol. Those on the Leave side thought such things were minor niggles and what really mattered was sticking two fingers up to the Frogs and the Hun and returning sovereignty to parliament. Though not to the extent of giving parliament a vote on the details – should any ever emerge – of the Brexit negotiations reached as it might vote against it.
‘Is that it?’ several more MPs enquired.
‘Is that it?’ Davis echoed. He’s been on the back benches for so long he hasn’t quite appreciated he’s now supposed to be answering the questions not asking them.
Not quite. There was just time for newspaper columnist Michael Gove to declare that everything was going far better than ‘the soi-disant experts with oeuf on their face’ had predicted and begging the minister never to consult anyone who might know what they were talking about. So far, that’s the one promise Davis has been able to keep.
Brexit means never having to say you’re sorry (or anything at all)
7 SEPTEMBER 2016
Careless talk costs lives. With her advisers having belatedly realised that saying ‘Brexit means Brexit’ was providing the country with far too much information about what Brexit actually means, Theresa May devoted much of prime minister’s questions and her subsequent statement on the G20 summit in China to damage limitation. She has already had to slap down David Davis for making up policy on the hoof in the Commons and her other two liabilities, Boris Johnson and Liam Fox, have yet to open their mouths.
It used to be the case that most people stopped listening to PMQs once the two leaders had finished going head to head. On Wednesday, it was the moment when many chose to tune in. With Brexit uppermost in everyone’s minds and the government front benches struggling even to maintain the ‘Brexit means Brexit’ line, Jeremy Corbyn asked the prime minister about the housing crisis. It was almost as if he was making a point of ignoring Owen Smith’s email instructing him to lead with Britain’s relationship with Europe.
May couldn’t believe her luck and clumsily shoehorned the gags she had prepared for harder questions into her non-answers. Her escape was only temporary, though, as she was forced on to the back foot by the SNP’s Angus Robertson, who wanted to know whether Britain would remain part of the single market. She glanced at her notes. ‘REMEMBER NOT TO SAY BREXIT MEANS BREXIT’. Written in capitals.
‘Brexit means …’ she began, before pausing. What did it mean if it didn’t mean Brexit? No. She couldn’t allow herself to think that way. She must try to stifle her natural tendency towards honesty and transparency. She started again. ‘It would not be right to give a running commentary on our Brexit. I know this is exactly the opposite of what the minister for Brexit promised you all on Monday, but that only goes to show how much progress we have made with our Brexit negotiations over the course of two days.
‘The relationship with Europe that we will be getting is a very special one that I can’t tell you about right now because I haven’t got a clue what it will look like. But I can promise you that it won’t be a Norwegian relationship because we are not Norwegians.
‘It will be a very special British relationship, which will be ours and ours alone and, once I have spent the next two years failing to get what I want, I will tell you what I have reluctantly settled for. Trust me on this, though. You’re wanting it. You’re loving it. You’re getting it.’
If May appeared somewhat taken aback when she eventually realised that many MPs were openly laughing at her, she looked abject when Tory backbencher Bernard Jenkin leapt to her rescue. ‘I feel more confident now about the future of the UK than at any other time in my life,’ he announced. Jenkin is one of those politicians with the unerring knack of being wrong about almost everything. So when he’s feeling good, it’s time for the rest of us to panic.
There was no let-up when the prime minister moved on to her G20 statement. ‘It would not be right for me to give a running commentary on our Brexit negotiations,’ she said, more than happy to repeat herself. While it wasn’t right to give a running commentary on her Brexit negotiations, it was perfectly in order to
give a running commentary on why she wouldn’t be giving a running commentary. ‘And not giving a running commentary was the process I took into the G20.
‘But let me say this. I am delighted to say that Mexico and Singapore are quite keen to do a trade deal with us at some unspecified time in the future and that when the Australians say they are going to put the UK at the back of the queue behind the EU, what they really mean is we are at the top of their thoughts and prayers. And by the way, I did whisper something about steel dumping when I was in the toilet so nobody can say I wasn’t tough with the Chinese.’
Most MPs had hoped May might have had a little more to show for her jaunt to China and several tried to tease out a few more details about what Brexit deals were in the offing. ‘I understand that you don’t want to give away any sensitive information,’ said Conservative Anna Soubry. ‘But could you at least tell us some of the principles that will underlie the negotiations?’
‘No.’
Labour’s Yvette Cooper tried another tack. ‘Without giving away any sensitive information, could you give us an idea of the values that will inform the negotiations?’
‘No.’
No principles. No values. No progress. No clue.
* * *
It hadn’t just been the Tories that had been having a leadership contest. Having only just got himself on to the ballot paper at the last minute the year before, thanks to a few Labour MPs thinking it would look good to have a token lefty in the mix, Jeremy Corbyn found himself facing a second contest inside 12 months. With Labour consistently lagging a long way behind the Tories in the polls, Owen Smith had put himself forward as the moderate candidate in a new leadership challenge. The result, which was announced at the Labour party conference in Liverpool, was the same as before: though the country didn’t appear to think too highly of Corbyn, the Labour membership (dramatically increased since the reduction of the joining fee to £3) was overwhelmingly behind him.