Don’t panic, don’t panic! Listen to the foreign secretary on the morning media round and you’d imagine that the evacuation of British nationals from Sudan was the most successful military operation of its kind since Dunkirk. Just without the small boats. Thousands of men, women and children rescued from under the noses of warring militias. All thanks to the bravery and leadership of one man. Take a bow, James “Ice Cool in Alex” Cleverly. “Oh no, no, no,” he didn’t demur, modestly. “I was just doing my job. I’m here to serve.”
Only, the pictures and reports coming out of Khartoum tell a rather different story. One of chaos. No one knowing exactly what is going on. Just over 500 people evacuated out of a possible 4,000 or so. Ill and disabled parents of British nationals having visa applications refused and being left behind. And only a few hours till the fragile ceasefire ends.
Even in the best-case scenario, at least half of all Brits will be left behind. Meanwhile, the French and the Germans have been well ahead of the game. All their nationals are long since back in Europe. The Germans were the ones who got up at first light to plant their beach towels on the runway. All the Brits could do was form a disorderly queue and hope for the best.
But some lessons at least have been learned from the shambolic Kabul airlift in 2021. The first is for the foreign secretary to actually be in the UK and looking busy. Two years ago, Dominic Raab was on a sunlounger in Crete, moaning that the sea was closed and wondering why everyone in Afghanistan was making such a fuss. If they wanted to leave the country, why couldn’t they make their own arrangements. What the hell did it have to do with him anyway?
Cleverly had been on a tour of the Pacific – nice work if you can get it – when the situation in Sudan deteriorated and had immediately cut short his trip and come home. No one was going to accuse him of being asleep on the job. Since then, Jimmy C has been hard at it. Looking at the atlas to find out where Sudan actually is. Trying to stay at least one fact ahead of any nosy MPs or reporters. It’s an improvement.
Then there’s the comms. No matter how disorganised the situation may be, Cleverly has learned to spin a good line. That everything is actually fine. The country can breathe and sleep easily because its foreign secretary has everything under control. So Jimmy is quite selective in his interpretation. He can’t say much as he’d have to kill us if he did. But to have rescued so many against the odds was a triumph. Focus on the 500 human interest stories. Not the 3,500 left behind. And if people did start wondering why the TV pix were so chaotic, just tell them they had cognitive dissonance.
The thing is to keep telling people what you want them to believe. So Cleverly was back in the Commons on Thursday lunchtime to give another statement – the second of the week – on just how brilliant and humble he was. The evacuation was moving at pace, no one could have done more, and he was personally offering to step in to negotiate a peace between the two warring factions. He seemed weirdly confident that the warlords would be listening in to parliament and would take him up on the offer. The rest of the statement was padded out with some facts about Sudan that he’d found on Wikipedia.
No one really had any questions for the foreign secretary. Mostly because they were as much in the dark about what’s really going on as Cleverly. But that’s the way Jimmy C likes it. Giving wishy-washy, feelgood answers to general enquiries.
The session was mostly notable for the return of Scott Benton, suspended as a Tory MP for offering to take cash for questions from the gambling industry. Young Scottie gently wondered if any country had ever been more compassionate than the UK. Clearly he’s desperate for forgiveness. Everyone else just assumed he was on the payroll of the Sudanese government.
Cleverly had also been on message in the morning. At the end of one interview, he had been asked about the Steve Barclay bullying allegations. Jimmy C had looked momentarily perturbed. He had visions of the Raabster and the Barclayster stripping naked and wrestling one another in the cabinet room. Best to be on the safe side. “The health secretary has made a thorough statement which I entirely accept,” he said. Only Barclay had said nothing. Cleverly had been bullied into remembering something that hadn’t happened. That was usually his trick.
Still. All in all, it had been a good day for the foreign secretary. Which is more than can be said for the junior levelling up minister, Rachel Maclean. Up till now, I had been under the impression Chris Philp was the stupidest, least competent minister in the current government. The brown-noser’s brown-noser.
But I take it all back. Philp is a wunderkind compared with Maclean. Wire her up to an EEG and there would be a straight line. God only knows what the voters of Redditch saw in her. And to think the local Tory party must have felt there were even worse candidates.
Maclean was in parliament to answer an urgent question on voter ID. A tricky one for someone lacking the capacity to identify herself in a mirror. She had clearly decided either she couldn’t be arsed to find out any basic information or she could just wing it. Either way, she crashed and burned. Luckily, she was too dim to appreciate her full humiliation.
All Labour’s Clive Betts wanted to know was whether voters who got turned away by greeters outside polling stations for not having ID would be counted in the statistics. Instead of just saying she didn’t have a clue and hadn’t been bothered to find out, she started lashing out. Labour just wanted to encourage voter fraud – note there were no prosecutions in 2022 – and it should just mind its own business.
Before long, Maclean was even getting grief from her own MPs. They were well used to useless ministers, but Maclean was taking the piss. Taking them all down with her. Getting snippy with everyone. Making a virtue of being clueless. In the end, it was Betts who answered his own question via a text message from the Electoral Commission and a point of order. No, voters outside the doors wouldn’t be counted. Maclean let out a piercing yell. Two medics rushed in to administer intravenous Valium. Let the flatlining recommence.
• This article was amended on 27 April 2023 because an earlier version referred to an ECG (which measures the heart), when an EEG (which measures brain activity) was meant.
