All praise the government of all the talentless. Or look at it this way. If Thérèse Coffey can make it to the cabinet, how useless do the rest of the Tory MPs have to be not to make the cut? Or perhaps Coffey has some svengali-like hold over Rishi Sunak. Can bend him to her will. Because let’s be honest, there’s no obvious sign of intelligent life in her. She’s at her most convincing when she’s at her most unconscious.
You’d have thought the environment secretary would have taken notes. Would have seen Sunak and Mark Spencer crash and burn at the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) conference in Birmingham on Monday, and made an effort to raise her game before facing the same crowd on Tuesday.
But Coffey arrived on stage in the manner of someone who had no interest in her audience and couldn’t wait to get back on the train to London. “Let me be clear,” she said time and again. In the manner of someone incapable of doing just that.
“Farming is about producing food,” she said, uninterestedly. Money can’t buy that level of searing insight. But it was the closest to intelligent life Thérèse could manage. She couldn’t even be arsed to go through the motions of announcing some extra money for farmers that had already been announced – the least any conference audience expects from a visiting government minister. She had come with nothing.
Things got even worse when the Q&A began, as Coffey upped the ante. The boredom morphed into outright rudeness. Who cared if you couldn’t buy salad or vegetables in the supermarkets these days? People would just have to get used to it. She couldn’t control the temperature in Spain. And would it be so bad if some people got scurvy? It was pointed out to her that the trouble was also rising costs of heating polytunnels. Thérèse yawned. Whatever.
Coffey then got into an argument with the NFU president, Minette Batters, about the market failures in egg production. The minister shrugged. She supposed the hens were on strike. Just about everyone else in the country was. Batters reminded her that more than 1 million hens had been lost to avian flu and some farmers had gone out of business. Thérèse looked at her watch. She had had enough of this question. Did someone have another. And before anyone asked, it was all the farmers’ fault that the Defra website was so inaccessible.
Long before the end, Coffey was being loudly booed by most people in the audience. Not that Thérèse cared. Her performance had had it all. Mostly total indifference. It was as if the Tories had already given up on the next election.
Down in Westminster, the deckchairs were being rearranged for prime minister’s questions. Dominic Raab had been ever present at Sunak’s side for these occasions up until now. But no longer. There was no sign of Psycho Dom. Perhaps Rish! has finally got round to airbrushing him out of the picture before the report on the bullying allegations. At the other end of the chamber, Nadhim “He Pays What He Wants” Zahawi made a tentative step towards his rehabilitation by making his first appearance back in the Commons since he was fired for a dodgy tax return.
Rish! had wanted this PMQs to be a victory lap. A chance to celebrate his success in achieving what no previous Tory leader had managed: resolving the Northern Ireland Brexit deal. To face down the DUP and the hardline ERGers in his own party in a display of pragmatic statesmanship. To see off Boris once and for all. He could almost taste the prize.
Some hope. Brexit is still turning out to be an internal Tory psychodrama. The party just can’t pass up any opportunity to tear itself apart. Most Conservatives want the whole thing done, but Sunak is in hock to the headbangers. They are the ones who call the shots. Rish! longs to be his own man. To take control of his life. But he just can’t do it.
In a straight fight between party and the national interest, party wins every time. He’s just too timid. Too ineffectual. We all know the deal is as good as done, but he can’t bring himself to cross the finishing line. He’s looking for the magic words that will get the ERG onboard. Only they don’t exist. There is no squaring the circle. Any deal with the EU will obviously have to involve EU law at some level. Even the idiots can see that.
Keir Starmer merely chose to punch the bruise. Reminding Sunak of what was at stake. That there was no way of reconciling the protocol. The UK could not act unilaterally. Total control had always been a Brexit pipe dream. But Labour would be a grownup – a consenting adult – and help the government get its deal over the line. Rish! looked increasingly desperate. Torn between two lovers. Feeling like a fool. He was doing his best. Everything was going to be fine. Promise.
Eventually, he lost it. Starmer was a surrender monkey. Willing to give the EU anything. Trying to thwart Brexit. Changing his mind again and again. Pots and kettles. Rish! has never had a belief he hasn’t changed. Other than the divine right of billionaires. Even so, this didn’t have quite the resonance it may have had three years ago. Now everyone can see that Brexit has been a self-inflicted disaster and most people would be quite happy for someone to be less gung-ho. We’re back in Schrödinger’s territory. We and the cat are both fucked.
Sunak couldn’t even bring himself to promise a vote on whatever deal he managed to negotiate. He couldn’t take the humiliation. The DUP’s Jeffrey Donaldson went for the kill. He was tired of all the tinkering. The only acceptable solution was to renegotiate the entire treaty. It was like 2019 all over again. We’ve gone nowhere. In some corner of Westminster, the Convict was punching the air.
