Sometimes you have to wonder whether politicians live in the same world as us. Breathe the same air, talk the same language. Almost as if election is immediately followed by a spell at idiot school. To implant that sense of effortless superiority that places their own experience on a higher plane to the rest of us. Their punishment is to be perpetually misunderstood. Take George Freeman. A former Tory minister unable to get by on £120,000 a year. It’s only the Just Giving fundraiser I started this week that’s keeping him off the streets. Pray for George.
But Freeman is far from the only one. On Wednesday, it was hard to find any minister or former minister not hellbent on taking the public for mugs. Maybe they just had spare capacity in their condescension quota for the month. Start again afresh on the first day of February. Or could it be almost everyone has given up. They know change is coming and have given up even pretending to take the job seriously.
Up in Scotland we had the former first minister giving evidence to the Covid inquiry. Since Nicola Sturgeon resigned from the top job in March she has spent more time than she would have wanted being questioned by police about the SNP’s finances. No one still seems to know how a luxury motorhome came to be parked outside her mother-in-law’s house in Dunfermline. But at the very least, it’s given Nicola some practice in answering awkward questions.
The lead counsel for the inquiry, Jamie Dawson, began with Sturgeon’s missing WhatsApp messages. What was it about Covid that led so many senior politicians to delete all their WhatsApps? That was a side-effect Chris Whitty never warned the rest of us about. Specifically, Dawson wanted to know why the former first minister had told Channel 4 in 2021 that she would hand over all her messages to any inquiry when she knew that she had already deleted them.
“Ah that,” said Nicola. She was sorry if there had been any misunderstanding, but she had only wanted to keep things simple for the little people. Because all that had happened was that she had saved the messages she thought would be relevant. Not that everything else had been deleted. It had merely not been retained in a way that could be retrieved.
Basically, she had been doing everyone a favour. Saving people the effort of going through messages asking people to amend her Tesco shopping order. In other words, Nicola had merely been doing the inquiry’s job for it. Because who better to decide what was relevant than Sturgeon herself? Really, she should have been made chair of the Scottish leg of the inquiry and let Lady Hallett take a few weeks off. So nothing to see here, then … Er, no. Nicola. Back in 2021 you lied to a TV journalist.
Nicola looked shocked. Her sentences became longer and more inarticulate. Openness and transparency had always been her guiding principles. If anything she had overshared with the Scottish people as first minister. “I knew I had operated in line with a policy I had operated in line with,” she said. No one was any the wiser.
We moved on to a surviving WhatsApp from a civil servant describing a culture of plausible deniability. Sturgeon shrugged. She could plausibly deny any plausible deniability. She certainly couldn’t recall any instructions to destroy evidence. That would be abhorrent. Someone might have said it as a joke. That was it, a joke. Ha ha. Then she had misremembered stuff in the past.
“I make no apology for saying that Boris Johnson was the wrong person to be prime minister,” she said. Many of us could agree on that. But there had also been times when she wished she hadn’t been first minister. She had just tried to be the best version of herself. Her voice caught and she dabbed her eyes as she recalled the responsibility. This was the human Nicola. The one she normally reserves for private consumption only.
The rest of the evidence could be filed alongside plausible deniability. She had always wanted to be inclusive in her decision-making. Couldn’t understand why the details of what was discussed were missing. Had definitely never tried to use the pandemic to her personal advantage. That would be the last thing she would do. Had merely tried to stop Scotland making the same mistakes as England. Believable? Barely. Then she hadn’t had countless piss-ups, she hadn’t ignored the scientific evidence and she hadn’t lost billions in PPE fraud to mates. So there was that.
Back in London, James Cleverly was also struggling with language during an appearance before the home affairs select committee. Jimmy Dimly’s command of language often leaves a lot to be desired. His natural speech is pure bollocks. There was no backlog of migrants to be processed, he insisted. To suggest otherwise was a lie. There was just an orderly queue. A bit like at a supermarket checkout. He also said that sending one person to Rwanda would prove the whole scheme was worthwhile. He thinks we’re all as dim as him.
Rishi Sunak was also reduced to talking nonsense at prime minister’s questions. Mostly because there’s nothing sensible left for him to say. Other than, “I give up. Let’s have an election.” Rish! has run out of road and no longer bothers to disguise his impotence. The only reason the Northern Ireland deal is going through is thanks to a £3bn bung and the belief that the Tories won’t be in power in a year’s time. So no one’s kicking up a fuss over alignment with the EU. That’s now priced in.
It was almost as if Keir Starmer had also got fed up with the one-sidedness of his exchanges with Sunak. His performance was no better than phoned in. Still enough to win easily, but nothing very inspirational. Trading on your opponent’s uselessness doesn’t win hearts and minds.
Rishi had nothing. No answer to inevitable pleas for distressed Tory ministers. No answer to people’s mortgage payments going up. Other than everyone should just sod off, stop bothering him and extend their mortgage into retirement. Great, we can all carry on working till we die. Thanks Rish!. Thanks Liz. Sunak shrugged. Phil from Iceland could also do one. Taking the piss out of a member of the public is bad politics. A sure sign the game is up. The Tory benches were half empty long before the end. Send for the whisky and barbiturates.
There was one sign of life. A very primitive form of life. Barely sentient. Someone who makes Jimmy Dimly look like an intellectual giant. The one, the only Andrea Leadsom. No one lowers the stupidity bar further than her. She was out on the airwaves celebrating the four-year anniversary of Brexit. Luckily, her short-term memory is shot, so she can’t remember what she said last year. Now she was insisting we should be cheering on rising food prices as a symbol of our liberation. We’re going to miss her when she’s gone. A Brexit giant …
