No.225 – I Think you May have Just Found Your Perfect Job, James!

Dear James,

I can imagine the scene in your whips’ office before PMQs last Wednesday. After the Boris disasters of the last few weeks, dejection must have been the order of the day. In the gloom, your brave warriors were doing their best to lift spirits. ‘The Injuns are at our gates and we’ve got to come together’. Man the guns. Stir up the troops. Throw up the barricades. We’ve just got to believe that the boss is indestructible even if he attempts to autodestruct almost every day. Is this what this week’s Tory ‘circling the wagons’ exercise looked like, James?

One of those brave warriors, Dominic Raab, the Minister under whom you presently serve, came out with a whimpering gush of servile abasement. He announced that Boris was “focused on the job at hand” and was an “ebullient, bouncy, optimistic, Tiggerish character, and he livens up his speeches in a way that few politicians past and present have done, but actually there is a steeliness to him as a prime minister and indeed his team, and we work as a team.” Wow, this man knows how to do loyalty! Sack him as Foreign Secretary and he comes back gagging for more humiliation. Has he no pride? 

At PMQs on Wednesday Boris came into to the chamber dead on midday, a good indication that something was afoot. His suddenly loyal troops were arrayed behind him. Nothing to lose for the rebels because today there was no vote. So they cheered and thumped their feet, as the ‘great man’ sat down. When Starmer stood up, their cheering mutated into Tory braying. ‘Captain Hindsight’ stood his ground. And there was much ground upon which to stand compared with the swamp in which Boris wallows - Paterson, Tory sleaze, Tory incompetence, and the latest party pooping spoilers relating to last Christmas. “Of course last December’s shebang in Downing Street was within guidelines – even though the rest of the country was in total lockdown at the time’. Do I hear you and the other whips saying, ‘Don’t be deflected by such trivia.  Stay calm and keep on projecting Tory certitude?“ But Starmer continued to goad the PM, asking: “Who knows if he’ll make it to the next election?” At another point the Labour leader suggested that Boris had ‘lost his place in his notes again.” “Is everything OK, prime minister?” he asked.  Boris replied: “I tell you what is not working, is that line of attack.” Touched a sore point did he PM? But his backbenchers cheered noisily as if he’d just won a tenner on the lottery. The opposition just smiled and watched the ‘great man’ flounder.  

I suppose everything was made worse by reports from France that President Macron had called the PM, ‘A Clown’ and a ‘Knucklehead’. According to ‘Le Canard Enchainé’, France’s equivalent to our own ‘Private Eye’, Macron also said, “BoJo talks to me at full speed, everything is going fine, we have discussions like big people, and then he gives us a hard time before or afterwards in an inelegant way. It’s always the same circus.”

I think ‘circus’ describes our current government quite well, James. Ministers gyrating round the black hole of leadership in the centre of a ring of confused chaos. Most people expect more. Much more. The braying and howling is tribalism at its worst. Parliament should not be a place where sneer and innuendo replace respect, reason and logic as the mode of communication. Those who work in the ‘normal world’ must be appalled. Of course, there are those who’ve always claimed that such events are merely a way of ‘letting off steam’. ‘It’s better that way than to allow resentments to brew’, but I’m sure in the privacy of your own home, you’re not that kind of person are you, James?  It’s only at work that you must show absolute loyalty to your tribe by dispelling any doubts you may have about the blond blusterer. The line is clear, “The prime minister is focused on delivering people’s priorities.” Boris, focused on anything?’ You must be joking. The only thing that Boris is focussed on beyond his own navel are the opinion polls and the voter panels. And, of course, the next ‘bon mot’ or mottled metaphor to emerge from his fevered brow. 

Who’d want to be an MP? Wednesday’s PMQ’s was the reason why so many capable people in our nation look upon such a prospect with despair and disdain. It was playground behaviour of the worst kind. Why subject yourself to such a bear pit when, in the real world, you can work in respectful harmony with others of different opinions? But those are the tools of your new trade I guess James? Arm twisting, threat, demands that your MPs follow the party line and ignore any principles they may have? I think you may have just found your perfect job, James! 

BH – Your Concerned Constituent