The phoney war is over. Tory MPs have given up even pretending the prime minister is of any importance. Theresa May is now officially a non-person. Not even a disembodied, metallic Maybot gurgle. A woman without credibility. Her dreams of bringing back her withdrawal agreement bill not even treated as an indulgence. She is the joke that has long since stopped being funny. In Stalinist Russia, she would already have been airbrushed out of every politburo photograph.
May’s departure is seen as not so much imminent as hopelessly overdue. A zombie government being led by someone without even the vital signs of a zombie. Now it’s every Tory for themselves, with more than 20 MPs – and counting – having declared themselves as candidates for the party leadership. Even though there is as yet no vacancy. As tumbleweed continues to pile up in the Commons, no opportunity for a photoshoot or a “wide-ranging” speech – preferably both – goes unmissed.
On Sunday, Esther McVey had declared her undying love for backbench Tory, Phillip Davies with a soft-focus piece in the Sunday papers. Not everyone’s ideal choice of life partner, as Davies is noted as one of the least attractive characters in the Conservative party – a hotly contested field – who takes pride in his misogyny. Still, it takes all sorts. Now she was due to launch her leadership campaign with a “wide-ranging appeal” to working-class Tories.
It was standing room only in the Jubilee Room, off Westminster Hall, before McVey appeared. Largely because no one had bothered to supply any chairs for the reporters and the smattering of MPs who had made the effort to turn up. Ben Bradley introduced the event by inviting everyone to watch a short video. “Just see what we’ve done so far,” he said. The answer turned out to be almost nothing as the video buffered and we were left with a long pause and a blank screen. Where’s Huawei when you need them?
Next up was Tory Scott Mann. An MP with the unique gift of the demotivational speech. Get him talking for more than 10 seconds and everyone in the room will be wishing they were dead. Or at least in a deep coma. Mann told a couple of pointless anecdotes about a bloke who hadn’t been able to get an appointment with his MP and a girl who was offered a job 35-miles away from where she lived and then sat down. Two minutes that no one in the room would ever get back.
“We must do better than the mess left by the Conservative party,” McVey began. This was either a radical piece of truth-telling or a Freudian slip and momentarily she had the room’s attention. Though not for long. The country had been badly let down over Brexit, she continued, and what the working-class who had always voted Labour had been pining for was the chance to vote Conservative. A pitch that might have been more credible coming from someone other than a former work and pensions secretary whose life mission had been to get everyone using food banks.
After promising more money for schools and police – paid for by stopping giving handouts to greedy foreigners from the international aid budget – McVey got round to the real purpose of her speech: me, me, me. The Tories needed a proper Brexiter as the next Tory leader, not some jumped-up wannabes like Jeremy Hunt and Sajid Javid. She was the blue-collar saviour and she would be going around the country, ruining people’s lives by interrupting their evenings to talk to them in pubs. Fifteen minutes into a campaign launch that had been scheduled to last an hour, it was thankfully all over. Short and not so sweet. Hopefully never to be heard from again.
Altogether more credible and impressive a leadership candidate is Penny Mordaunt – mainly through not being the latest in a long line of disgraced former defence secretaries. In her first appearance in her new role at the dispatch box, Mordaunt made a point of saying almost nothing at departmental questions, choosing to let her junior ministers field most of the incoming flak. But what she did say was enough to reassure MPs on both sides of the house that she wasn’t about to invade China just for the hell of it. For which she got a warm reception.
Mordaunt also handled herself well in answering an urgent question on the use of torture. Simply by saying she generally thought it was bad idea, but that if Gavin had tortured the person who had leaked the fact that he had leaked the details of the National Security Council meeting she would have him tortured. It may be hard to see her getting down to the business end of the leadership contest, but not being Gavin is more than enough to keep her in the mix for a few weeks yet.
