Just when you thought it was safe to come out … It’s back. And this time it may not be meaningful. But there again, it might be. At business questions, Andrea Leadsom wasn’t at all clear what the government was planning to bring back to the Commons on Friday. Brexit is now a fast-replicating virus that is entirely resistant to everyone’s best efforts to control it and is claiming dozens of victims, the latest being the prime minister herself.
Leadsom started by keeping things deliberately vague, hoping no one would pick up on its significance. The government would be having a debate on something to do with leaving the EU and at some point – hopefully around 2.30pm, so that anyone still breathing could go home and overdose – MPs would get to vote on it.
Understandably, no one was entirely reassured by this unexpected development and pressed her for more information. Which she genuinely didn’t have. The leader of the House had been hung out to dry. And given that she frequently struggles even when she does have a script, she was a sitting target for any opposition MP.
“Um,” she said guardedly, playing for time. She couldn’t say precisely just how meaningful the vote would be. Or what it would be on. It might look something like Meaningful Vote 3 or it could be Meaningless Vote 27. It could be Withdrawal Agreement 1. Or it could be W1A. Though maybe it would just help if everyone stopped trying to think in such binary terms.
MPs should think of it as Mindfulness Vote One. A new type of zen parliamentary process where everyone took time to concentrate on their breathing and then listened to the voice inside their heads telling them to do exactly what the Leader in Name Only wanted. To emphasise the point, she struck a near perfect Warrior Two yoga pose. She still had it. Hell, yeah!
Sensing she was rather losing her audience, Leadsom became more desperate and played her last card. If MPs couldn’t even manage a Mindfulness Vote One then at least go for Mindlessness Vote One, also known as the Wishful Thinking Vote. Do it for Lino. A prime minister so feeble she couldn’t even organise her own departure date. The high priestess of clusterfuckery who tried to fall on her sword, but merely grazed her arm. So as a leaving gift, please could everyone vote for whatever it was the government was bringing before the House, so that May could go out on a winning note. Please, just let her win something. Once. As a kindness. A blind Brexit! You know it makes nonsense.
Leadsom slumped back down on to the Treasury bench. This hadn’t gone at all how she had hoped. It would be nice if at some time, someone would be kind enough to let her know what was going on.
Only the previous evening she had been dusting off the old pale blue #Rally4Leadsom T-shirts from her previous leadership bid in 2016 in preparation for her next tilt at the top job. Her estimation of her own abilities is quite at odds with everyone else’s. But the first day of her new campaign had merely exposed her limitations.
Across the road in the Queen Elizabeth Centre, Liz Truss was also doing her bit at the British Chambers of Commerce Conference to show her solidarity for Lino, by demonstrating she had no desire to take her job. Sure she had heard the rumours that she fancied putting her name into the mix, but the chief secretary to the Treasury was determined to put an end to such idle chatter.
Truss is never the most convincing speakers at the best of times, but this speech was a new low even for her. Worse even than her cheese debacle at the Tory party conference. Her struggles with the English language have now reached a point where she invariably stresses the wrong syllables as she is incapable of distinguishing between the banal and the even more banal.
“If you’ve got a good idea, you can get on,” she shouted. Apart from being palpably untrue – Truss has never had a good idea and she’s somehow wound up in the cabinet – this wasn’t the kind of Deepak Chopra demotivational team talk business people had come to hear. They wanted to know when the hell the government was going to get its act together on Brexit, but all Truss would commit to was that Brexit was a huge opportunity to shake things up. Until they broke into fragments. She was received in a silence that was as awkward as the Quaker meeting scene in Fleabag.
Other government ministers and prime ministerial hopefuls were wisely keeping their head down. After the previous night’s onanistic psychodrama, everyone needed to catch their breath and work out just how terminal the damage they had done to their careers really was. Things fall apart. It wasn’t just that no one appeared to know anything. It was as if everyone had all but given up. Brexit fatigue. No one even cared if the following day’s vote was meaningful, mindful, pointless or even legal. They just wanted it over and done with. Meanwhile the country burns. There will be a reckoning.
