Poor George. It was bad enough waking up to a new opinion poll showing only 2% of respondents thought he was a natural leader; a race to the bottom with Tim Farron isn’t a good look for someone eyeing up the leadership of the Conservative party. Then it dawned on him that David Cameron was away in Japan for the G7 and he would have to front up prime minister’s questions. It was OK for Dave, he only had to deal with Jeremy Corbyn; but he would have to go mano a mano with Labour’s deputy leader Angela Eagle, an altogether more tricky operator at the dispatch box.
Eagle began by pointing out that the French tax authorities had raided Google’s offices while the chancellor had been delighted to just collect the odd fiver from the search engine every now and again. Osborne looked around nervously before replying that every little helps and no one should forget Google had also promised to hand over all the points on its Nectar card.
Having got the chancellor on the back foot, Eagle devoted her remaining five questions to pointing out the splits in the Conservative party over Europe – a subject Corbyn invariably avoids. Did the chancellor agree with Priti Patel, or Len McCluskey who said that the EU was good for business? What did he think of Iain Duncan Smith calling him Pinocchio? Or Boris Johnson calling the prime minister demented? How come every pro-Brexit minister had been banished from the front bench? At this point, Michael Gove waved rather sheepishly from behind the Speaker to show that he could not be so easily silenced. Justice for the justice secretary one.
It was all fairly harmless, scattergun stuff but for the first time in weeks there were smiles and noise on the Labour benches. There’s nothing like divisions in the opposition to make those within your own party seem less painful. “It’s no great revelation that different Conservative MPs have different views on the European Union,” said Osborne, making the best of a poor hand. “That is why we are having a referendum, because this issue divides parties, families and friends.”
Or, in the case of many Tory MPs, ex-friends. The split over the EU has become so corrosive that most can barely look each other in the eye any more; the prospect of all being sweetness and light in the Tory party whatever the result are now non-existent. Just how bad things have got is that Osborne had a much easier time answering questions from the Labour benches than his own.
The blue on blue attacks began with the bizarre suggestion from Richard Drax that all MPs would require permission to speak from Jean-Claude Juncker if Britain voted to remain and became steadily more deluded thereafter. Philip Davies was certain the Chilcot report held the key to a Vote Leave victory – who knew the Iraq war was a Brussels plot? – and that its publication was being deliberately withheld until after 23 June. Anne Main then went on to suggest Britain’s entire green belt was under threat from the mass immigration that would inevitably occur if Britain stayed in the EU; it was only a matter of weeks before the Cotswolds would be blanketed in skyscrapers. In months the Peak District would be a distant memory.
The paranoia was proving contagious and Bernard Jenkin was keen to throw a conspiracy theory of his own into the ring. Bernie was alarmed the government was using its websites to promote government policy and that even those web pages that weren’t were probably pumping out subliminal “Vote Remain” messages so the only reasonable thing to do was to shut down the entire internet. George muttered something noncommittal and made a dash for it out of the chamber. Now that he came to think of it, Dave was welcome to the Tory party.
