Sulk wants. Sulk must have. Sulk can’t have. Sulk angry. Sulk throws toys out of pram. Sulk wants Mummy. Classic Boris. Classic Dom.
This wasn’t how it was meant to be. Boris Johnson had imagined himself as the nation’s saviour. The gaslighter-in-chief who had gone out of his way to bring a country to its knees was now on the verge of leading it to a Promised Land. OK, it wasn’t really much of a Promised Land. More of a shithole really. But from where the country was standing right now any shithole could be confused for a Promised Land.
It had all started so well, too. He had actually managed to win a meaningful vote on his Brexit deal. Which was more than Theresa May had ever done. It had meant treaching on the DUP and fooling a few Labour MPs who were desperate to be fooled, but needs must. He didn’t have any great qualms. Lying wasn’t just second nature to him. It was his entire nature.
Then it had all gone tits up when the Commons had rejected his programme motion seeking to rush through the most important piece of legislation for 70 years in three days flat. Now there was no chance of meeting his self-imposed 31 October deadline. He had been beaten on a technicality that even Classic Dom hadn’t anticipated. Especially Classic Dom. He wasn’t dead in a ditch. He was dead from a glitch.
“I’m not playing any more,” the Sulk had sulked. If he couldn’t get his own way then he was going to suspend the passage of the bill. Who cared if parliament had actually set aside time for Brexit? It could go back to debating a pointless Queen’s speech he had never cared about. Toddlers everywhere could only marvel at such an epic temper tantrum. The EU merely despaired.
It’s often hard to know which is the more scary. The Boris Johnson in full-blown narcissistic meltdown, lost to himself and any contact with reality. Or the Boris that is giving his best impression of empathy: trying to pretend he is aware that other people actually exist. The first is terrifying but has the virtue of a certain integrity: a menace operating in plain sight. In the second, the insincerity is borderline sociopathic. A darkness hidden.
For the opening of the second reading of Brexit withdrawal bill, we got Boris the Contrite. Boris the Listener. Boris the Appeaser. The prime minister couldn’t have been more willing to take interventions from a succession of Labour MPs with planted questions, looking for reasons to back his Brexit deal and seeking assurances on workers’ and environmental rights to ease their consciences. “Of course, of course, pifflepafflewifflewaffle,” said Johnson. No one cared more about workers – what were they again? – which is why he had explicitly taken all protections out of the withdrawal bill and dumped them into the political declaration. Workers were far too important to be left to something legally binding.
That, though, was about as good as it got for the prime minister. It never fails to amaze just how bad he is at making his deal sound persuasive. Almost as if it’s convenient for Brexit to mean whatever anyone wants it to mean. Even so, trying to convince the Northern Irish MPs that he knew about Northern Ireland was probably not a good idea. Especially as there were huge gaps in his knowledge about the practicalities and implications of a hard border. Next time, it might help if he read the bill before he argued for it.
“Fish,” shouted Owen Paterson. It’s one of the few intelligible words he’s mastered. Johnson was happy to assure him that all fish would be given British passports and that any EU fish found swimming in UK waters would be deported and then killed. Other Tories made rather more helpful interventions.
Vicky Ford placed her hands together and begged parliament to pray for Boris. A humble man trying to make the country a worse place. Steve Baker went further. He begged Boris to forgive his manifold sins and weaknesses. The ERG is now making Dad’s Army look like a crack SAS squad. The Hard Man of Brexit has yet to find a principle on which he can’t go soft. A knighthood can’t be far off.
Even with all this love, Johnson’s facade eventually cracked – there’s only so much Mr Nice Guy he can manage – and he ended by going full-on psycho. Three days was more than long enough to get Brexit done, he yelled. Any longer and MPs might have enough time to discover even more of its flaws. Democracy could only be restored by removing democratic scrutiny.
Nor was there any need to bother with impact assessments, because everyone was quite happy to either lose their job or take an 8% hit in earnings. These were the sacrifices of a brave nation.
The rest was noise. Speeches reheated from previous debates in no expectation of changing minds. Though not so loud that Barry Gardiner couldn’t doze off on Labour’s frontbench. Call it Brexit fatigue. The government is counting on it becoming an epidemic.
