You wait weeks for one prime minister to come along and then five turn up at the same time. On Tuesday night, Theresa May gave up the unequal battle. She’d already tried offering her resignation but her backbenchers had hated her so much they had kept her on life support by voting down her deal a third time. So the Leader in Name Only of the Party in Name Only had taken the nuclear option and invited Jeremy Corbyn into Downing Street for a couple of days work experience.
All of which turned prime minister’s questions into something more like prime ministers’ chats. Both prime ministers had walked into the chamber at roughly the same time and their exchanges began with an unfamiliar courtesy. Corbyn thanked Lino very much for the hospital pass and Lino replied that she would be delighted if he accepted her offer of taking responsibility for her clusterfuckery of the past three years. A level of politeness only possible between two people who disliked each other intensely.
As they were going to spend most of the afternoon arguing over who was going to sit in the biggest chair in No 10 – “After you.” “No, after you.” “But I insist.” – the Labour leader thought it only proper to steer clear of Brexit for PMCs. Rather he just treated it as a desultory dry run for a general election – not that he really needed one now as he was already in power – by asking about poverty.
Lino had shrugged dismally and said she was doing her best but it wasn’t easy when you were part of a non-existent government whose sole purpose was to do as little as possible. On the grounds that everything it did try to do invariably turned into a complete shitshow. She muttered something about universal credit and how she hoped she would have a decent retirement when the Pino finally got bored with their sadism. Corbyn’s reminder that she would now have to pay for her TV licence when she reached 75 almost broke her. It’s always the little things that tip you over the edge.
“Let’s talk about what’s happening under a Conservative government,” she said. Let’s not, murmured everyone on her own benches. Why keep bringing up the war? Lino had entered the Commons to near silence from her own benches. Not even her cabinet can now look her in the eye. Her authority, if you could ever have called it that, was completely shot. She had never been loved – it’s hard to feel an attachment to the inanimate – but there had been a grudging respect for her resilience. Now there was just undisguised hatred. The Brexiters would never forgive her for denying them the Brexit they had voted against.
The biggest cheer from the Tory ranks came when Nigel ‘Who he?’ Adams, who had resigned as a junior Wales minister earlier in the day, was called by the Speaker. Adams bristled with passive-aggression as he kept Brexit to an implied subtext and asked about disabled facilities in Selby station. Lino looked helpless. She didn’t even have the power to organise the installation of a lift.
Après Adams, le deluge. What followed was an almost constant blue-on-blue action as Tory after Tory called her out on Brexit. How dare she betray the one true Brexit? How could she even consider roping in the Labour leader to the negotiations? He was a red bouncing on the Downing Street bed. An antisemite. A scourge of everyone in the home counties.
Under the constant onslaught, Lino cracked and defaulted to her Maybot factory settings. Yes Corbyn was a threat to national security, she barked. And that was precisely why she was inviting him to resolve a national emergency. It was quite bonkers. She had openly insulted the man she was looking on to bail her out of a crisis before any talks had got under way. Her capacity to self-destruct is almost limitless. Everything turns to dust in her hands. Naught’s had, all’s spent. What little chance of the two prime ministers ever agreeing on a Brexit deal had been strangled at birth.
With Corbyn and Lino off to talk through their irreconcilable differences with their divorce lawyers, three other apprentice prime ministers – Oliver Letwin, Yvette Cooper and Hilary Benn – tried to fill the vacuum. But with only partial success. Benn’s amendment to force the Commons to have further indicative votes next Monday was defeated. When push came to shove, parliament couldn’t even decide on whether to decide – to agree whether to agree – with the votes tied on 310 and the Speaker giving his casting vote for the government. The first time this had happened since 1993. That was over Europe too.
The second vote on the main Cooper motion to have a debate on making the government seek an extension in the event of a no-deal Brexit sneaked through by 312 to 311. There would be a debate but whether MPs would be able to agree on the meaning of parliament taking back control for a third time was anyone’s guess. The government was horrified at the thought of MPs rushing through legislation. If they could just chill out and wait for the government to fail to do anything, the whole process would be redundant. As so often, we had ended the day knowing less than we had started. Still, at least two of the five prime ministers were still standing. For the time being.
