Dominic Raab launched his bid for the Tory leadership today with a super-slick website and campaign video.
The video begins with an objectively hilarious moment where Raab spins on his heels to turn to the camera , before declaring: “Fairness!”
But look a bit more closely at the video and you’ll find something which is either even more hilarious, or an incredibly dark foreshadowing of his strategy for dealing with Europe.
See, he’s filmed the video in Victoria Palace Gardens, a leafy, green park in the grounds of the Houses of Parliament.
It’s soon to be home to the National Holocaust Education Centre.
But it’s another memorial which is interesting us today. That black statue you can see over Raab right shoulder throughout the video.
That statue is called “The Burghers of Calais” - which is, of course, amusing in itself.
Readers with long memories will remember Raab speaking in public just after he was made Brexit Secretary and declaring he “hadn’t quite understood” how reliant the UK is on the Dover/Calais crossing.
But if you look into the history of the statue, you may find a hint at how Prime Minister Raab might approach negotiations with the Continent.
The statue serves to commemorate an event during the Hundred Years War, when Calais was under siege by the English for about eleven months.
King Edward III laid siege to the city, which was eventually forced to parlays for surrender under threat of outright starvation.
Edward offered to spare the lives of the ordinary folk of Calais if six of the city’s leaders walked out with nooses around their necks and submitted themselves for execution.
Six men volunteered and the siege was lifted.
They ended up not being executed after all - either because of an intervention from Edward’s Queen, Philippa of Hainault, who thought it would be a bad omen for the couple’s unborn child - or because the whole episode was a piece of political theatre.
Of course, it might all just be a coincidence.
