It wasn’t the best of adverts for parliament.
Every few years or so, MPs let out a collective howl of outrage and decide that something really must be done about sexual misconduct in Westminster. And every few years or so almost nothing substantially changes. Not so long ago it was pornography found on Damian Green’s Commons computer. Now another as-yet unnamed Tory MP has upped the ante by watching pornography on his phone in the Commons’ chamber. Give it a few more years and some sexually incontinent MP will be masturbating live on Parliament TV.
That was far from the end of it, though. There was also a shadow cabinet minister accused of making sexually inappropriate remarks about a female Welsh MP. Not to mention the 56 other MPs, including three cabinet members, who are under investigation for sexual harassment. It makes you wonder how some male MPs ever find time to do any work.
So it was Ben Wallace’s bad luck that he was the minister given the short straw of explaining all this on the morning media round. The defence secretary did not cover himself in glory. A simple “This is unacceptable,” and “All women should be treated with respect,” would have done. Instead he chose to play the “long hours, hard-working, late bars” card. As if that was somehow an excuse and any man who worked late and then went to the pub couldn’t help but revert to a naturally sexist self. Clearly some MPs must congratulate themselves for getting through the day without sexually harassing anyone.
All things considered, then, the prorogation of parliament probably couldn’t come a moment too soon. A chance to wipe both hard drives and the green benches. Hazmat suits all round. But before the Commons rose for 12 days until the state opening on 10 May, there was still a handful of MPs actually trying to do some work.
Labour’s Thangam Debbonaire was trying to secure a correction for one of the lies that Boris Johnson had told during prime minister’s questions. Good luck with that. Conservative Peter Bottomley was waiting in vain for Nadine Dorries to make a statement on the privatisation of Channel 4. Like the Convict, the culture secretary is notoriously reluctant to make herself accountable to her peers.
Along the committee corridor, though, history was being made. Almost invariably, James Cleverly is the stupidest person in any room he enters. It’s a massive failure of nominative determinism. But just this once, Jimmy Dimly got an even break. At the meeting of the European scrutiny committee, he got the opportunity to feel what it must be like to be a towering intellect. It just pays to keep the right company. Step forward committee chair, Bill Cash, Tory MPs Richard Drax, David Jones, Greg Smith and Anne Marie Morris, and the near-silent suspended Scottish National MP Margaret Ferrier. Names that Cleverly will treasure as long as he lives.
The subject, inevitably, was the Northern Ireland protocol. Something that every Tory Brexiter now goes out of their way to distance themselves from, having greeted its arrival as a triumph. Then again, even David Frost has no idea these days that he negotiated the protocol. Scarcely a week passes without him writing in the Telegraph about what a hopeless shitshow it is. Lord Frost is in for a hell of a shock when he eventually meets himself.
Cash got things going with a general diatribe that Dimly, in his Foreign Office role, should make sure he carried on meeting Brits as well as Europeans, before Drax and Jones moved on to the Northern Ireland Heart of Darkness. Was the minister aware of just how evil the protocol was and that the EU must have hypnotised the UK negotiators into agreeing to it? Did the Americans know just how damaging the protocol was to the NI peace process? New EU directives made NI less and less aligned with the rest of Britain. It was all dreadful. We needed to trigger article 16 before the Apocalypse.
“Hmm,” muttered Jimmy D. He wasn’t quite sure how to break it to this coven of halfwits. The problem was ours not the EU’s. They didn’t force us to sign anything. If we were up shit creek it was entirely of our doing. In the end, he decided it was best to say nothing. Why get into dangerous territory and admit on the record that he and the government were out of their depth and the Convict had lied to the country to get Brexit done. So he just said it was all on a need-to-know basis – Cash and co definitely had no need to know – and he’d maybe update them some time in the next parliament.
Down at the Eurotunnel control centre, Jacob Rees-Mogg was also struggling to come to terms with the realities of Brexit. Just as the Northern Ireland protocol was slowly separating NI from the rest of the UK, so the new trade agreement with the EU would cost the UK a fortune in checks and tariffs. So the minister for Brexit opportunities was there to tell the nation that the opportunity he had identified was that Brexit was prohibitively expensive and would put thousands of companies out of business if properly implemented. Which he wasn’t going to do. He was going to delay it for a fourth time. So we would continue to take any foods from the EU unchecked.
Viva Brexit. Viva sovereignty.
