Finally, a prime minister’s questions that produced one clearcut answer. Just not an answer to a question anyone had thought to ask. For understandable reasons. Because the response to “Who is actually governing the country?” turns out to be absolutely no one. Worse still, there really isn’t much in the way of opposition either. The UK is clueless and rudderless. Drifting hopelessly up shit creek in a half-hearted search for a paddle.
Let’s look at the chief suspects. For several years it has felt as if the European Research Group was in charge, steering Theresa May to an ever harder, more damaging Brexit. Now, though, the unpleasants’ revolt appears – for the time being at least – to be a busted flush. Their attempts to force a vote of no confidence in the prime minister collapsed when they were unable to count to 48, and Tuesday’s Global Britain end-of-the-pier show starring seven elderly white men singing Vera Lynn songs was a personal humiliation for Jacob Rees-Mogg and David Davis.
At PMQs the ERG retreated into near silence, with only Esther McVey making much of an intervention on behalf of the Eurosceptics. Much was expected of the former work and pensions secretary in her first one-on-one with May since resigning from the cabinet, but she bottled it, lamely asking if the UK would be leaving the EU on 29 March next year. No one batted an eyelid when the prime minister gave a completely different answer to the one she had given to Jeremy Corbyn just minutes earlier. After all, with no one in charge there was no one to hold to account.
Even without any pressure from the ERG, the government was still under no illusions that it was in government. That much had been clear ever since the DUP had ripped up its confidence-and-supply agreement with the Conservatives after it emerged that May’s Brexit withdrawal agreement in effect treated Northern Ireland differently to the rest of the UK. In several votes on the budget, the Conservatives have been forced to accept Labour and SNP amendments to avoid defeat. Indeed, the government would even have lost a vote had Corbyn and a few other Labour MPs remembered to turn up to the Commons. Easy mistake to make.
On the few occasions that the subject of Brexit and Northern Ireland did come up, May merely acted confused. Mainly because she is. She first tried to imply that the backstop was only a theoretical construct and that people shouldn’t get too worked up about the details as it would never be implemented, only then to say that were it to be implemented then it wouldn’t be for very long. The DUP leader, Nigel Dodds, spent most of the 45-minute session ostentatiously shaking his head.
You’d have thought that an opposition party would be keen to exploit the black hole at the centre of Downing Street. To make its own claims to be in government. The Labour leader likes to do things rather differently. Almost as if he is hellbent on showing why he thinks the country is run best when not being run by anyone at all. Or to put it another way, Corbyn says it best when he says nothing at all.
Corbyn did start promisingly, exploiting comments made by Amber Rudd earlier in the day to ask whether a no-deal Brexit was now off the table. But May’s reversion to her default automaton speak blindsided him. As it does almost every week. So instead of putting the prime minister under pressure by asking how she intended to govern on a day-to-day basis with no majority, how she proposed to get her Brexit deal through parliament when roughly 75 of her own MPs had said they would vote against it, and whether she stood by her EU nationals “jumping the queue remarks” – questions that were on the minds of most people in the country – he opted to expose his ignorance of the withdrawal agreement by muddling up a customs border and a regulatory border. Not to mention his own coherent Brexit plan.
So what should have been a critical exchange between a prime minister and a leader of the opposition turned into an argument between two ill-informed pub bores. An argument that May won quite easily. Mainly because she appeared to know the things she did not know and steered well clear of them, while Corbyn’s unknowns are known to everyone but him. In their failure, their lack of competence, the country had its answer. Just not its reassurance.
