What a difference a couple of days make. On Monday, Theresa May was given a fawning reception by her own benches in the Commons for deferring the tricky stuff and progressing the EU negotiations to the second phase. Despite the best efforts of David Davis to torpedo the preliminary agreement before it had even been ratified.
Come prime minister’s questions, many on the Tory benches appeared to have had second thoughts, as Theresa’s arrival in the chamber was greeted with barely a murmur. The intervening hours had concentrated their minds. Theresa was still barely in command of her party, let alone the country. She faced defeat at the committee stage of the EU withdrawal bill and could easily be out of office by the middle of next year. She was just as hopeless and out of her depth as they had originally suspected.
As so often in recent months, the prime minister looked as if she would rather be anywhere than where she actually was. She appears permanently fatigued and miserable. If only she had followed up the P45 she had been offered at the party conference, she would have been off the hook. Free to put her feet up and chat to the only people who really understood her. The Four Pot Plants. The last signs of intelligent life in the cabinet. As it was, she would just have to make do. Her party had lowered their expectations of her and it was her duty to sink to them. She would show them they were right to have lost faith.
Jeremy Corbyn needed no second invitation to take advantage. Steering clear of Brexit – an issue on which he is, at best, ambivalent – the Labour leader went in on a question that was arguably of more pressing concern to many people. Homelessness had gone up under the Conservative government: could the prime minister promise that 2018 would be the year it came down?
No. She couldn’t. What she could do was say that she was building some houses and that there would be even more homeless people if Labour was in power. Nor could she promise to reduce child homelessness in 2018 because most kids were too poor to afford proper housing. And if they didn’t have the money, they deserved to be homeless. Philip Hammond and other Tory frontbenchers stared at their shoes. It was hard listening to someone dictate their own suicide note.
The more the Labour leader pressed the prime minister, the more robotic she became. Pure, unfiltered Maybot. Corbyn would talk of the impact of being homeless; she would just reply in semi-detached soundbites. There was no feeling, no connection with how hard, how disempowering it must be to be living on the streets. Everything was reduced to statistics. Bleep, whirr, clank, up 1.74m. Bleep, whirr, clank, down 200,000. She was a number, not a name.
From there on, the Maybot could barely form a coherent answer. Labour’s Stephen Timms wanted to know why the impact assessments that Davis had said existed had turned out not to exist after all. Theresa couldn’t compute. She was adamant the impact assessments that even Davis had admitted didn’t exist, did exist after all. She just couldn’t be entirely sure where they were.
Caroline Lucas then asked for the chancellor to apologise for saying that Britain’s productivity crisis was partially caused by disabled people. Theresa said there was no need as he definitely hadn’t heard the thing that everyone had heard him say. We were falling backwards through the looking glass into a hallucinogenic world where everything was both possible and not possible.
The most telling exchange was left till last when Anna Soubry offered the prime minister a last opportunity to save herself from potential embarrassment by accepting the clause 7 amendment. Theresa paused, thinking it over. Her rational self knew it was the right thing to do. A way out that might buy her a few extra months in the job at some time. A chance to get the Brexit mutineers on board.
But in the back of her head, she could hear the siren call of Pot Plant One. The P45 and beach holiday were just too tempting. To hell with it then. She’d take the risk and face down the rebels. If the government scraped the vote, she’d have appeared strong and if she lost she’d be one step closer to freedom. It was win-win. So Theresa went back on to autopilot. There was no need to make sure parliament had a meaningful vote because the meaningless vote it had been promised was, in its very meaninglessness, laden with meaning. Whirr. Clunk. Thud.
“Time for bed,” said Zebedee.
John Crace’s new book, I, Maybot, is published by Guardian Faber. To order a copy for £6.99, saving £3,go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.
