This time last week, Theresa May would probably never have imagined her visit to Poland would attract so much interest. A couple of photo opportunities and a hasty press conference with the Polish prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, that no one bothered to broadcast and she would be out of there. One more job knocked off her to-do list before she could put her feet up for Christmas.
The sacking of Damian Green late on Wednesday night rather changed all that. Now the focus was back on the prime minister and she looked done in. After a year in which just about everything that could go wrong had gone wrong, having to fire the one person she could almost trust in the cabinet was the last straw. She did her best to appear gracious – she couldn’t quite bring herself to say she was thrilled to be in Warsaw – but her voice was even flatter than usual. Here was a prime minister going through the motions and dreading what was to come.
After being introduced by the Polish translator as “Madam Brexit” – one of the few things to make her smile all day – Theresa began with a brief word of thanks to the Poles who had fought alongside Britain in the last war. She went on to list a few new initiatives she was hoping to get off the ground – an Anglo-Polish forum, among other things – and concluded by saying how much she wanted the 1 million Poles living in the UK to stay. This seemed to be as much of a surprise to Boris Johnson and David Davis, who were sitting in the audience, as to Morawiecki. They had all been under the impression that one of the main rallying cries of of the leave campaign in the referendum was to get rid of as many Poles as possible.
With the formalities out the way, the prime minister took a few deep breaths and braced herself for the incoming from the British media. Had she done enough to deal with sexual harassment in Westminster? Theresa chose to sidestep that one with a few platitudes. Though she had fired two ministers, she could easily have been more decisive with Green rather than waiting till the last day before recess to sneak out the news when she hoped no one was looking. After all, the main facts of the case had been clear for weeks.
Besides which, Theresa hadn’t actually sacked Green for having porn on his work computer. Every chap should be allowed to pleasure themselves at work. She had fired him for breaking the ministerial code by lying about having porn on his computer. And if she was going to fire ministers for lying then she would have to get rid of the two clowns in the front row. Boris had told so many porkies she didn’t know where to start, while Davis had lied about having done the Brexit impact assessments. She had read some of the rubbish he had cobbled together at the last minute and the most helpful piece of information had been that Britain was an island. She must remember that for future reference.
So, best to avoid the issue of ministers lying. Instead, she chose to focus on the irregularities of the police investigation. Quite right. If a couple of coppers hadn’t spoken out of turn, no one would have been any the wiser about the contents of Green’s hard drive. So Damian would have been free to do what Damian did best and she would still have had one friendly face at the cabinet table. Not that she could remember what it was a first secretary of state actually did – it was a mystery to everyone – but she knew she quite liked having him around.
Nor was there much respite when it was Morawiecki’s turn to answer questions. Asked whether he would defend Britain’s attempts to get a bespoke trade arrangement with the EU in the face of opposition from France and Germany, the Polish prime minister was totally non-committal. At this, Theresa’s head disappeared a little further inside her torso so that only her hair and shoulders were visible. The trip had been even more of a waste of time than she had feared.
With the prime minister away in Poland, it was the health secretary who had drawn the short straw of trying to explain why the latest crisis in government wasn’t really a crisis on the Today programme. Jeremy Hunt’s explanation that Green was guilty of a little white lie that ministers would have got away with in third-world countries like France was only partially convincing.
But Hunt did – temporarily – get the government out of a hole and in the process gave the impression he was making his own bid for the leadership of the Tory party. Even more astonishing, given his track record of incompetence in office, was that it didn’t seem totally impossible. Politics in 2017 just became that bit more surreal.
