Mountain, meet molehill. Over the past month, countless businesses have had to adapt to survive. Selling more online, having meetings over Zoom, that kind of thing. Yet for its first day back in session, the Commons was struggling big time to adjust. It took more than an hour for a handful of MPs to agree some fairly basic procedures. Everything was most irregular. The like of which had not been seen since 1349.
You could tell we were in trouble right from the off as it was Jacob Rees-Mogg who was easily the most enthusiastic moderniser in the Commons. What he was proposing all seemed entirely sensible. Not to mention straightforward. Fifty MPs in the house at any one time, with another 120 logging in online. No tricky votes for at least a week as no one had yet worked out how to make the system work.
FFS. Even a Channel 5 gameshow has a secure audience voting system. And if we were still members of the EU, we could have got some guidance from them as the Brussels parliament has been using an online voting system for years. But that ship has long since sailed.
The shadow leader of the Commons, Valerie Vaz, was about the only person willing to embrace the new normal. Everyone else was more concerned about having ancient privileges taken away from them in perpetuity. The DUP’s Ian Paisley Jr and Jim Shannon were most exercised that the Commons might use its new regime to sneak through a vote allowing abortion in Northern Ireland.
The situation cried out for someone to stand up and shout: “We’re in the middle of a global pandemic that’s killing thousands of people every day. So stop arsing about and being so bloody precious. No one’s trying to rewrite the rulebook for good. We’re just trying to muddle through and hold the government to account as best they can.”
After more than an hour of pointless nitpicking, the few dozen MPs in the chamber grudgingly nodded the new measures through. And then promptly went home. There was no time to ask the government any tricky questions like the future. Best to break off for tea before watching the daily Downing Street press briefing instead.
Today’s government frontman was Matt Hancock, who throughout looked to be on the verge of tears, his voice catching with emotion. Normally the health secretary is a walking, talking Tigger, bouncing with man-child optimism in the face of any impending catastrophe. But now he was utterly subdued. Broken, even.
And well he might be. The vague sense of a collegiate cabinet truce that had appeared in place when Boris Johnson first fell ill is well and truly over. Since Dominic Cummings came back to work, the knives are out to find a scapegoat for when the coronavirus reckoning inevitably comes. And the blades are all pointing in Matt’s back. Classic Dom. Screw things up and get someone else to take the blame.
Part of Hancock’s tragedy is that he is the architect of his own downfall. While other ministers seek to shift the blame and keep things vague, there is an intrinsic goodness and honesty to Matt. He does really care. Out of a dried-out riverbed of talent at the head of government, he is the closest we have got to a politician of integrity.
It’s just that he’s not always as competent as he might be. Desperate to provide some hope and answers in a political vacuum of self-distancing from accountability. So he writes cheques he knows can’t be cashed. He makes promises that can’t be kept. There isn’t a prayer that the arbitrary target of 100,000 tests per day he ad libbed a few weeks ago will be met, so this is the cross on which the Grand Inquisitor, Classic Dom, will crucify him.
With all this going on, the press briefing was understandably a car crash. With scattered parts all over the place. He promised that anyone who needed a hospital bed would get one. He just couldn’t guarantee that any of the doctors or nurses would have the necessary personal protective equipment to treat them. The transport plane that’s gone missing in Istanbul is now being written in as a character in the latest Dan Brown romp.
Matt did also say that the first vaccine would be trialled on a person this coming Thursday. “But,” said the Anti-Tigger. But the science was very uncertain and so people shouldn’t get their hopes up too much. This from a minister who has consistently trotted out the party line that the science was always 100% accurate and that every decision had been taken in line with scientific advice. Hancock was in freefall, visibly being pulled in two different directions. His centre can no longer hold.
Most questions focused on the evidence that Simon McDonald, the permanent secretary to the Foreign Office, had given to a select committee that afternoon. Namely that Michael Gove’s assertion that the UK’s failure to join the EU procurement programme had been an email administrative error was total bollocks. It had been a political decision all along. Who would have guessed the Govester had been caught out lying again?
Hancock, though, was adamant. As health secretary he had definitely signed up to the EU programme. Leaving open the possibility that he had been overruled by Boris, Gove or Dominic Raab. Hell, if he was going down he might as well take some of the real guilty parties down with him. For the first time during the briefing, a ghost of a smile crossed his lips.
