“The superstar has arrived,” Lord Ashcroft shouted as Owen Paterson stepped on to the makeshift stage. Paterson gave Michael the kingmaker an uneasy sideways glance, searching for signs of irony. Understandably.
The Tory right might be looking for Anyone but Nige to present the case for an EU exit. But the man who, as environment secretary, blamed the badgers for failing to form an orderly culling queue may not be quite the ticket.
It would have been cheaper to buy every badger a business class flight to LA and a night in the Chateau Marmont hotel than kill them the O-Patz way.
Paterson was speaking at an event organised by Business for Britain, aka the deep-pocketed Britain Out of Europe at Any Cost campaign, and chose to begin with a history lesson – an unwise move for someone with the bearing and charisma of a supply teacher in a school that’s been put in special measures.
“The Yurpean [he is too much of the landed gentry to be able to say European] project was forged in the crucible of the terrible battle of Verdun in 1916,” he announced, making an ideal of a Europe free from war sound like a conspiracy designed to bring Britain to its knees 100 years later. “Neh’less,” he continued, his finger moving sideways over the page as he spoke, “the gurnment … Yurp … yurs and yurs … ”
From time to time he would look up and shake his head with what might have been élan if that hadn’t been a French word. It’s rumoured that Paterson is fluent in both French and German, though you wouldn’t guess it from his pronunciation. He gives the impression of someone who believes that shouting at foreigners is the best way to make himself understood. “J’AI DIT SHOOTER LES BLOODY BLAIREAUX.”
Still, his French can’t be much worse than his English.
The badgers might have got away. But now Paterson had the pesky Yurpeans firmly in his culling sights, he wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice.
The trade deficit with Yurp had nothing to with the Yurpeans producing more stuff that we wanted to buy than we could sell back to them. It was a con. Pure and simple, though not one quite matching his portrayal of the eurozone as “an unhappy land of semi-permanent recession”.
Just imagine how much more the Yurpeans would be stiffing us if their economies were growing. He was undeterred. “The boot is on the other foot now,” he declared, wisely omitting the word “jack”.
Everywhere Paterson looked, he found duplicitous Yurpeans, scheming to defraud a defenceless Blighty. Greek feta cheese, the Codex Alimentarius and, most disturbingly, the “green blob”: all were undermining Britain on a daily basis.
“I’m definitely not saying we should leave Yurp,” he added. “But we should definitely invoke Article 50 and leave Yurp.”
This wasn’t quite the contradiction it appeared as Paterson twice said: “We have reached a fork in the road with the Yurpean project,” so it’s possible he may have doubled back on himself.
“Why do we doubt our ability to lead on the world stage?” he asked in conclusion. If he had been watching himself on a TV monitor, he might have realised he’d just answered that.
