Square peg, square hole. Neither David Davis nor Dominic Raab had worked out particularly well as Brexit secretaries. Davis because he was naturally lazy and fatally dim, Raab because he was under the impression his job was significant. With Steve Barclay, the prime minister has struck gold. A man bright enough to know he’s irrelevant, but too stupid to realise that might be a drawback. A man entirely comfortable with his own mediocrity. A minister of no importance.
All of which has turned Brexit departmental questions into a Jim Hacker tribute act. Albeit one that has begun to slightly pall with each revival. There’s only so much fun to be had from sitting in the Commons chamber listening to ministers going out of their way to make clear that their main function was to know nothing about anything. Just 12 Tory backbenchers bothered to show up this time. If it were down to them, Brexit questions would be downsized to a committee room.
There are still some opposition MPs who happen to believe that Brexit is the biggest crisis facing the country since the last war and that with under 30 days to go before the UK leaves the EU, it might be a good idea to have some kind of plan. Barclay appeared genuinely bewildered by this. No one had ever said Brexit would be good for the country, so why all the fuss? There was a bad deal and a worse deal. Que será, será.
This response didn’t go down as well as the Brexit secretary had hoped, and he was soon facing follow-up questions from Labour about what progress on cross-party talks had been made. Barclay shrugged. How the hell would he know? He was only the Brexit secretary. This kind of information was strictly limited to everyone but him. But he could confirm that some people from different parties may have talked to one another. And it was possible Brexit might have come up in these discussions.
Hilary Benn, chair of the Brexit select committee, tried to discover if Barclay had heard the same rumours as him that the EU had no intention of removing the Northern Ireland backstop. This time Barclay was incredulous. Though he had been to Brussels, he had never actually met anyone there. Eurostar had been offering cheap winter deals and he and his team had popped over for lunch a couple of times.
Thereafter, he was happy to run through a whole range of other topics that he knew nothing about. No, he couldn’t say how the government was going to vote if it came to no deal because not even Theresa May had that information and in any case he was sure he was going to vote for the deal that he had voted against the last time by backing the Brady amendment. Apart from anything else, it was terribly confusing having to choose between voting “aye” or “no” and he couldn’t rule out the possibility of doing a Chris Grayling and wandering into the wrong lobby.
The junior ministers Kwasi Kwarteng and Chris Heaton-Harris have also drunk the departmental ignorance Kool-Aid. Kwarteng was happy to confirm that though he had never actually met a worker he was delighted to confirm that the Tories would really, really care about workers until after a few Labour MPs voted with the government in the middle of next week. Heaton-Harris insisted that people had voted for Brexit to make themselves poorer and was determined to deliver on that commitment.
Robin Walker was rather cagier. He has been in the Brexit department since it was created and has seen countless colleagues come and go. So he has learned to avoid it all by taking out US citizenship. Every time he is asked a question he pleads the fifth amendment, claiming he can’t possibly confirm or deny anything as it might later incriminate him. He can feel the clammy breath of a Chilcot-style inquiry on his neck and is watching his back. He’s not quite as stupid as he looks.
We ended, as these sessions so often now do, in farce. First Heaton-Harris tried to claim that by trying to avoid no deal, the SNP was secretly backing it. No one expects the Spanish Inquisition! And that because the government was keeping no deal on the table, it was secretly trying to make to make sure there was no deal.
Then Barclay chipped in with the observation that the government could not be accused of running down the clock because the space-time continuum was outside cabinet control. They both sounded like a couple of old stoners. The Brexit secretary left the chamber in triumph. He could be a hero. Just for one day.
