Watch I’m a Celebrity, Strictly Come Dancing or penguins freezing in the Antarctic. If you must, watch repeats of Midsomer Murders on ITV4 or Top Gear on Dave. And if you really can’t bear any of those then stare at a blank screen or run for the hills. Anything but subject yourself to the hour-long Brexit debate between Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn provisionally scheduled for Sunday week. Trust me, you’ll save yourself years in therapy.
Both leaders were clearly intent on using prime minister’s questions as a dress rehearsal. Even down to the heavily telegraphed gags and the lingering stares to the camera. It made for dismal viewing. Not just because May and Corbyn are such second-rate performers, but because they really don’t have anything very much to say. The prime minister has a plan, which is to have various plans. A plan that doesn’t stand a chance of getting through parliament. The leader of the opposition doesn’t even have a plan. Or at least not one that he is able to articulate.
Corbyn began on safe enough ground by listing the divisions in the government. The foreign secretary had said the government’s Brexit deal would only mitigate most of the negative impacts. The chancellor had admitted every form of Brexit left the UK worse off. The business secretary was already calling for an extension of the transition period to 2022. Was there any member of her cabinet she actually agreed with?
There wasn’t. Even though May couldn’t confirm what her plan was, given there was a whole spectrum of possible outcomes that may or may not happen, she was absolutely certain that her deal was the best deal. Mainly because it was the only one. Other than a no-deal.
She was also clear that what the country had voted for in the referendum was for everyone to be worse off than they otherwise would have been and she was determined to deliver on that. Though she couldn’t say just how much worse off everyone would be, but she was adamant that people would die less quickly under her arrangement. She knew that because the economic forecasts, which she advised people not to take too seriously because economic forecasters were invariably wrong, backed her up.
The longer May went on the more evasive and confused she became. At one point she even seemed to have a total systems failure and went blank. Her mouth opened but no words came out. “Um ... er,” she said. The backstop was the backstop but it wasn’t really the backstop because there was an alternative to the backstop. The government wasn’t going to publish the legal advice it had promised to publish because ... just because.
All of which should have given Corbyn the easiest of wins. But as the best he could offer was that if he were to have a plan then it would be marginally less rubbish than whatever the government’s plan turned out to be, the two leaders were reduced to trading empty soundbites. This was PMQs as echo chamber.
The time would have been better spent getting both leaders to face off in a bushtucker trial. Chomping their way through a wallaby’s scrotum would be the least that May and Corbyn could do in return for wrecking the country with their own incompetence. It would also be much better TV.
There was no greater enlightenment to be found in Labour’s urgent question on the Brexit economic forecasts that had been published earlier in the day. Philip Hammond had spent most of the morning touring the TV studios, gleefully telling anyone who would listen that Brexit was going to make everyone worse off. As this wasn’t quite the message Downing Street had been trying to get out, Hammond was locked in a cupboard and it was Mel Stride, one of the more junior Treasury ministers, who was sent out to reply for the government.
Stride’s whole purpose in life is to know as little as possible about everything. A job he does brilliantly. So after an hour at the dispatch box all he had managed to do was persuade the few MPs left in the chamber to book one-way tickets to Zurich. The forecasts weren’t actually Treasury forecasts so he couldn’t actually vouch for the accuracy of any of them. And it was a complete coincidence that the one option that the government had forgotten to model was the one the prime minister was proposing. But then even if it had done the work, the analysis would have been meaningless as there were too many variables.
Just another day in Brexitland. Less than two weeks until parliament gets to vote on the country’s future and still no clarity about anything. The revolution will be televised. But will anyone be watching?
