This is Britain’s stupidest hour – the age of crass, world-beating idiocy. History might, rather politely, record it as “the parliament of stupids”. As it departs today, many will think: good riddance to them, and to our stupid, obstinate, pig-headed prime minister.
The shock is that Wednesday’s uproar in the Commons was government-initiated pandemonium. The seasoned observer Paul Waugh, of HuffPost, called it, “more anarchy than I’ve ever seen in 20 years of sitting in the press gallery … in part orchestrated by the Tory whips”. The speaker rapidly lost control – and the attacks from the Tory frontbench turned on John Bercow, the one the Brexiters yearn to chase away. Stupid is the wrong word for deadly-dangerous behaviour from an out-of-control government.
How dare they depart leaving Brexit in limbo – no vote, no idea what happens next. On The Today Programme on BBC Radio 4, the leader of the house, Andrea Leadsom, blithely confirmed with great sanguinity that if there is no agreement then the legal position is that no-deal prevails. That’s a “managed no-deal”, she said, stupidly. Managing with the army on the streets, the NHS squandering millions on fridges for rationed medicines, some businesses stockpiling and most exporters simply despairing, while the border force and port authorities keep reminding the cabinet that there is no way to stop gridlock.
Even households are told to prepare. That’s an open invitation to the sort of panic-buying Mrs Thatcher boasted of in the year of the three-day week, when she revealed to a magazine in 1974 that she had filled two larders with tins of ham, tongue and fish, and jars of fruit, jam, marmalade and coffee – plus five bags of sugar, in the middle of a panic-buying sugar shortage. When criticised, she called it, “simply prudent housekeeping”. The three-day week was another entirely homegrown, artificial, Tory-created national crisis, which, incidentally, brought down Edward Heath’s government. Such an emergency would bring down this one too. But the Tory Brextremists driving the cabinet to Cobra-level alarmism have passed beyond the stage of rational political calculation.
The international development secretary, Penny Mordaunt (yet another implausible leadership contender), reportedly told the cabinet her department should take control because it has experience in emergency provision. Get ready for air-dropped food parcels and water purification tablets, with soldiers guarding supermarket shelves from food riots. Only a dangerously stupid cabinet can have sat around seriously discussing their intention to create a national emergency.
How stupid is Theresa May? I enjoyed John Crace’s four possibilities this week: she’s psychotically delusional, consumed with personal ambition (I doubt that one), a sleeper for a foreign power bent on destroying us – or totally incompetent.
What Jeremy Corbyn muttered was unparliamentary: he should have quickly apologised and not worsened it with the unlikely explanation he said “stupid people” not “stupid woman”. But the brouhaha pumped up by the Tories was beyond stupid for its nakedly synthetic indignation about nothing much, an assault on the speaker and an orchestrated distraction from their Brexit disaster.
But there is, alas, plenty of stupidity to go round. In those awesomely awful PMQ confrontations, Corbyn’s own stupid obduracy curiously mirrors May’s, as they both repeat their wooden mantras, both avoiding Brexit votes. They share the same rigidity and lack of agility.
Corbyn still cleaves to the Len McCluskey opposition to a referendum; a few days away from his entourage of McCluskey people may give Corbyn a chance to think again. Unlike John McDonnell, Corbyn seems not greatly influenced by the need to win elections.
But if he were, he should take a moment over the break to look at the latest polling analysis from Peter Kellner, a former YouGov president. He finds an 18% lead for remain, in a straight choice with May’s deal. Pollsters are in low repute, and a referendum campaign would swing votes all over the place – but that suggests a startling change.
Corbyn and McDonnell, and all Labour MPs fearing their leave voters, should examine this poll for the attitudes of Labour voters. In an election, if Labour continued to support Brexit in any form the party could fall to third place, at 25%, behind the Liberal Democrats, who would rise to 26%. Those who voted Labour last year and remain the year before say they are more likely to switch to the Liberal Democrats (49%) than stay with Labour (41%).
Of course, they may not when it comes to the ballot box – but trying to woo leave voters by “respecting” the referendum result has become a liability that doesn’t win leave votes. Labour support among leavers slips from 21% to 19%; Tory support among leave voters in an election would rise from 62% to 69%.
Well, that’s just a poll. But Kellner knows his stuff. Labour top brass should go away and rethink their deadlocked stasis on the most important question of a generation. Labour supporters everywhere are driven to distraction by their party’s failure to seize the initiative from this most dangerous government in living memory. The pretence that Labour can renegotiate Brexit was blown out of the water by the EU itself, unless a stop is put on the 29 March Article 50 deadline and another referendum called.
If Labour comes back in January parroting the same empty, fixed phrases we hear daily from the shadow cabinet, it really will be as stupid as the notoriously stupid party nominally in power. But that’s far too mild an epithet for this destructive government. Add your own lexicon for lunacy and ill-intent.
• Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
