Name: Warm prosecco.
Served at: Tory summer parties.
Appearance: Less bubbly than it was.
Rather like the Tories themselves? Very good, yes. Conservative morale dwindles in proportion to the party’s number of seats in parliament, just as water becomes less able to store dissolved carbon dioxide at higher temperatures.
I’m not sure the metaphor stretches that far. Whatever. The point is that the justice secretary, David Lidington, blames rumours of Theresa May’s precarious position as party leader on warm prosecco.
How come? Does she drink too much of it? Emphatically not. Lidington says its presence in the bloodstream of some Tory MPs explains the rumours of a plot to ditch her.
Whose bloodstream, exactly? Andrew Mitchell’s, I suppose, or those of the other MPs who had dinner with him on 26 June and reportedly heard him say that May was “weak”, “dead in the water” and had “lost her authority”. Mitchell is pals with David Davis, who is one of the people being suggested as an alternative prime minister.
I see. That sounds serious. Mitchell called it “an overheated report” of what he said.
Perhaps the result of overheated Italian wine? That is certainly Lidington’s opinion. “Almost every July, a combination of too much sun and too much warm prosecco leads to gossipy stories in the media,” he told Andrew Marr on Sunday.
Really? Last July, there was a leadership election underway, so all the gossip was real. The July before that, David Cameron had recently won an election, so the Tories were happy. The July before that, Cameron sacked Michael Gove as education secretary during a cabinet reshuffle from a position of strength … All right. Maybe Lidington was thinking of some other Julys.
Or maybe newspapers are printing largely accurate stories about Tory MPs wanting to get rid of May because she called an election to increase the party’s majority, then bungled the campaign so badly that they lost it altogether, making the Brexit negotiations even more chaotic and almost paralysing the party in parliament. I suppose there’s possibly some truth in that.
Do say: “Friends of the prime minister deny that her MPs have been telling the truth to journalists.”
Don’t say: “Downing Street sources expect a Secretary of State for Wine Refrigeration to be appointed in the next reshuffle.”
