Monday
First as satire then as tragedy. On Sunday I wrote that the Labour shadow ministers were resigning at such a rate that it wouldn’t be long before Cat Smith, a Corbynite MP with almost no parliamentary – or life – experience was sitting on the opposition frontbench. Sure enough, when the prime minister came to make his statement on the referendum, there she was just a few places down from Jeremy Corbyn as the new minister for young people and looking hopelessly out of her depth after more than 100 more senior backbenchers had declined shadow ministerial posts. One Labour MP was offered three jobs and turned them all down.
To add to the sense of chaos, the one new shadow minister who should have been in the house wasn’t: Clive Lewis, the new shadow defence minister who has not yet had time to familiarise himself with Westminster, was stuck knee-deep in the Glastonbury mud when he should have been leading defence questions. Meanwhile Chris Bryant resigned as shadow leader because Corbyn wouldn’t deny he had voted for Britain to leave the EU. And yes, I had joked the previous day that Corbyn had put his X in the wrong box.
Tuesday
The current line from the Vote Leave camp, voiced most strongly by Iain Duncan Smith in the absence of Michael Gove and Boris Johnson who have both used the period of post-referendum uncertainty to catch up on their sleep, is that the reason no one has any sort of plan about how to implement Britain’s exit from the EU is because it was never their job to come up with a plan and that it was up to the remain camp to work out what should happen. It used to be the hard left that dealt in dialectics. But one person who did thoroughly take on board the “no plan is the best policy” theory was Roy Hodgson, who on Monday evening masterminded England’s embarrassing defeat to Iceland in the Euros. Roy had been so determined that nothing should be left to chance that he had come up with an absence of plan that even ruled out the possibility of Iceland being worse at penalties than England. As a Spurs fan I did feel slightly embarrassed that five of my team’s players had taken part in such an abject display. But then I thought it might be quite therapeutic for the rest of the country to go through the same agonies I experience on all too many weekends.
Wednesday
The reason for Michael Gove’s absence has finally been revealed in both a Daily Mail column and leaked email from his wife, Sarah Vine. Here I can reveal some exclusive extracts that didn’t make the headlines. “Friday morning and Mikey and I are really tired. ‘I’ve won,’ squeaked Mikey. ‘You mean, we’ve won,’ I replied, sternly. ‘Sorry Mummy,’ he said. ‘I meant “we”. Can I have bitty?’ The phone hasn’t stopped ringing. Apparently some members of the media want me to explain what Mikey’s government, led by me, is going to do next. How selfish these people are. The referendum campaign has been absolutely exhausting for me and the last thing I need is to take tiresome phone calls from interfering busybodies. Besides, I have to make sure that Mikey gets a proper job in my new government and I don’t think Boris is at all trustworthy. Not like me and Mikey who would never stab anyone in the back. That’s just not our style. Hang on, Mikey is just going out. ‘Don’t forget to bring me back a new government, Mikey, or you’ll never get bitty again.’ Sorry, where was I?”
Thursday
You have to admire the Labour media team. On a day when the wife-swapping in the Tory party could have dominated the news agendas, Labour managed to get blanket coverage for something that most parties would have been happy to see buried. The event in question was the publication of Shami Chakrabarti’s report on antisemitism in the Labour party. Shami didn’t get things off to the best of starts by saying Labour should try to resist the temptation of saying “Hitler” too often. Stick to Goebbels or Himmler instead. Next, Ruth Smeeth, a Jewish Labour MP, was reduced to tears by a Corbyn supporter who she says accused her of being a traitor to the Labour cause. If that wasn’t all bad enough, Corbyn appeared to compare the Israeli government with al-Qaida and Islamic State. At which point Chakrabarti had to announce she was going to reopen her inquiry. Meanwhile, back in the Commons, Philip Hollobone, the Conservative MP for Kettering, was complaining about Lindsay Lohan’s tweets about Kettering on referendum night. These are the people who are governing us.
Friday
The 100th anniversary of the first day of the Battle of the Somme has not passed without both the leave and remain campaigns using it to their advantage. The leavers insist that the 20,000 attacking soldiers who died on 1 July 1916 would have wanted to leave the EU, while the remainers are equally certain they would have wanted to stay. Both sides might have been better off shutting up and visiting the memorial to those whose bodies were never recovered at Thiepval in France. There aren’t many places that have reduced me to silence, but Thiepval is one. It also nearly cost me my marriage just days into my honeymoon in 1985, as I insisted we spent the first three days touring the first world war battlefields before we drove further south towards the Lot. If you’re looking to mug up on the battle, I can recommend Lyn Macdonald’s Somme. Her book was first published in 1983 and she was one of the last historians to record the personal accounts of many of the men who fought there. Read and weep.
Digested week digested: Is this a dagger which I see before me?
