Some politicians might just wonder how low their careers can go after being asked to serve in a department run by Nadine Dorries. Not Chris Philp. Then again, the digital minister is no normal No 2. That’s a level of responsibility of which he can only dream. Philp is much more a natural No 5. And only then because there is no No 6. He is a man who can be guaranteed not to demonstrate having a conscience. Not because he is intrinsically evil or amoral, but because he is too dim to have an original thought in his head. He is someone who can be relied on to repeat the last thing someone said to him and believe it to be true.
All of which made Philp the ideal candidate for the morning media round, as the only question he was going to be asked was whether the prime minister should apologise for his Jimmy Savile remarks after the previous evening’s protests in which Keir Starmer had been abused and harassed. And the Philpster duly adopted His Master’s Voice by parroting the lines he had been told to learn.
He began by insisting Boris Johnson’s words had been misconstrued. Which bit of Big Dog saying that Starmer had failed to prosecute Savile had been misconstrued, he wasn’t entirely sure. After all, The Suspect had been completely unambiguous when he had called out the Labour leader in the Commons during his statement on the Sue Gray report.
Undeterred, the Philpster then tried to realign himself with the prime minister’s subsequent remarks. What The Suspect had really meant was that Starmer – like Big Dog – had been forced to accept responsibility for things that weren’t his fault. Only it turned out that Johnson was being asked to take responsibility for things that were his fault. He had attended at least six of the parties and had probably known about most of the others. Hardly the same as apologising for a decision that had been taken by others in your organisation.
Having – as he saw it – established the basic facts, the minister then went on to ad lib. Always a mistake when you’re not very bright. It was like this: there was no need for The Suspect to apologise for having incited a load of protesters. Rather, the protesters should have been apologising to him. After all, the mob had also shouted out slogans about anti-vaxxers and Julian Assange, so they should have known better than to drag the prime minister into the debate by also mentioning Savile.
Besides which, it was evident that the protesters would have been out on the street giving Starmer a hard time regardless, so The Suspect could hardly be blamed even if they did shout out the odd “Jimmy Savile” line. In any case, it wasn’t as if Boris had invented the Savile slur himself. He’d just come across it by chance on a far-right, extremist website. As you do. So surely it was up to the people who were in charge of writing this stuff on the interweb to make sure their information was accurate before people like the prime minister got into trouble by repeating it?
LBC’s Nick Ferrari looked at Philp as if he were an idiot. Fair enough. A lot of us have done the same thing. The case was cut and dried. It was straight out of the Trump playbook. Spew out enough lies and some of them will be believed. Then take no responsibility for any actions incited by the lies. So Ferrari tried taking Philp back to basics. Would he have used the Savile attack against Starmer?
“Er … what Savile attack?” simpered Philp. He didn’t know about any Savile attack. The one we’ve just been talking about, Ferrari replied. Oh that one! That wasn’t an attack. That was just the prime minister trying to identify with the heavy burden of office that both men shared. Fine. But would he have said it? Oh God, no. He had never knowingly said anything controversial in his life. He was just an empty shell. Waiting to be filled with whatever his childminders told him.
The best part of being Chris Philp is that you don’t really know when Chris Philp has been in a train wreck of interviews. As far as he was concerned, he had done a top job protecting The Suspect’s reputation. So he went back to his department blissfully unaware that most people outside the Boris cabal thought The Suspect had lied and needed to publicly apologise. Not that he would. Why break the habit of a lifetime?
Not everyone in government was having such a good day. Jacob Rees-Mogg had just got the call that he was being moved from leader of the house to a new post of “minister for Brexit opportunities”. But what did that mean – other than a chance to celebrate the collapse of the Northern Ireland peace process? Boris had been at his most opaque. “Look at it this way, Jakey,” he had said. “You’re going to have a lot more time on your hands. Especially when I’m gone and you return to the backbenchers. Face it, no one but me would have you in the cabinet.”
To be fair, Big Dog had said exactly the same to Michael Ellis when he had told him he was being promoted for three times defending him over partygate when no one else would. Then, that was the point of Mike. To do the jobs others had too much self-worth to do. Still, Ellis didn’t care about the cabinet job so much as the knighthood he’d craved for years. Come the resignation honours list, his life would finally have meaning.
An evening with Marina Hyde and John Crace
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