Cometh the hour, cometh the man. At last, a deputy whom Rishi Sunak can trust. Trust to be thoroughly mediocre. The last thing an interim prime minister – there’s an unquestionable lightness of being to Rish!: even he doesn’t seem to know what he stands for – who is grooming his party for opposition really wants is a number two biting at his heels.
Certainly not a malign presence like Dominic Raab who would smile while killing you. And who you know believes he would do a far better job. Just biding his time. Though Dom has a lot of time on his hands these days.
Oliver Dowden, however, is the perfect fit. A man who had never dreamed of being anything so grand as a deputy prime minister. Who would actually have been just as happy in his natural role as a number three or four. A cross between a gentleman’s gentleman and a parody character from a 1970s sitcom.
Someone for whom deference is ingrained. Olive, as he is known by many, is that rare politician. A man who is only too aware of his many limitations. His one purpose in life is to fail. And therefore to make his boss look good. And Sunak needs all the help he can get. Everything he touches is falling apart. Half his cabinet are busy freelancing, making up policy on the hoof. The other half merely comatose.
With Rish! en route to Japan via Iceland – who would have guessed the EU wouldn’t be interested in adopting the UK’s asylum proposals? – it was left to Dowden to face his first deputy prime minister’s questions. Something he had prepared for diligently. Nobody could do quite that badly unless they had given it a lot of thought beforehand. This was failure on a heroic scale.
Labour’s Angela Rayner began by welcoming Olive as the third deputy prime minister she had faced across the dispatch box. There was a lot of head-scratching on the sparsely populated benches – Dowden’s reputation precedes him – as they tried to remember the third. Then it came to them. Those glorious six weeks when Thérèse Coffey was one step removed from No 10. The laughs we had.
Could she remind Dowden that he had resigned as party chairman when the Tories lost 300 seats in the local elections in 2022? Who did he think might be responsible for the loss of 1,000 seats earlier this month? Olive tried and failed not to glance at the new party chair, Greg Hands, who was sitting further down the frontbench. Hands blushed and tried to pretend he wasn’t there.
Dowden got one good gag in about Ed Davey being Keir Starmer’s preferred deputy but after that it was all downhill. Not that Rayner was on top form herself. Many of her questions were rambling rants that got drowned out in the general noise. But then she didn’t really need a sprinkling of stardust. All she had to do was stand vaguely upright to take the convincing win.
“Er … you supported Jeremy Corbyn in 2019,” said Olive, his voice becoming more and more shrill the more desperate he became. Um, yes. And he had supported Boris Johnson at the same election. And look how that had ended. He’ll be sure to erase that from his CV. Besides which, everyone knows the Corbyn digs are dead in the water. Literally no one cares. Corbyn is now barely a footnote in recent British history.
The deputy prime minister couldn’t stop digging. He was proud of the government’s record. Proud that NHS waiting lists weren’t coming down. Proud that Britain had the worst growth in the G7. Proud that crime rates were soaring. Proud that there were more food banks than ever before. At least, that’s what he would have said if he hadn’t started lying through his teeth. He even tried to outdo Rayner on her working-class credentials. That was never going to work.
Rayner concluded with some observations about the three-day National Conservatism conference that was winding up just across the road in Westminster. The mad, the bad and the sad creating a new ideology for a Tory party that had run its course in government. That couldn’t – as Jacob Rees-Mogg had admitted – even gerrymander a vote properly. Just lurching from crisis to crisis. Drunks in search of an audience. “Um … Jeremy Corbyn,” was all Dowden could manage. Long before the end, most MPs had already left. This won’t be going on Olive’s showreel.
Over at the Nat Cons, we were all in for a treat. A keynote speech from Lord Frost. Frosty the No Man. Living proof that genuine talent can be a disadvantage. Someone whose motto has been to fail more. Fail better. Weirdly, he was greeted as a man of genuine substance. One of the Conservatives overachievers. A real catch. Beggars can’t be choosers and all that.
Frosty began by congratulating the conference for congratulating him. They were clearly the future. Even though, to judge by the audience, they were mostly the past. Male, stale, pale. Men of a certain age and colour. Then he attacked his opponents. Not just the left but most of the Tory party. We had no sense of humour. We were out of touch with normal ideas.
Let’s think this one through. We didn’t laugh at Douglas Murray’s Holocaust joke about the Germans mucking up nationalism with two world wars. We didn’t clap when David Starkey insisted that black people were jealous of the Holocaust. They didn’t like being down the grievance hierarchy. If that’s the bar then count me in. Call me a killjoy.
But, hey, there were plenty of gags in Frosty’s speech. Just that none of them were intentional. He’s the least self-aware man on the planet. Brexit was the anti-establishment revolution. Except it was led by the establishment.
He was proud of the deal he had negotiated even if it obviously had been a sham and wasn’t working. He was a member of the dispossessed. Though he had been in government and been given a peerage by a corrupt prime minister for failing. And now expects to be fast-tracked as a Tory MP. All while saying how the least capable people were promoted in government. Sometimes it’s not anti-woke to say the unsayable. It’s just really stupid. Frosty could learn from silence.
It wasn’t clear quite what his lordship wanted. Or how he was going to deliver on the Brexit he had screwed up. Maybe he just didn’t have time. It was probably all down to immigrants. Most things at this conference had been. Don’t get me wrong. Everyone liked foreigners in theory. Just not in practice. And especially not over here.
If this is the future then the Conservatives are racing towards a cul-de-sac. The rightwing evangelicals have finally got the audience they craved. They might regret it later.
