You’d have thought there was at least one Conservative MP who would still be prepared to defend Boris Johnson. The second world war Japanese soldier on a Pacific Island who was still refusing to surrender in the 1970s. Someone – other than Nadine Dorries – who was prepared to die on the hill of whether an over-promoted former culture secretary should be given a peerage.
And all Nadine can do is howl at the injustice in the Daily Mail. She can’t bring herself to resign, yet she refuses to come to the House of Commons. Hoping merely to make life a tiny bit difficult for Rishi Sunak by not allowing him to have all three byelections on the same day. Hardly a dirty protest.
If you had to pick one person to be that Japanese soldier, then you’d have got good odds on it being Philip Davies. The part-time MP, full-time GB News presenter and professional contrarian. Over the years, Phil has defended the indefensible on countless occasions. Brexit, parties, lies, culture wars. You name it, Davies has been OK with it. Few men have been truer to the spirit of Johnson bullshit and division.
Yet it turns out that even Phil has his limits. Shortly before the end of what had been another fairly desperate prime minister’s questions for Sunak, Davies rose to his feet to take centre stage. When could we have a proper Conservative government, he wailed.
Johnson had been a crashing disappointment, he said, giving full rein to his inner hater. Despite his 80-seat majority, he could only indulge the socialist nanny state – I guess Boris has more invested in nannies than most of us – by banning buy one get one free offers on junk food.
Why couldn’t people be left in peace to get obese? If you die, you die. Get over it. You could hear the waves crashing over what remains of Boris’s legacy and reputation. Somewhere in the UK, the blond narcissist could be heard sobbing “Et tu, Phil?” Johnson was almost on his own. Still protesting his innocence. Or lying, as we call it.
Weirdly, it turned out that Johnson’s biggest defender at PMQs was Sunak himself. In as much as he couldn’t bring himself to criticise his predecessor. The half-hearted apologist. There again, he had been a willing participant in his government. So perhaps, somewhere in the murkier areas of his subconscious, he knows that he is partly to blame. Stockholm syndrome. That he should have been far quicker to speak out. After all, most of the country knew Johnson was a wrong‘un long before Rish! resigned as chancellor.
Keir Starmer had begun confidently. As if he knew this was going to be a walk in the park. Sunak has no new lines left and the ones he uses are hopelessly out of tune. Far from sounding like a prime minister, Rish! more closely resembles a leader of the opposition these days. One who knows his party is on the slide and expects to be out of a job in the near future. The Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Let’s hope Joe Biden comes through with renewing that green card. Otherwise last week’s trip to Washington would have been a total waste.
Bills. Prices. Mortgages. Everything was going up, the Labour leader observed. So how was it that all the Tories had been doing in the past week was squabbling over which crony got what honour? Sunak tried to look offended. Hurt face. All he had done was follow precedent by waving through Johnson’s honours list on the nod. A dirty job, but someone had to do it. Pontius Rish!.
He should have claimed the credit for removing some of the more egregious names and preventing Stanley Johnson from getting a knighthood.
Small mercies.
Starmer went for the throat. If Rish! had managed to stop some honours, it clearly meant he was entirely relaxed about others being approved. In what world were gongs appropriate for the very people who had both organised the parties at Number 10 and tried to cover them up. The rule-breakers would now – in some cases – be rule-makers.
And why had Sunak not at least waited until the privileges committee had published its report on whether Johnson lied to parliament before going ahead and ok-ing the honours list? At best, it looked iffy. At worst, corrupt. A blatant attempt to rush the gongs through. Surely the honest thing to do, the accountable thing to do, the thing that shouted integrity, would have been to say that there was no precedent for an honours list from a disgraced prime minister. Yet again, when offered a chance to take the moral high ground, Rish! had dived for the valleys.
Er … Um … Sunak played for time. All the while his benches were silent. They can smell failure. But Jeremy Corbyn had nominated a couple of iffy people for the Lords. What that had to do with Starmer was unclear. He went on to say Labour was running the country badly – Sunak gets easily confused about who is in power – but that the Tories were doing a fantastic job. High wages, low growth, high interest rates. It sounded like a celebration of stagflation.
There were only a handful of SNP MPs in the chamber but their party leader, Stephen Flynn, also had Sunak on the ropes. Just with a very simple question about interest rates. Did he agree with his analysis last year that high interest rates would cost his party the election? Rish! mumbled an attempted gag about Nicola Sturgeon.
Flynn more than held his own. “Just grow up,” he said, his voice laced with contempt. You could see Sunak shrivel. He had been well and truly owned. He was a man with nothing to say and no idea how to say it. Just another leader broken on the Tory wheel. Not even Jeremy Hunt could look him in the eye. This can’t go on. But it will.
