Brexit Westminster is like the Crystal Maze on crystal meth
John Crace
A looking-glass world where truth last milliseconds and
every MP wants to play the joker
@JohnJCrace
Wed 27 Mar 2019 20.58 GMT Last modified on Thu 28 Mar 2019
01.05 GMT
Theresa May speaks in the Commons.
‘All she cared about
was that she’d created the ultimate lose-lose situation.’ Photograph: Mark
Duffy/AP
The only person missing was Prince Edward. Brexit has now
turned Westminster into the Crystal Maze on crystal meth. A looking-glass world
where any truth has a half-life measured in milliseconds, where normal rules no
longer apply and every MP is desperate to play the joker. The best the rest of
us can hope for is to wake up to find we had been dropped into the ninth series
of Dallas and that the last few years have just been a bad dream. Imagine how
good that would feel.
This was the day when the pupils chose to put their own
school in special measures because they had lost faith in their teachers. When
parliament sought to take back control of parliament. Precisely the form of
taking back control the government had always insisted the country didn’t have
in mind when it had voted to take back control. But then the government now
barely has control over its bowels as everything it touches turns to shit.
There is no area of public life it hasn’t found a way to do badly.
First though, we went through the formalities of prime
minister’s questions. A formality not just because Theresa May is Leader in
Name Only but because Oliver Letwin was the de facto prime minister for the
day. For Lino, it seemed like something of a release.
Now that even she seems to have realised she has reached the
endgame of her time in office, she appeared almost demob happy, in as much as
someone whose automated language skills barely extend to meaningful sentences
can do. She still insisted she had no intention of listening to anyone but
herself, but made no effort to deny her sell-by date was near. The last sign of
artificial intelligence in a Maybot is an awareness of inbuilt obsolescence.
The school’s new timetable didn’t get off to the most
promising of starts. After Letwin had apologetically read out the lessons for
the day – he does everything apologetically, even on rare occasions like this
when he has nothing to apologise for – Jacob Rees-Mogg merely used the time to
debate the merits of different public schools. The UK’s biggest constitutional
crisis reduced to a spat between Eton and Winchester over Tudor history. Beyond
pathos.
The Grand Wizard of Mogg has always resembled a boy in a
suit. Now he’s just a homunculus trapped inside a boy’s body, mewling at the
moon to distract everyone from his own sense of entitled inadequacy and
profound misjudgment, and unable to even own that it was partly down to him
that the government had temporarily lost control of Commons’ business. If nanny
had been around, he’d have been sent to the naughty step. For life.
Lino wasn’t quite done, however. There was still time for
another unnecessary act of self-harm as she whipped her party to vote down the
business of the house that had been agreed only two days previously. She
punched the air as she crashed to yet another defeat. Losing has become an
obsessive compulsive disorder. Failure is her defining feature, the only thing
at which she indisputably excels. With any luck, she’d lose again providing
John Bercow didn’t stop her from bringing the meaningful vote for a third time
and the Democratic Unionist party didn’t do something stupid like saying it
would vote for her deal after all.
But Lino needed back-up, a get-out clause. So she headed off
to the 1922 Committee to deliver the coup de grace, the sacrificial
self-immolation. She knew she was useless, she told the Tory backbenchers. She
had always been hopeless. And now was the time for everyone to acknowledge they
too thought she was rubbish by getting behind her deal that they all thought
was terrible. If they did that, she’d promise to resign sometime over the
summer. She wasn’t entirely clear on dates, but then she’s seldom clear on
anything. All she cared about was that she’d created the ultimate lose-lose
situation, both for herself and the country. She would go down in history as
the worst ever prime minister. So far. The ideal outcome.
Boris Johnson tried to look sombre as he left the 1922
Committee but he couldn’t conceal a smirk. Everything was working out just
fine. Who cared if the public reckoned him to be a man of no principles? He’d
never pretended to be anything but a self-interested careerist. Brexit had only
ever been a means to an end. He could live with vassalage if necessary. Having
blown it once back in 2016, he now had another shot at the top job. His face
crumpled just a little as he belatedly realised he’d be struggling for support
among fellow Tory MPs who did have scruples. Hopefully, there wouldn’t be too
many of them. And a little Latin would impress the rest.
What followed was yet more clusterfuckery. The ERG split,
the splitters split from the splitters and then the hardcore Spartans
threatened to bulldoze parliament in the name of democracy. Just before 9pm the
shit really hit the fan when the DUP found there was no deal to which they
could say yes. No retreat, baby, no surrender. Lino’s deal was as good as dead
and she’d made the ultimate futile gesture.
As so often we ended up by knowing less than when we had
started. Friday had been cleared for a third meaningful vote but no one knew if
it would now even take place. Just how much more of a punishment beating was
Lino willing to take. She couldn’t even organise her own departure. The only
upside was the distress on Boris’s face. His venality had been all in vain. The
pneumatic huckster had just slashed his own spare tyres.
The quantum Brexit had become ever more relative. And
parliament was still left wondering quite what it had taken back control of as
it had contrived to vote against everything. Bollocks to everything. The will
of the people was to remain indefinitely in a tenth circle of hell. We were
supposed to be leaving the EU in two days’ time. Time for the Four Pot Plants.
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