.webp)
Westminster in shock consensus: Door Matt Hancock
is a prat
John Crace
Meanwhile, good guy Tom Tug emerges as one of few sane
Tories liked by not just his own party but Labour too
Tue 1 Nov
2022 18.59 GMT
It won’t
last. But for one day only, parliament found a few things on which all MPs
could agree. The first was BBC local radio. The proposed cuts to services were
an outrage and would devastate communities. Said absolutely everyone during an
urgent question. Junior culture minister Julia Lopez could hardly believe her
luck. All she had to do was nod her head, say how right everyone was, and that
she would be sure to mention it to the director-general when she saw him next
week. She didn’t even have to explain why the BBC might be financially
stretched.
Next up was
Tom Tugendhat. Rapidly emerging not just as one of the few sane Tories left in
Westminster but as one of the great survivors. After years spent making an
enemy of Boris Johnson as chair of the foreign affairs select committee, the
one-nation Tugendhat had a brief few days in the limelight when he ran for the
leadership of the Conservative party in the summer.
He did
better than some – think Jeremy Hunt, Nadhim Zahawi and Sajid Javid – and made
it to the first televised debate but was soon eliminated thereafter. Though
probably as much to his surprise as everyone else’s, he then found himself in
Liz Truss’s cabinet as security minister. Somehow Tugendhat survived.
Principally by doing and saying absolutely nothing for the seven weeks Librium
Liz was in government. In fact, no one is even quite sure if Tugendhat ever
bothered to get out of bed. A bed-bound, elective mute was by far the best
persona to navigate the halcyon Truss days.
His silence
was rewarded with Rishi Sunak deciding that Tugendhat was one of the few Truss
ministers worth retaining in his own cabinet. But eventually Tom Tug was forced
out into the open for an urgent question on Chinese rogue police stations in
the UK.
And it all
turned into a bit of a love-in. Because not only did the Tories like their man,
but so did the opposition parties. In a parallel universe Tugendhat could
easily have ended up as one of them. Politically he is far closer to the centre
of the Labour party than he is to the Tory right.
The urgent
question had been brought by Alicia Kearns, the new chair of the foreign
affairs committee, so there was a lot of mutual congratulation. May I
congratulate the former chair of the foreign affairs select committee on his
new role and his first outing at the dispatch box. Oh, no, no, no. It should be
me congratulating the honourable lady on becoming the new select committee
chair. Oh no, no, no. After
you. Oh, no, no, no. After
you.
Iain Duncan
Smith did point out that other countries had been a wee bit quicker to spot
Chinese police stations in their own countries, but wasn’t going to blame Tom
Tug as he was one of the good guys and couldn’t possibly be held responsible
for any government failures. Alistair Carmichael came up with the most innovative
solution. Why didn’t the UK set up a few police stations in China? Brilliant.
Just send the Met to Beijing and make millions doing the Chinese for speeding.
Tugendhat
wasn’t finished. Once the UQ was over he was up on his feet again for his first
ministerial statement. On the creation of a taskforce to protect the country
that he couldn’t really tell MPs about because if he did he would either have
to kill them or himself. Everyone just nodded along.
Even
Labour’s Yvette Cooper. She too agreed that Tom was a tremendous bloke. She
just wanted to know what the government was doing about Johnson, Truss and
Suella Braverman. All of whom appeared to have a bizarre approach to national
security.
The Convict
enjoyed hanging out with the KGB, Librium Liz managed to get her phone hacked,
while Leaky Sue texted government secrets to her mates. One of whom, John
Hayes, happened to be wandering around the chamber trying to tell anyone who
would listen that he knew nothing about anything.
Tom Tug
resisted the temptation to indulge Cooper. Rather he just said she had been
informed on privy council terms how mind-blowingly stupid his colleagues were.
So could he just leave it at that for now? It wasn’t going to serve any higher
purpose to prove they were catastrophically unfit for office when they weren’t
in the chamber. And that was that. Tugendhat could return to his Trappist
wellness clinic.
But that
wasn’t the end of the strange, almost magical, consensus. Because the biggest
outbreak of agreement was around Door Matt Hancock. You couldn’t find anyone
who didn’t think he was a complete prat. His vanity meets hubris in I’m a
Celebrity.
Poor Matt.
Delusional to the last. He wanted to connect with the real people, he said. And
now was the time to do it. When the UK was still in complete chaos and no one
would miss his valuable input as an MP. That much was true. It was a chance for
the little people to hear about his fantastic new book, Pandemic Diaries.
The everyday
story about a man promoted so far out of his depth he ended up killing loads of
elderly Covid patients by sending them back to care homes. A man who paid the
ultimate sacrifice just for daring to fall in love with someone else’s wife,
leaving his own and being caught on CCTV snogging and groping like a teenager.
A real life story of a man whose mid-life crisis led him to break the rules. He
fought the law and the law won.
A man so
needy he imagined the public might fall in love with him. A man so dim he
couldn’t see he would end up being made to do the bushtucker trial night after
night. A man destined to disappear into obscurity as he chokes on kangaroo
scrotum. Westminster won’t miss him.
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário