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meIt’s no big secret that Boris Johnson has a problem with women. And not just your wives, girlfriends, and IT advisers. So when addressing the Prime Minister’s questions to confront Angela Rayner, a former working-class care worker and the kind of woman he had probably never encountered before, who was replacing the self-isolating Keir Starmer, the sole target of Johnson was trying to avoid being his normal, aggressive, condescending and condescending self. And though he looked through the shipping box every now and then, as if to check if Rayner was from another planet, he almost held it together. There were no jokes or insults. This was the closest to politeness Boris can handle.
Rayner seemed understandably nervous at first, this was her first outing at PMQ, but she quickly got going with a story about a man named Keir who couldn’t go to work that morning, before reminding Boris that he had once worked at the watch out. sector and did you have any idea what the average salary was for someone who worked in that profession? She didn’t, but it didn’t bother her. He was just concentrating on trying not to sound too rude.
Which is pretty much the way the rest of the session went. Rayner would ask some revealing questions about the government’s failures to meet its own coronavirus testing goals – or even adequate ones – and Boris would just speak with all the copycat charm he could. It didn’t matter if he didn’t know the answer or came up with some figures that even he knew were bullshit; the only strategy in play was to sound like he was treating Rayner as an equal.
Rayner did some good lines about driving to Durham for a Covid test and the government gave priority to shooting grouse – Johnson’s self-inflicted wound that he was acting on people’s priorities led to the odd whining from his own banks, but Boris no longer cared about anything. . The Labor deputy director may have made the best of the exchanges, but he had lasted the 15 minutes without presenting himself as an unreconstructed titled dinosaur. Which, under the circumstances, almost counted as a draw.
Much more revealing, such as revealing just how little command of details the prime minister really has, was his appearance before the liaison committee, the supergroup of select committee chairs, later in the afternoon. The committee then has the advantage of being able to keep asking questions until Johnson’s lack of clue is exposed. It was also unfortunate for Boris that two of the main areas examined were his specialized topics of ignorance: the coronavirus and Brexit.
Scientific committee chair Greg Clark got things going by noting that the government’s Covid testing systems were, to put it nicely, a bit messy. Boris just fidgeted and rubbed his bloodshot eyes, seeking inspiration. We are definitely going to test 500,000 per day at the end of October. Clark sighed. At that time of year, there were typically 500,000 people each day showing symptoms consistent with Covid anyway, so it really wouldn’t be enough to start dealing with the problem.
Johnson tugged at her hair and suggested that it would be helpful if only those who definitely had the virus asked for a test. Moments later, he denied Meg Hillier knowledge of the ever promising Operation Moonshot that would deliver 10 million tests a day that returned results in just 20 minutes. Hold that thought. We have a prime minister who has no recollection of committing his government to spending £ 100bn on live television a week earlier. Sometimes it’s a wonder that you can even get dressed in the morning.
That, however, turned out to be Boris at his most consistent. For the rest of the session, he looked like an overgrown school boy who had been put in the Naughty Step for not turning in his homework. When was there going to be a public inquiry? Never, hoped. Although there could be an investigation into lessons learned at some point in the future whose conclusion would be to never conduct a public investigation.
Catherine McKinnell of Labor asked him about a report that he clearly did not know existed and went on to suggest that if it was okay for the government to break the law in limited and specific ways, why couldn’t members of the public choose which one? laws they wanted to violate in specific and limited ways. Boris again had no response, other than stating that there had always been one rule for him and another for everyone else.
Things got even uglier when the issue moved to Brexit. Johnson only smiled when asked why he was choosing to violate international law rather than abide by the arbitration procedures that he himself had negotiated in the withdrawal agreement. When pushed further, he implied that he hadn’t realized that leaving the EU meant leaving the EU in its entirety, rather than being able to choose the parts we wanted to keep.
This, Johnson claimed, was proof that the EU had not been negotiating in good faith. Once again, satire proved to be a straightforward transcription service. Especially since Brandon Lewis, the secretary of Northern Ireland, had told the select committee earlier that morning that the EU had acted reasonably at all times.
Boris also couldn’t say who was right: Attorney General Robert Buckland, who claimed the Internal Markets bill only violated the law if it was implemented, or Brandon Lewis, who said it did so under any circumstances. “I refer you to the attorney general’s advice,” Johnson shrugged. When you trust Suella Braverman, with synaptic problems, who you wouldn’t employ to fight a parking ticket, to get answers, you know you’re fighting for a lost cause.
The session ended in confusion, with the Prime Minister unable to say whether Lord Keen, Scotland’s Conservative Advocate General, had resigned after the Northern Ireland secretary corrected him for his comments on the breach of the law in parliament. Minutes later, it was announced that Keen had indeed resigned. Whether the Conservatives could get a replacement was another matter, though, as anyone who agreed to take the job would be immediately disbarred for being willing to break the law. As is often the case, the line between farce and tragedy was becoming increasingly blurred.
