Corbyn promised not to resort to Punch and Judy politics when he became Labour leader and PMQs have been pretty bleak ever since. However lately he has thrown his morals out of the window, bad for his unshakable moral fibre, good for us. Maybe he doesn’t even mind about nuclear proliferation after all and the last thirty years of activism has been a ruse to get his mum to knit him some more jumpers.
Corbyn laid into Theresa May over Brexit (what else?) it wasn’t hard, as her trusty foreign sec had already dropped her in it.
Boris has been mouthing off, to a Czech journalist, about leaving the customs union and Jeremy was wondering if that was now government policy?
Of course it wasn’t, May said or maybe it is, as nobody, including Boris really knows. Corbyn put the knife in and asked for Boris to come to the bench and tell the house, but the red faced foreign secretary sat deadly still with the nervous smile of a child who has been caught nicking from the tuck shop.
Then there was the small matter of the leaked document from some management consultants that said there was “no common strategy on Brexit and there are large divisions in the cabinet over leaving the EU” If this report was total rubbish then surely she could tell us the plan? Corbyn wondered.
Of course she couldn’t because management consultants get paid an eye-watering amount of money to tell what you already know, and this case is no different.
May gave the stock reply, that yes they have a plan, and it’s to “get the best possible deal.” That isn’t a plan, it’s an aim. Christopher Columbus’ aim was to find India, but I’m sure there was a lot of planning to get the voyage of discovery going, and even with all the intricate details sorted, he still ended up in totally the wrong place.
Continuing the nautical theme Jezza repeated Johnson’s recent statement to the world that “Brexit means Brexit and we will make a Titanic success of it.“ Just let that comment sink (boom boom) in.
On fire Corbyn moved on to the next Tory embarrassment: did May have a response to the Italian politician who was hoping for some slither of a Brexit strategy or the Dutch minister who said that Boris Johnson’s Brexit vision is ‘intellectually impossible.” Yep you guessed it, she didn’t.
Did the PM know how many civil servants are needed to deliver this fantastic agreement she is going to secure 10,000? 30,000? Even a ballpark figure? It is hardly top-secret information we need to hide from the French negotiators.
May’s limp response was that Corbyn has no plan and his party is divided over Brexit, but so what? He isn’t the PM, and she is trying her hardest not to let parliament vote over Brexit anyway. Even if the Labour cabinet think Brexit needs 45,000 clowns to ensure a smooth settlement, it is totally irrelevant.
Each week May reminds me more and more of a fussy deputy headmistress at her much loved grammar school, demanding to make every decision herself, but not actually making any.
Of course we don’t want to give every detail to our European partners/rivals (delete as appropriate) when it comes to the difficult negotiations, but surely even a self-flagellating hard Brexiteer must admit that the government has literally no idea what it is doing.
However, sadly, perhaps not as Angus Robertson, SNP, pointed out we are now in a post-truth world, possibly because the truth hurts too much.
Sycophantic question of the day
Wendy Morton, Con, who praised businesses in her constituency, especially a funeral parlour. Pretty morbid but the only certainties in life are death and taxes…and that the Tories don’t a clue what to do about Brexit.
Winner
Corbyn