I think it’s fair to say that Boris Johnson, and therefore the Government and, slightly more tenuously the Tory Party, is having a less than successful week. First, there was the unsurprising but still eyebrow-raising Sunday Times scoop of his friendship with a confidently-smiling younger American entrepeneuress and the £126,000 she received in public funds during his tenure as London mayor. As of today, the PM has a fortnight to answer the London Assembly’s questions about this particular misunderstanding, ‘plaster falling off the ceiling’ or whatever dismissive term he reaches for in describing it.
Johnson may have thought he’d have a bit more time to sort out this particular mess in coming weeks, but alas no, instead he’ll be scuttling back to Westminster because, also as of today, the Supreme Court has ruled that his prorogation of Parliament was unlawful, it should never have happened and his words to the Queen were… let’s go with misleading. With some MPs already taking their seats at Westminster and others packing their bags and heading back to London, the safe money is now on a vote of no confidence in the PM, renewed vitality in the Remainers’ alliance, fresh calls for an election and more mopped brows in Brussels as the clock continues to tick on October 31’s Brexit deadline.
All of this would be nectar for the Labour bees, you might think. But, despite their righteous hollers at the behaviour of the Government, they are no nearer getting their own ducks in a row or providing any meaningful accountability to this confederacy of dunces failing to rule over us.
Parliament’s main website defines the Opposition’s main role as one of scrutiny. It must hold the government of the day accountable to the public, check the excesses of the ruling party and, significantly, not be totally antagonistic in its dealings.
While we all might agree that final ship has long sailed, it is the other failings that are so depressing, and their root lies in the weight of the Labour Party’s pre-existing problems that they have failed to iron out and were so horribly on show at this year’s conference in Brighton.
The ongoing anti-Semitism battle shows no signs of abating, and it was a depressing giveaway at last week’s Liberal Democrat conference when former Labour convert Luciana Berger described her relief at being able to walk around the halls without the personal protection she’d been given at the Labour conference the year before.
The other biggest elephant sitting front row in the conference room, as it has been since before the Referendum in 2016, is the Labour Party’s ‘evolving’ position on Brexit. Heaven knows, we might not like the Tory position on leaving the EU, but at least we could describe it in an elevator moving at normal speed. Under Johnson’s preoccupied watch, it remains, ‘We’re leaving, do or die, and we don’t need the Brexit Party’s help with that, Nigel, thanks but no thanks.’ Similarly, the Lib Dems have found fresh vigour, new members and a whole new wad of donation cash with their equally abrupt offering, ‘We want to stay. We’re not going to ask anyone. We’re just going to revoke. Vote for us if you feel the same.’
By contrast, the Labour message has been a bit more blurred from the start, since Jeremy Corbyn campaigned for Remain with his fingers crossed behind his back, then pushed instead for a general election until he was offered one last month which he refused, and most recently settled on no position at all – not a good look after the European election which punished severely his party’s apparent indifference.
But it was all going to be ok, because this week’s conference would give the party the chance to clarify the manifesto, simplify the message and trumpet it from the Brighton rooftops – except things have, once again, gone a bit off script.
First, there was a whole load of oxygen mis-spent, trying and failing to remove the thorn in Corbyn’s side, aka his deputy leader Tom Watson, not through any personal failings or allegations they could drum up, but through some faintly Politburo-esque machination of doing away instead with the role of deputy leader. Strangely, this comically transparent effort failed but only after two days of valuable conference time.
Then, even more inexplicably, they grabbed their share of Sunday headlines with… drumroll… the decision to strip private schools of their assets and redistribute them, with the subheading of revised quotas for universities taking in privately educated students.
Well, I don’t know about you but, right now, with the Damoclean sword of food shortages, medicine restrictions and industrial collapse hanging over all our heads, I’m not sure my sleepless nights are spent worrying about revised university quotas. It’s undoubtedly a noble step on the path to equality and social mobility, and a nod to our European counterparts in this aping of the Finnish school model where there are no private schools at all (the thinking being this inspires well-to-do parents to make every school as successful as possible). But it’s also problematic – in fact, there are already so many questions over the legality of the asset-stripping part of it that even John McDonnell, not known for holding back on a socialist splurge, refused to put his name to it. You know you’re in trouble when…
More pragmatically, is this really the kind of brainstorming Labour needs right now? It’s as though the national executive is desperate to lead a conversation anywhere apart from Brexit and, after yesterday’s voting debacle, you can see why.
In what observers called “farcical scenes”, the conference on Monday evening rejected a motion calling for the party to campaign for Remain in the event of a second referendum, but only after a) the party’s national executive had previously tried to block the motion being heard, b) two of the biggest unions, Unite and the GMB, block-voted against the motion, along with Momentum and c) hmmm, I don’t know quite how to describe this accurately, the vote count got a bit muddled. The result was decreed after a show of hands in the hall, with chair Wendy Nichols initially calling it for Remain, before she was overruled by general secretary Jennie Formby, who simply said she saw more hands go up in the hall against the motion. Just as well the Referendum was more forensically monitored, eh?
And there, in a nutshell, is a microcosm of Jeremy Corbyn’s biggest problem – a marauding mass of people with different ideas, all putting their hands in the air, all wanting to be heard, that he’s been trying to keep happy for years by simply saying they can have it both ways. If in doubt, keep singing ‘Oh Jer-emy Cor-byn’ and hope for inspiration. But it won’t come.
How can it? How can Corbyn promise to become PM, send his strongest forces off to Brussels to secure “the best deal possible” and then put it to the country if those strongest forces are John McDonnell, Emily Thornberry and Sir Keir Starmer, all devout Remainers, who will then campaign against that same deal? It’s equally and oppositely bad to Boris Johnson’s plan to tell the EU he’s prepared to leave without a deal, and then telling the rest of the world he’s only bluffing but he needs everyone to keep quiet. They have newspapers in Brussels!
So here we are, five days later and what should have been Labour’s finest hour is mired in confusion, chaos, internal fighting, departures and disputes.
But why? Well the short answer is Jeremy Corbyn, an increasingly camera-shy party leader whom one pundit described this week as having all of Tony Blair’s vices (control freakery, triangulation) and none of his virtues (a sense of moderation, electability). There is, inevitably, the mounting suspicion that after decades of happy hectoring from the backbenches, he no more wants to be PM than he wanted the Remain for which he so reluctantly campaigned.
Well, that’s fair enough if he doesn’t want to be PM, Boris Johnson isn’t making it look the most attractive proposition, but could he at least summon up the necessary enthusiasm to be the leader of the opposition when the country needs it most?
