Has Matt Hancock resigned yet? Not at the moment of writing. The man who, as a candidate for the Tory leadership, said that it would be wrong to prorogue Parliament,a betrayal of the democracy men fought for on the Normandy beaches, is still a Minister. What was wrong in July is now fine by him. It’s coat-turning time for Mr Hancock.
Let us admit, however reluctantly, that in one sense the Prime Minister has a point. He finds himself in a pickle. He has recognized that there is no majority in the Commons for anything with regard to Brexit. There is no majority for No Deal. There is no majority for any revision of the Withdrawal Agreement that might be accepted by the EU. There is no majority for revoking Article 50 by which we applied to leave the EU. There is no majority for a second Referendum. There is no majority for a Government of National Unity. There is no majority for a General Election. There is (probably) no majority for his own Government.
It’s GUBU.
GUBU – grotesque, unbelievable , bizarre, unprecedented – was the anagram coined by Conor Cruise O’Brien to describe one of the more lurid episodes in the Government of Charlie Haughey.
Now we have our own GUBU and it’s as GUBU as you can get.
“Take Back Control” was the great Leave cry. Take control back from the bureaucracy of Brussels and entrust it to our sovereign Parliament.
Alas, our sovereign Parliament is itself out of control. So it has to be closed down for five weeks to protect the Prime Minister from the House of Commons. He can’t get MPs to do what he wants them to do. So he’ll do without them.
GUBU
Charles I would have approved. He said Parliaments were like cats: “they grow cursed with age.”
The Prime Minister still claims he can negotiate a better deal with the EU. He can’t negotiate one with our own Parliament. This being so he will, as Aneurin Bevan said of a different matter, go naked to the table at which negotiations take place. To anything he proposes the likely answer will be: “why should we believe you can get this through your Parliament?”
Why has Johnson done this? It’s what Sir Humphrey Appleby would have called a courageous decision, but “courageous” in his vocabulary meant “daft” Yet even if it is courageous in the usual sense of the word, it is strange. Johnson has never been a courageous politician; he blusters when challenged. He chickened ignominiously out of the 2016 Tory leadership election. Pricked balloons had more substance. Nor has he been a gambler.
So who has put him up to this? Who has stiffened up his sinews and summoned up his blood? Who is pulling the strings? I wish I knew.
Closing down Parliament, even if only for five weeks, to prevent it from challenging the Leader’s policy is what in the past we have expected only from tin-pot dictators. Now Johnson has the UK looking like a Banana Republic without the bananas. No wonder it looks like a coup d’etat.
GUBU.
How this will work out Heaven knows, but I can tell you one thing. Say what you like about her, pile up her real and imagined sins as high as you choose, but Margaret Thatcher would never have done this. Whatever her faults, she believed in Parliamentary democracy and in holding her own and winning the argument at the Dispatch Box. And she would have had a good Lincolnshire word for Johnson’s unwillingness to face the Commons. She would have said he was “frit”.
Finally, a wise word from the Past, from Mr Rees-Mogg’s eighteenth century: “There was never a man went to break Parliament, but Parliament broke him.”
Meanwhile it’s all GUBU.
Expect a flood of people applying for a passport to Pimlico, which if you remember the movie, had been ceded sometime in the Middle Ages to the Duchy of Burgundy.
