Why didn’t Boris Johnson update the Commons on the tensions between Iran and the US, instead of sending his Defence Secretary Ben Wallace to give a statement this afternoon? Jeremy Corbyn thought this was worth complaining about when he responded, telling the Chamber that the Prime Minister was ‘hiding behind his Defence Secretary’. He demanded that Wallace explain ‘where the Prime Minister is and what he is doing that is so much more important than addressing parliament on the assassination of Iranian General Qassem Suleimani’.
Wallace’s retort was that Johnson was ‘running the country’. He also accused Corbyn of producing ‘the usual tripe about “this is about Trump, this is about America”,’ which he described as being ‘all the usual anti-imperialist guff’. His justification for Johnson not being there, aside from being busy running the country, was that ‘this Prime Minister actually believes in a cabinet government’, and in sending individual members of that cabinet to the Commons to explain the government’s position.
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