Boris is finally free

A curious atmosphere in the Commons today. Relaxed. Jovial. Almost like a party. There was a bit of aggro at the start when two MPs were ‘named’, that is thrown out, for the crime of defying the authority of the chair. Boris seemed perfectly stoical about everything. He obviously couldn’t care less anymore and he decided to give Sir Keir Starmer, (‘Captain Hindsight’), a new nickname. He’s now ‘Captain Crasher-Roony Snooze-Fest.’

After years of jousting with him in the chamber, Boris offered a backhanded tribute. ‘I want to thank him for the style in which he’s conducted himself. And he’s been considerably less lethal than many other members of this house.’

And he warned that any of the leadership candidates will ‘wipe the floor with him.’ Sir Keir had a decent outing. The pressure was off. His great enemy has been toppled by Tory cut-throats and disloyalists. So his enjoyable task today was to create trouble on the cliffs and glaciers up which the slippery mountaineers are busily scrambling. 

He focused his attacks on Rishi Sunak and Nadhim Zahawi. Does he fear them most? Or perhaps he views them as useful emblems of Tory wealth and privilege. Using veiled language, Sir Keir suggested that each candidate should ‘declare where they and their families have been domiciled for tax purposes and whether they’ve been beneficiaries of an off-shore scheme.’

Boris pretended to have misheard this slur on Sunak. He said that when ‘off-shore people’ invest in Britain they work wonders for our economy. It’s evident that Sir Keir has nothing new in his strategy room. He’ll continue to bash the next Tory PM with Labour’s far-left playbook of class war, self-pity and a lust for confiscating the proceeds of hard work.

Sunak and Zahawi must be thrilled to have received a personal monstering from the Labour leader today. He called Zahawi ‘the member for Stratford and Gibraltar’ and he derided his bizarre promise to cut 20 per cent from major government budgets (or is it 20 per cent of civil servants?). And he poured scorn on Sunak’s vow to rebuild the economy.

‘They’re acting as if they’ve just arrived from the moon,’ he said. This is crucial to Labour. The next election will be a ‘change’ election and an incoming Tory PM can claim to lead a wholly revitalised party. Sir Keir mustn’t let his foes steal Labour’s greatest asset. And it’s significant that he didn’t mention Penny Mordaunt. This will damage her claim that she’s the Tory most feared by Labour strategists.

Ian Blackford of the SNP called the leadership contest, ‘a toxic race to the right’, and he predicted that the winner ‘will make Genghis Khan look like a moderate.’ Other Scottish members pleaded with Boris to let them hold the independence referendum that they pretend to crave. The PM came clean. He called their policy, ‘the delirium of monotony’ and he asked them to ‘change the record’. Instead of fretting about secession, they should tackle Scotland’s heroin scourge which keeps the grave-diggers working around the clock.

In the dying moments, two backbenchers made reference to a worrying abstraction called ‘the national heatwave emergency.’ In July, the weather often gets warm but to call this an ‘emergency’ is a pernicious lie. Next they’ll announce that sunbathing is attempted suicide. MPs are desperate to launch further attacks on our liberty, as they did during lockdown. And they know that the best method is to exploit fake disasters and medical calamities cooked up in the corridors of power. The long-term plan is to train the public, like dogs, to come to heel when their Master whistles.