Despite the Prime Minister presumably going to bed each night, trotters crossed, eyes screwed up and wishing hard as if trying to reanimate Tinkerbell, the Mandelson scandal is not magically going to go away. Indeed, today MPs were granted an extensive chunk of parliamentary time to discuss it. Unsurprisingly, the PM swerved this particular treat. Given how things are going he really ought to be ringing round publishers to see if any of them want his memoirs. I wonder where the serialisation will be? It’s a good job the Beano is still publishing. There was no sign of the Foreign Secretary either.
Today the boy who stood on the burning deck was, once again, Foreign Office junior minister Stephen Doughty. Doughty has become the go-to fall guy for the myriad cockups the government is managing to inflict on itself. He had the dubious honour of being the face of the Chagos Betrayal, he had to announce Mandy’s sacking last week and now he was back again for another spanking. We were in the territory of parliamentary BDSM.
Unsurprisingly, few government backbenchers fancied standing up for their failure to sack the Nonce’s Friend at the emergency debate tabled by David Davis. The Labour benches were desolate. Not even tumbleweed had bothered to turn up. It looked, ironically, like the pews at a paedophile’s funeral.
That is not to say that absolutely no one had turned up to defend the government. This is the real mark of the Bottom Crawler. Lesser invertebrates stayed away rather than stand up for something so toxic. But some of their more gelatinous colleagues had come to catch the whips’ eye. The Prime Minister had presumably emptied the compost bin in the No. 10 garden and sent whichever creatures he found wriggling there into the House of Commons to talk about how the government was actually a bastion of morality.
Chris Curtis of Milton Keynes deployed the whataboutery defence, on the basis that a Tory candidate at the last general election had once worked for Lord Mandelson’s advisory firm. Perhaps the lowest point of the debate was when dignity-vacuum John Slinger of Rugby stood up and with a straight face praised the higher ethical standards of this Labour administration. Not to worry, Sir Keir, the Lightweight Brigade were here to ‘help’! Slinger continued his charge towards the enemy guns by invoking at some length David Cameron’s failures in vetting Andy Coulson over a decade ago. ‘Is this about Lord Mandelson?’ bellowed Richard Tice.
Slinger’s ‘blame Cameron’ defence landed badly; he might as well have said: ‘Before they condemned the Prime Minister, did the House also know that Robert Walpole employed the odd wrong ‘un?’ Amid jeers, he tried again. ‘What I am doing in my speech is setting out very useful context,’ he added, triggering further jeers. “It IS useful”, he insisted. The bootlicking culminated in Slinger hailing Sir Keir as ‘a man of integrity’. The Commons very rarely convulses with laughter, but this was just such an occasion. The Father of the House rose in the midst of hilarity.
‘Can I offer him some advice?’, Sir Edward Leigh sighed, ‘Don’t do the Whips’ Office’s dirty work for them.’ Slinger stood up, incandescent, and offered the Father of the House some advice in turn. ‘Don’t patronise me!’ he snapped, in what he doubtless thought was a stunning and brave tone.
‘Oooooo!’ went the House camply, as if members of the opposition had all been simultaneously possessed by the ghost of Dame Edna Everage. Sir Edward tried to explain he was only offering helpful advice – presumably, as a devout Roman Catholic, he thought that helping someone so obviously in need was an act of corporal mercy. Cue an intervention by Sir Desmond Swayne: ‘Those who lick the feet of the unworthy get themselves a dirty tongue.’ Much ‘hear, hearing’ from the whole House.
Some of the Labour left were enjoying themselves even more than the Tories
Next, we had a cameo from Scotland’s angriest man, SNP Westminster leader Stephen Flynn. Somehow this debate had united the Tories, Labour left, Gaza independents, Plaid Cymru, Reform, Democratic Unionists and Lib Dems in disgust at the Prime Minister’s failings. Still, though a closely crowded field in parliament and the country it might be, I would bet that nobody hates Sir Keir quite as much as Flynn. He lamented that the glum faces of the government benches weren’t broadcast around the country. He also succeeded in quoting Lord Mandelson’s instruction to a newspaper who asked him about the allegations: ‘F*** Off!’ Finally, he reached the PM himself: ‘What a complete disgrace!’ spat Flynn.
Kemi Badenoch also gave Sir Keir an accomplished clobbering. Making much of his absence, she accused him of ‘shrivelling from leadership, dodging responsibility and hiding behind others’. Across the despatch box, prime ministerial whipping boy Stephen Doughty gulped.
Some of the Labour left were enjoying themselves even more than the Tories or SNP. Emily Thornberry was in her pomp. Her rather erratic hairdo and comedy lapels might have given her the appearance of Ken Dodd, but her delivery was pure Exocet missile. Richard Burgon stayed for the entire debate; watching the Svengali of the Blairite project get a kicking was like three hours at the seaside to him.
Eventually we returned to poor Doughty, whom David Davis pityingly described as resembling ‘the last Spartan at Thermopylae’, such were the injuries he’d sustained this afternoon. Doughty tried a last-ditch defence; he pointed out that Lord Mandelson had been a host on Times Radio and that he had also – and this was the real symbol of moral perfection – been a candidate for Chancellor of Oxford University. To appeal to these institutions as guarantors of integrity was reminiscent of the line from the Simpsons: ‘Nobody who speaks German could be an evil man.’
It was also a fascinating insight into the delusion of the establishment. People with the ‘right opinions’, who assent to all the cretinous assumptions of their class and caste, cannot then be morally suspect. Even being pals with a paedo is better than having the wrong views on the nation-state or the constitution or migration. Such is the argument of a class devoid of integrity, a rotting carcass of an administration. There were times in this debate when another Simpsons quote came to mind: ‘Stop, stop: they’re already dead.’
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