When is a promotion a punishment? When you become Brexit secretary
|
Version 0 of 1. When Theresa May first offered David Davis the job of Brexit secretary last July it felt like an unexpected promotion. Now he realises it was a punishment beating. Davis looked out on his feet when he was called upon to make his third appearance at the dispatch box inside seven days in order to make a statement on the government’s white paper. Last week, his voice had been a growl; on Tuesday it was down to a croak; now it was barely a whisper. At this rate Davis will be lucky not to be on life support by the weekend. “We’re leaving the European Union on 23 June 2016,” he groaned, before coming to an abrupt halt. “Actually that’s wrong. That’s when we voted to leave the EU isn’t it? Perhaps I should have read this through first.” Chance would have been a fine thing. The first he’d heard of the white paper being published on Thursday had been when May said so at prime minister’s questions the day before, and his staff had been up all night copying and pasting a few pictures and graphs into her Lancaster House speech to come up with something that looked even vaguely official. “Don’t worry,” he said, not entirely enthusiastically. “We’ve got two more years of this.” Two more years in which things were likely to get worse. Davis picked up a copy of the white paper. It was white. Which was a start. He flicked through a few pages to see if there was anything he recognised. A section about the single market and customs union, but that was about it. He wished he’d listened to that Lancaster House speech a bit more carefully now, but at the time it had mostly sounded like wishlist waffle. Sod it. If she could waffle, so could he. “We can and are preparing trade agreements so we can do something quickly afterwards,” he said. At this point, he remembered that the incompetent Liam Fox was going to be in charge of trade deals. “Though it might take a bit longer.” Time to wrap this one up before he dug himself in any deeper. “EU desperate to do business with us ... optimism that the best days are yet to come.” They couldn’t get much worse than this, surely. Keir Starmer appeared equally done in, his eyes little more than hollowed-out sockets. Brexit is a nightmare for Labour at the best of times and now he had to come up with some reasonably intelligent questions to a white paper that had only been dumped in his lap seconds early. It was at times like this Keir was tempted to throw a sickie. Why couldn’t he have one of Diane Abbott’s migraines? Poor Diane. She had been so desperate to vote on article 50; she must be absolutely gutted to have missed out. Especially as she had seemed to be on such good form just hours earlier. He must remember to send her some flowers. “This white paper says nothing, is full of inconsistencies and denies parliament a meaningful vote,” said Starmer. He couldn’t be sure of any of that, but it was a decent enough bet. Then he cut his losses and sat down. “I’m not sure what a meaningful vote is,” Davis replied. When you came to think about it, even something that was meaningless had meaning. If only in its absence of meaning. So parliament would definitely be getting a meaningful debate, even if its meaning was meaningless. This was going better than he had feared. Not for long, as soon various MPs started quoting paragraph numbers at him. What about 8.43? What about 5.9? Why were we getting rid of a customs union to recreate a new one? How was he supposed to know? The rest of the house had had far more time to look at the white paper than him. He ad-libbed some unsatisfactory answers to pass the time. Not long to go now. But Davis was feeling big-hearted and was determined to end on some consensus. Could the house not agree on pages 16, 24, 34, 50, 60, 66, 76, 77, 78 and 79 right here, right now? The handful of MPs still awake looked through the white paper and nodded. These pages were all blank. Davis left happy. Over 10% of the deal was already in the bag. |