Gove savours beef with Farage, and Johnson finds Osborne souring
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Version 0 of 1. Call off the search. The most outrageous official lie of the entire referendum campaign has now been told: Michael Gove claims to be backed by “people from the world of entertainment – including Liz Hurley”. That Hurley’s performances are primarily used in EU black sites on behalf of the CIA is a fact that cannot possibly have escaped the justice secretary’s attention – but then, he lives in a post-fact world. The sadness is that he declined to respond to the news on Tuesday that David Beckham was backing the remain side, with the obvious gag, “I think Britain has had enough of dead-ball experts”. Even so, I’m really looking forward to episodes of the TV series Behind the Music on the various referendum campaigns. The rival leave factions are now resembling one of the more Byzantine hair metal feuds. The Axl Rose in all this – the guy even people on the pain reliever Percocet can’t work with – is Nigel Farage. They’ve all got beef with Farage. “I shuddered,” said Gove over the Ukip leader’s Breaking Point poster. “Michael Gove had better look at his own posters,” shot back Farage. Nigel is now being relentlessly briefed against as a tactical quarterwit. Today it was the turn of Boris Johnson to be sniffy. “We have nothing to do with that campaign,” he told LBC of Leave.EU. Could he in all conscience accept the votes it garnered? At this point things took a turn for the surreal. When he stood for London mayor, Boris recalled, people said he would get far-right votes. “And I said, I don’t want those votes.” So there you have it: there are good Brexit votes and bad Brexit votes – and Boris doesn’t want the bad ones. It all had something of the flavour of the Chris Morris Brass Eye sketch in which he differentiated between “good Aids” and “bad Aids”. Then again, it was in an even earlier incarnation, as the psychopathic news anchor on The Day Today, that Morris underscored that show’s almost supernatural ability to satirise the future. “And at 10 past 10,” ran a joke written in 1994, “it’s Question Time – LIVE FROM WEMBLEY STADIUM.” Is this EU vote farce repeated as history? Boris certainly plays Wembley arena on Tuesday night (think of it as the referendosseum), while the BBC announces that they could have filled their mega debate gig 10 times over. This raises the possibility that there might well be ticket touts operating outside Question Time – all exactly as predicted in the Book of Revelation. As for the gladiatorial battle therein, Boris’s classicism is a little more refined than Russell Crowe’s (though equally self regarding). But let’s hope he opts to turn to the audience after finishing off fellow panellist Francis O’Grady and demanding: “Are you not entertained? ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED? Is this not why you are here?” Only for a lone voice in row W to pipe up: “No, I thought it was a Motley Crue gig.” Maximus had a little more at stake on his outings, of course. On Tuesday Boris declared he’d go on TV to apologise if Brexit caused a recession. Which certainly turns an out result into a win-win for, say, the people of Wearside, whose loss of a Hitachi factory will definitely be cancelled out by a televised BoJo soz. And yet, for all Johnson’s sweet attempts to level the playing field in this way, it is difficult to escape the impression that the referendum is being contested by people so financially insulated that they have nothing to lose bar a kitchen supper invitation. Cameron’s former buddy Steve Hilton is now undermining the PM’s account of migration targets. Boris is calling the chancellor a liar with the sarcastically exaggerated diffidence you imagine he deployed when George Osborne was known to fellow Bullingdon Club members as Oik on account of his only having attended St Paul’s. “I hope I wasn’t too strong,” Boris fretted hammily on LBC, after some mildly exasperated criticism of Osborne. The former London mayor’s family might have come out for remain in the EU. “I think they’re all secret Brexiters,” he chuckled, “but anyway … ” Elsewhere, much has been made of the schism between the Goves and the Camerons, given that Gove’s wife, the Daily Mail columnist Sarah Vine, is godmother to the Camerons’ youngest child. But even that feels like little more than just another warning to those weirdo careerists who make work friends godparents to their children. It was the same with Rupert and Wendi Murdoch and their close chum Tony Blair. One minute they were all laughing it up at a christening on the banks of the river Jordan; now Tony’s probably having to send little Grace and Chloe their presents via the Pentagon. And so with the Goves and Camerons, who may never again break homemade focaccia in a kitchen that is better than Ed Miliband’s. I mean, I’m sure it’ll make the Conservative summer ball vaguely awkward. But it’s not exactly Boys From The Blackstuff. |