Boris Johnson's Super Saturday bubble bursts

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/oct/19/boris-johnsons-super-saturday-bubble-bursts

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Boris Johnson isn’t good at deferred gratification. Sulk wants. Sulk must have. Jennifer Arcuri had driven him mad by insisting he stick to Google Hangouts when he’d been dying to move on to spreadsheets. But today of all days he had been certain nothing could spoil his triumph. He’d looked the EU in the eye and he had blinked first. It took some skill to go back to Brussels and negotiate an even worse withdrawal agreement than Theresa May, but somehow – against all the odds – he had defied the gloomsters and pulled it off.

So this was to have been his Super Saturday. A day to go down in the history books, when parliament met for the first time on a weekend in 37 years and he, the World King, would be carried aloft along the Tory benches as the “Man who Delivered Brexit”. OK, it would almost certainly be a short-lived triumph once everyone realised that he’d promised polar opposites to different groups of MPs and the real arguments would only emerge once the UK had left the EU, but he could live with that. He wasn’t a man used to taking responsibility for the long-term consequences of his actions.

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Instead this turned out to be Not-So-Much Saturday. All thanks to Oliver Letwin, who had wanted to give the Commons more time to examine the legislation and to prevent the UK crashing out with a no-deal Brexit on 31 October if the ERG chose to play dirty. Typical boring Girly Swot. “Trust me, I’m Boris,” he had said and to his astonishment 322 other MPs had decided they didn’t. Though the real philosophical impossibility had been that 306 reckoned they could. Yet again, Brexit continues to make fools of fools. But the result was still the same. Boris denied. His exquisite petite mort had turned into a dispiriting grande mort.

The Sulk did what the Sulk does. He sulked. OK, he’d almost certainly get his deal in the end, but he didn’t want to wait. He wanted to go back to Downing Street to play back clips of “His Finest Hour”. If not the country’s finest hour. But now he was going to be locked back into a Groundhog Day of having to explain why his shit deal wasn’t shit. It just wasn’t fair.

“Pifflepafflewifflewaffle,” he mumbled sulkily. Kevin the Teenager had behaved more gracefully. He wasn’t going to say if he was going to write a letter to the EU asking for an extension. He might. There again he might not. But if he did, he’d do it later. Much later. At the very last minute. “DEEr DoNAld, I aM rRITing vis leTTa coz I HavE bin made 2, wiv NO luv. BoRIs.” Classic Boris. Classic Dom. Clearly the pair were made for each other. Combined they have an emotional age of nine and three-quarters.

Proceedings had begun with the prime minister making a statement to the Commons. It was his deal and when he’d said there would be no border down the Irish Sea what he had meant was that there wouldn’t be any badgers in wetsuits conducting underwater checks. Instead the badgers would be surrounding Liverpool in night-vision goggles. Besides what better way was there of expressing our commitment to the European cause than by telling the EU to sod off? It wasn’t you, he had told Michel, it’s me. I’ve got commitment problems.

Jeremy Corbyn’s reply had been typically drab. The words come out in the right order but his heart never appears to be in what he’s saying. All passion spent. It’s as if what he’s reading out is a total surprise to him. Maybe it is. The only other highlights of the session were John Baron insisting both that he had never been a member of the ERG and that he had stopped being a member of the ERG, while insisting that his excitement the previous day over the deregulation of workers’ rights had been a total aberration. Arise Baron Baron. Where would the country be without idiots like him?

The debate proper also mostly lived down to expectations. No cabinet minister has worked harder to make himself more forgettably average than Steve Barclay and he appeared thrilled that every word he said lost its meaning long before it had escaped his lips. His most compelling argument for not publishing the impact assessments which showed the UK would be 6.9% worse off under the new deal was that Classic Dom had some stats which proved everyone would be 7.9% happier to be 6.9% poorer. Truly the country is screwed.

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Not for the first time, by far the best speech came from the shadow Brexit secretary, Keir Starmer. Mainly because he is about the only person in the Commons who really understands this stuff. And cares about it. He tore through the hypocrisies and deceits in the bill and laid bare the almost inevitability of crashing out with no deal in December 2020 as agreeing a new trade deal in little more than six months was nigh on impossible.

Thereafter things fell apart. Theresa May proved you can never lose what you don’t have. She is the presence that feels like an absence. It also turned out that things she could never countenance as prime minister she is more than happy to suck up as a backbencher. She’s at her best when she says nothing at all.

Fittingly, Chris Grayling provided the day’s nadir. Cheek wobbling uncontrollably – the nervous tic that’s the only giveaway for signs of intelligence that may lurk within – he begged Letwin to withdraw his amendment. Tories pleaded with Failing Grayling to sit down – every time he speaks he loses votes – but the damage was done. Letwin was home and dry.

The day ended in chaos with Jacob Rees-Mogg having a strop of his own and refusing to tell anyone exactly what business the government had planned for the next week. It might try to have the same vote again on Monday, but there again it might not. There would be votes. Some of which would be Meaningful, others of which would be Deep and Meaningless. A parliament of donkeys, led by nematodes. And not very bright ones at that.