Lloyd Evans

Smiley, fluent and softly spoken, John McDonnell sometimes comes across as a bit cuddly. Yesterday Labour’s shadow chancellor was interviewed by Iain Dale at the Edinburgh festival. He said he’s looking forward to a boating trip on the Norfolk Broads. ‘My wife and I sail. But we sail badly. People get off the water when they see us coming.’ He felt he deserved a break after working with the Tories on a cross-party approach to the Withdrawal Agreement. ‘No one should have to sit opposite Michael Gove for six weeks. I did it for the country.’ Iain Dale quizzed him about Labour’s immediate threat: Boris. ‘The guy’s reckless. The guy’s unstable,’ said McDonnell. ‘I will move heaven and earth to stop a no-deal Brexit.

The PM’s partner has one of the toughest jobs in politics even though it’s not a political appointment. That’s the nub of the difficulty. The role is undefined and unpaid. And whatever the partner does can be labelled a blunder and used to attack the prime minister. I’ve just written a play, ‘Cherie – My Struggle’, about Mrs Blair’s life inside Downing Street. Carrie Symonds is bound to face many of the difficulties Cherie had to grapple with.  First, security. Cherie was shocked to learn that she couldn’t leave Number 10 without informing her close protection officers. They accompanied her everywhere, even to the chemist. She was banned from driving her own car.

Forget Churchill. Never mind the Iron Duke. Ignore the claims of Pitt the Younger. The greatest prime minister in British history is Theresa May. That was the message from PMQs today. Tory after Tory stood up to heap praise on their departing chief. Wages are up. Homelessness is falling. Employment is on the rise, thanks to her brilliant captaincy of the nation. We heard about honour, duty, courtesy and public service. It seems that she carried each of these virtues to a pitch that no successor can surpass. ‘Fantastic’ was the only word to describe her policies on mental health. Her domestic violence agenda, we were told, will be an eternal legacy. And on modern slavery she has led the world. It was as if the Tories were in the presence of a demi-god. Superwoman herself.

Only one person in Britain now believes that Boris might deprive us of a Jeremy Hunt premiership. That person is Jeremy Hunt. The rest of us expect the ‘Blonde Ambition’ project to reach fruition and for Boris to enter Number 10. This will come as no surprise to anyone who knows him. Nature always marked him out. Even as a first-year Balliol student, aged 18, he was weirdly conspicuous – the ruddy jowls, the stooped bullish stance, the booming Duke of Wellington voice, and the freakish white bob crowning his head like a heavenly spotlight. He was always one to watch. People say he can’t ‘do detail’. But nobody spends four years studying classics at Oxford without the power to absorb and retain a mass of abstract information.

A thin turnout for Theresa May’s penultimate PMQs. Labour members were skulking in corridors plotting to oust their leader. And Tories, especially devout Remainers, were busy talking to journalists about their lifelong commitment to a no-deal Brexit. Mrs May seemed to be angling for the post of chief attack dog at the next election. Jeremy Corbyn asked her about climate change but she raised Labour’s anti-Semitism crisis. ‘You have failed the test of leadership,’ she said, bending the rules by addressing him directly. ‘Stand up and apologise.’ Breaches of protocol always add extra juice to Commons rows. Corbyn retorted that Labour was the first party to pass anti-racism legislation in Britain.

The US jobs miracle continues. Donald Trump has just created another vacancy at the British embassy in Washington. Sir Kim Darroch’s resignation was the opening issue at PMQs and Theresa May expressed her shock and regret at the diplomat’s departure, ‘after a lifetime of service to this country,’ she added pointedly. Sir Kim isn’t the only victim of an unfair campaign to oust him. The PM usually favours formal attire at PMQs but today she was sporting a white t-shirt and a knee-length kung-fu jacket. Lime green, loose around the bust and faintly shiny, it looked like a sex club bathrobe. Jeremy Corbyn brought up her ‘burning injustices’ speech when she entered Downing Street. The PM defended herself with a list of her achievements in office.

PMQs is clearly broken and only Brexiteers know how to fix it. Theresa May should leave. Jeremy Corbyn should remain and put questions to Boris next week and to Jeremy Hunt the week after. A test of both candidates in match conditions would be welcomed by all. But it won’t happen. A Tory party that can’t extract us from the EU has no hope of giving PMQs the tweak it needs. Today we had another snooze-in with Tory backbenchers falling over each other to congratulate May on her exemplary record and visionary leadership. She’s the worst PM since Eden and they all pretended she was Pericles. Andrea Leadsom praised her work on behalf of disadvantaged babies. The PM, to the astonishment of nobody, agreed with her.

Theresa May, our stand-in prime minster, was hit by a surprisingly effective ambush at PMQs. Jeremy Corbyn led on Britain’s involvement in the Yemeni conflict. Last week the Court of Appeal ruled that the government had overlooked Saudi Arabia’s responsibility for breaches of international law. Mrs May sounded desperate as she quoted a legal finding from 2017 that the government had engaged in ‘anguished scrutiny’ of Saudi Arabia’s position. Corbyn rolled out some mighty figures. 200,000 had died in Yemen, he said, many of them children. Famine and disease are about to claim 100,000 more lives. All because of May. Her response – that the Foreign Secretary is hosting a meeting of the Yemen Quad – sounded feeble. Corbyn clobbered her again.

The title ‘Father of the House’ tends to give the bearer a chronic problem with wind. The present holder, Ken Clarke, stood up at PMQs and asked a question of Gibbonian magnitude and complexity. Among the gusts of prose was a useful point about spending. ‘It would be extremely unwise for the outgoing government to make reckless commitments,’ he said. He was ignored. Member after member tried to cadge money from Mrs May before she quits the Downing Street cash-pile. The Conservative MP Marcus Jones wanted a handout for shops in Nuneaton, while Paul Scully made the case for SEN children. Tim Loughton, whose constituency abuts the sea, proposed a whole new arm of government, the Coastal Schools Challenge Fund, to help kids living near a beach to swot harder.

Boris Johnson made his pitch to become PM at a spirited mini-rally in central London. He began with a swipe at the stalling economies of the Eurozone which he compared unfavourably with ‘the commercial dynamism of the British people.’ His one-nation pitch bore almost too many adman’s sound-bites. He called England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland ‘the quartet’, and ‘the awesome foursome’. Together they make Britain ‘the soft-power superpower of the world’. Towards the EU he was generous. He referred to them as ‘our friends and partners’, somewhat insistently and he hoped that Brussels would adopt his upbeat mood about Brexit. ‘I think there will be a symmetrical enthusiasm about getting this thing done’.