We might as well give up on approaching British politics with logic – our own prime minister has

Theresa May set such a pattern of doing the opposite of what she promises so often, that nothing she says now is of any value at all

Mark Steel
Thursday 13 December 2018 16:54 GMT
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Theresa May promises to deliver Brexit 'that people voted for' after winning confidence vote

This is fun now. Every week we get used to a more unfathomable level of glorious chaos. By the end of January the House of Commons will be full of goats while the speaker calls “order order, members must NOT breed on the dispatch box.” Thirty MPs will be suspended for dressing as Teletubbies and dipping the mace in tubby custard. Jacob Rees-Mogg will begin a speech “I can’t support an Irish backstop because nanny won’t allow it, will you nanny?” and turn to a skeleton in a rocking chair.

Theresa May will claim she’s won a vote on an amendment about a customs union, but only because she included the votes of 285 teddy bears she’d lined up on the benches, although even then it came out as a tie.

The Scottish nationalists will invoke an ancient rite of Perth and release a leopard to gallop round the House. And, as it mauls Liam Fox, Jeremy Corbyn will ask a question about cuts to the library service in Plymouth.

The DUP will claim the latest offer from the EU is possessed by the devil and smuggle an exorcist into Prime Minister’s Questions, causing Amber Rudd to cover Anna Soubry in green sick; fifteen members of the cabinet will escape by disguising themselves as the Wu-Tang Clan; an opinion poll will show Isis have a 9 per cent lead, then Michael Gove will go on Radio 4 to say “we are proud to have brought stability to the country”.

Vote of confidence: what happens next?

At the moment, May is claiming victory, because she insisted without her the country would collapse into unspeakable irreparable annihilation. And only 38 per cent of her own MPs preferred that to her.

If she’s smart, she’ll make sure all her elections are like this. Either you vote for her, or you’re placed in solitary confinement in a North Korean prison. Then she’ll appear in Downing Street beaming “once again I have a clear mandate, with 57 per cent of voters making a choice of preferring stability with me, to being fed to a rabid pack of wolves”.

One piece of luck that went her way is two MPs – known to favour her but who had been suspended by the Conservative Party for alleged sex offences – had their suspensions overturned on the day of the vote. At the time of the suspensions, political parties were horrified by those sorts of offences, so it was a deserved slice of fortune, that at that precise moment, they became the sort of things we’re no longer horrified by.

Earlier in the week, half an hour after insisting she was absolutely definitely with complete certainty going ahead with the vote on her EU deal, which was the greatest triumph of humanity, she told us there wouldn’t be a vote and it didn’t really matter. Instead she was going back to the EU, which she had spent weeks insisting absolutely definitely with complete certainty there was no point in doing.

So now she’s meeting the EU leaders in the hope they’ll change the deal she swore was the best possible deal that they would never change. Maybe she thinks they work the same way as her, and having said this was the final, final deal that could never change, they’ll now say “oh go on, write whatever you want and we’ll agree to it, and you can take the Eiffel Tower if you want”.

So it must have been quite a surprise when the meeting happened like this: Angela Merkel: “what are you doing here?” Theresa May: “I’ve come to renegotiate the deal.” Merkel: “We told you that couldn’t possibly happen, please go away or I’ll call security.” May: “But”. Merkel: “Don’t do this to yourself. Get off me. How dare you dribble on me?”

Then she comes back to assure us she’s had a very fruitful meeting, in which the prime minister of Luxembourg said he’d let her stroke his cat if she’d just f*** off.

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Once she eventually steps down, she should set up a tourist company called Theresa’s City Breaks, in which you fly to a series of European destinations that have told you in advance they will humiliate you until you crawl round the floor barking like a dog.

She’s set such a pattern of doing the opposite of what she promises so often, that nothing she says now is of any value at all. She’s like the kid at school that can’t help making things up, and this is probably her next stage. Andrew Marr will ask how she plans to pursue her deal, and she’ll say: “Let me be absolutely clear. My dad invented llamas. There’s a statue of him in Peru. I’ve got the biggest cornflake in the world, you can put it over the Grand Canyon and walk across it. My wee comes out as liquid gold. I keep it in a barrel and after 29 March I’m going to sell it for £30bn and spend it on the NHS.”

And as the uncertainty and chaos and instability hurtles on, the remains of the government reassures us with statements such as: “There is no need for alarm over food shortages, as we have quite sensibly stockpiled 200 buckets of dandelions. We are also prepared to pass emergency legislation relaxing restrictions on cannibalism, which is precisely the sort of measure to make us prosper now that we’re free to abolish unnecessary EU red tape.”

The most valuable lesson of all this is as follows: If May tells us she will absolutely without question not go berserk with an AK47 up Oxford Street this Christmas – you should probably avoid Oxford Street until February at least.

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