No one likes to get played. After a head-spinning Wednesday in Parliament, in which Number 10 strategist Dominic Cummings’ 4D chess strategy started to crumble, that much became clear.
The Commons voted to block a no deal Brexit – a bill the Lords have said they will push through by the end of Friday – while the government’s attempts to bring forward a general election didn’t reach enough votes; 298 voted in favour to 56 against, nowhere near the threshold of a two-thirds majority needed under the Fixed Term Parliament Act.
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Following his fourth major defeat in two days, Johnson observed that Corbyn had become “become the first leader of the opposition in the democratic history of our country to refuse the invitation to an election”. But an election will come soon enough, and Corbyn’s task was to not let Johnson dictate the terms. As opposition politicians repeatedly said: they want an election to kick the Tories out, not to walk into government’s trap of an election on the 15th of October, a Blitzkrieg campaign to help get a kamikaze no deal Brexit through.
There is a total distrust of anything the Prime Minister and his cronies want to do. The offer of a general election was suspected of being yet another pawn in Dominic Cummings’ great game. It was “a bit like the offer of an apple to Snow White”, said Jeremy Corbyn. “Not an apple or even an election, but the poison of a no deal.”
Or, as Labour MP Jess Philips put it, “The PM is playing some bully-boy game, that I’m probably not able to understand more than parliamentary procedures. What we have here is a game where we’re not being told what the rules are… this is some game that three men inside Downing Street have come up with to try and game the system so that they win.”
The incredibility of Johnson’s position was total – blasting the opposition for hampering negotiations with the EU that aren’t even happening. No level of goading – Johnson called Corbyn a “chlorinated chicken” and a “big girl’s blouse” – could make the opposition take the bait and go for the election the government wanted.
The thing about shock and awe tactics is that people in shock tend to shut down, which is exactly what parliament is now seemingly doing to any government ploy.
Throughout PMQs, Boris Johnson’s words were catching up with him. And not only on Brexit. In a stand-out moment, Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi, the Labour MP for Slough, rounded on the Prime Minister for his remarks in the Daily Telegraph that women who wear the burka look like “ninjas” and “letterboxes”.
To applause, the MP asked, “If I decide to wear a turban, or you decide to wear a cross, or he decides to wear a kippah or skullcap, or she decides to wear a hijab or a burka, does that mean that it is open season for members of this house to make derogatory or divisive remarks about our appearance?”
Johnson failed to answer his follow up question: “When will the prime minister finally order an inquiry into Islamophobia in his party, something which both he, and his chancellor, promised on national television?”
It was not the first question of the day that Johnson failed to answer, but it may have been the most powerful.
Johnson is looking rattled and weak, discovering that you can lie and confuse and shithouse your way to the highest office in the land, but possibly only because your electorate is made up of about 150,000 bigots.
In the wider picture there may be some kind of weird Trumpian logic at play, where the worse Johnson does in Parliament, the better it is for the election tactic of painting himself as the antithesis to out-of-touch, anti-Brexit politicians. For now, though, it’s just pretty fun to watch the exasperation of a born-to-rule Etonian who can’t rule much of anything at all.
