A Tory minister has been caught telling the truth? Don’t panic, it was only an accident

What on earth was Ben Wallace doing, saying prorogation was actually about Brexit?

Ben Wallace was the longest-serving security minister in this country’s history. For three years he led this nation’s fight against terror in all its ever-changing technological forms.

So it is a little concerning that in that time nobody got round to briefing him on what it is that a television camera and a lapel microphone actually do.

Indeed he has every right to feel let down by the department, the Ministry of Defence, to be exact, that he now runs.

Someone, really, should have let him know, that if you have consented to the wearing of a microphone, and are standing in the full glare of a television news camera, it is not, perhaps the most auspicious time for some light-hearted small talk that will fatally undermine your own government’s 48-hour media lying strategy.

Only the day before, there had been Boris Johnson, grinning his way through claims that he was absolutely, definitely, only proroguing parliament to get on with his minority government’s “new, exciting legislative agenda”, absolutely none of which can possibly pass through the House of Commons.

And then, on Thursday morning, there was Jacob Rees-Mogg on the Today programme, still unable to get his fob watch back in his pocket after his trip to Balmoral to see the Queen, claiming that the longest suspension of parliament since 1945 was in fact “routine” and “quite boring”.

So what was Ben Wallace doing, the fifth most senior minister in the cabinet, at a meeting in Helsinki, telling his French counterpart that, in fact, this whole prorogation thing really was all about Brexit?

“Parliament has been very good at saying what it doesn’t want but it has been awful at saying what it wants. That’s the reality,” he told her, over a polite chuckle.

“So you know any leader has to, you know, try. I don’t know what the outcome of it will be. Oh... politics.”

Oh, politics indeed... lol. Politics, which in the UK has come to mean little more than the industrialisation of lying. Just what will the outcome be? Who knows? Ben Wallace certainly doesn’t.

Indeed, how did Mr Wallace not come by the memo? Which is to say, if you’re a Tory cabinet minister, whenever you spot a TV camera, whatever you do, don’t tell the truth.

It’s not like this is a new diktat either. It certainly predates the Boris Johnson era.

The news programmes have not struggled, in the last 24 hours, to dig up all sorts of footage of all kinds of Tories, looking into a television camera and telling all kinds of porkies.

There’s one of Matt Hancock, from just a few months ago, saying prorogation of parliament would be an affront to the men who died at Dunkirk, and, he adds, with staccato certainty, “I. Will. Not. Have. It.”

Except, it turns out, he will have it. Because he’s not resigned, he’s still in the cabinet, and parliament’s very much still being prorogued.

There’s Amber Rudd, sitting on Hastings pier, saying it would be “outrageous to consider proroguing parliament. We are not Stuart kings”. And yet, she’s only gone and done it.

There’s Sajid Javid, at the Tory leadership hustings, saying, “You don’t deliver democracy by trashing democracy.” He’s the chancellor of the exchequer now and somehow, by way of a miracle really, it has become trashed.

There’s Michael Gove, Andrea Leadsom, Nicky Morgan. Anyway, I could go on for some time but we’ll limit it to just one more, kind of crucial one.

Dominic Cummings, the Brexit brain egg, the man whose great genius is the altar on which the reputation of the country must be laid. The Oracle. The post-politics politician. The guy who is, let’s face it, too clever for democracy.

The great visionary who has emerged from his long years buried in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War only to find he has slipped the surly bonds of Other People’s Opinions, not to say, the British parliamentary system.

It’s just that I could have sworn I saw him wandering out of his house three weeks ago, Vote Leave tote bag over his shoulder, reactolite lenses blackening under the glare from his own soul, stopping to tell Sky News that, “Politicians don’t get to choose which votes they respect. That’s the critical issue.”

And indeed it is the critical issue. It is the uncertain foundation of our way of life. And yet, this country had a general election in 2017. It was fully informed by the EU referendum that had occurred a year before it. Theresa May went around the country, telling the voters with terrifying singularity to “strengthen my hand in the negotiations with Brussels”.

And the voters declined to do it. They returned a hung parliament, one that will not sanction a no-deal Brexit, so Cummings and Johnson have had a think. They’ve decided they know best and chucked it out.

But at least we can know that Cummings got the memo.

“Politicians don’t get to choose which votes they respect. That is the critical issue.”

It’s not as grand a lie as the rest. It may even have been a mere oversight, which we are only too glad to correct. Politicians don’t get to choose which votes they respect, apart from me.