No wonder Theresa May is so against a second referendum. It would involve actually answering a question
For 100 minutes the prime minister faced questions. She did not answer a single one.
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Your support makes all the difference.No one alive or dead has any clue how the country will find its way out of the constitutional crisis it currently faces, but there is a reason Theresa May appears to fear a second referendum more than anything else.
On Thursday morning, at the end of 100 minutes of questioning from backbench MPs in which every single question went unanswered, she may have inadvertently opened the window in to her own worst nightmare.
The likelihood of a second referendum is growing, which means that in just a few months from now, the prime minister could find herself alone in a tiny room, with a simple binary question staring back at her, which she must answer.
Oh to be a fly on the wall in the polling booth, as she stares at the ballot paper, her shoulders rocking, eyes wide in panic, in a desperate search for the box marked: “Let me be very clear. As I said in my Lancaster House speech. Delivering on the will of the British people. It is a good deal. No deal is better than a bad deal. This is the only deal on offer. Frustrating the will of the British people. Strong and stable. Brexit means Brexit.”
At this point, smoke rises up into the ceiling, presumably of a church hall somewhere in Maidenhead. At the gap at the foot of the cubicle, a bright blue trouser suit slides down in to kitten heels. A metal padlock necklace thuds against the floorboards.
Let us rewind a moment. At the end of May’s appearance before parliament’s Liaison Committee, the name given to the committee made from all the heads of the other committees, together forming a kind of Power Rangers-style super boss of all the other committees, the prime minister faced the most innocuous question of all.
It was simply, “Will you come back and speak to us again in the coming weeks?”
Her reply? “We have arrangements in place for the number of times I come to the committee in any year.”
It was the closest she got to an answer all morning, and it was a no. She can’t be bothered with them, and to be fair, they can’t really be bothered with her either.
It is, I believe, the sixth time she has faced this committee, and now, when she meets each of their simple questions with impenetrable, meaningless noise, they just laugh at her.
Yesterday, the chancellor Philip Hammond set out how, according to Treasury analysis, every possible scenario for leaving the EU leaves us worse off than if we stayed in. And Bank of England analysis indicates that leaving with no deal at all is the worst outcome by an unimaginably large margin.
“What is certainly the case is that no deal is no longer better than a bad deal, is it, because no deal would be the worst outcome of them all, wouldn’t it?” Hilary Benn asked her.
“Well that depends on what a bad deal looks like,” she replied.
“Is there a worse deal than no deal?”
“The deal we have negotiated is not that.”
“But what deal would be worse than no deal?”
“We have not negotiated a deal that is in that category.”
That’s verbatim. By the time Benn passed over to the next questioner, all he could do was chuckle to himself.
When Yvette Cooper was finished, or before she was even finished in fact, she simply said, “Prime minister I don’t think you are adding anything and it’s Tom Tugendhat’s turn.
Tugendhat had, if perhaps by accident, the best line of the day. When he described how the divorce agreement had been carried out and suggested we are now moving on to the remarriage, the prime minister told him there was to be no remarriage. “We will be good friends.”
“Friends with benefits?” he asked the prime minister. It would have been awkward enough had she heard him the first time, but alas she was forced to say, amid the laughter, “I missed your quip.”
And so Tugendhat had to repeat it. May, one suspects, not being a particularly active participant in the millennial dating scene, is not au fait with the meaning of “friends with benefits”, which is a pity, because it is a remarkably apposite description.
While May spoke, the EU parliament held a debate on Brexit, in which very few of its 751 MEPs turned up.
They’ve moved on. They’re not interested. There’s nothing in it for us. But they’re still only too happy to bend us over and, well, you know.
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