Chris Grayling’s defence of the Seaborne Freight contract was the most risible thing I have ever heard said in the House of Commons

It takes a great amount of political skill to defend the transparently indefensible, and Grayling has absolutely none

The satirist concedes defeat when he has to deploy what is known in the news business as a “straight intro”, but once again Chris Grayling has got the better of us so, with a real sense of sadness, here goes...

On Tuesday lunchtime, Chris Grayling, the transport secretary, was called to the despatch box of the House of Commons to face questions about why he had awarded a £14m shipping contract to a company that does not own any ships, whose registered assets total £66, and whose terms and conditions of business turned out to have been copied and pasted from a takeaway delivery website.

To mount any kind of defence for events as fully auto-parodic as this would be beyond even the most skilled politician, so the distance by which it was beyond Chris Grayling can only be accurately calculated by monitoring shifts in the radiation levels emitted by stars on the edge of the observable universe.

Grayling rarely goes 24 hours without committing some kind of atrocity that would be career-ending in a man with shame, but from the moment he shuffled into the Commons chamber shortly after lunch it was clear he too considered the Seaborne Freight abomination right up there with his very greatest hits.

The tell for when not just the world but Grayling himself knows Grayling has cocked up is an occasional twitch in his right eye, as if the lower eyelid is determined to scratch an itch in the upper one.

And as Labour’s Andy McDonald filleted, seasoned and served up the full horrors of the Seaborne Freight contract with a spectacular precision that can only be described as Salt Bae-esque, the transport secretary’s right eye socket danced like a dying fly on a halogen hob.

Why, Mr McDonald wanted to know, had they awarded this contract to a company with “no money, no ships and no employees”?

Why, he wanted to know, had the government’s due diligence inspected only the company, and not the individuals behind the company, whose trail of business devastation appears to cover several continents, and has left Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs several hundred thousand pounds out of pocket?

What would happen, he wanted to know, in the instant that Seaborne Freight might actually be required to sail some ships from Ramsgate to Ostend in Belgium, the very job they had been hired to do, given the Mayor of Ostend has made clear that, even if they manage to get their hands on any actual ships, he will not allow them to dock there?

The answer Mr Grayling gave to the first point was the worst defence of anything I have ever heard in the House of Commons, a record that would stand for almost the next three minutes.

“There is no due diligence we have done that indicates there is anything wrong with these people,” Mr Grayling said to howls of derision from Labour.

It was a bold tactic. When the woeful quality of the due diligence itself is the very thing you are being criticised for, to deploy your own woeful due diligence as a defence is not really a defence.

On the metaphor front, it is hard to know where to start. It was not that Mr Grayling was being asked, by his wife, why he had bought a house that was demonstrably on fire from the first floor up. What he was being asked was why, given that pervasive burning smell, he hadn’t asked the estate agent if he could just have a quick look upstairs. And his response was that, given neither the living room nor the kitchen were directly ablaze, how could he possibly have been expected to know?

But it was then that things got especially ridiculous. As far as Grayling was concerned, it was fine to give a £14m contract to a shipping company with no ships, because they will only get the money should their services be required in the event of a no-deal Brexit. And the government doesn’t want a no-deal Brexit, so why does it matter?

That the Conservatives were willing to sign large contracts with all but non-existent companies, apparently showed it was them, not Labour, that was serious about no-deal contingency planning. But given no deal wouldn’t happen anyway, it didn’t matter that the contracts were so very obviously not serious.

While all this was going on, by the way, a backbencher by the name of James Heappey was circling the Tory benches, handing out sheets of paper to sympathetic Brexiteer MPs, containing various pre-planned attack lines with which to leap to Mr Grayling’s defence, which would soon be revealed in all their pyrotechnic glory.

Suddenly, there was Owen Paterson MP, rising to his feet to say: “I commend him for ‘showing we are serious’ about no deal.”

Admittedly, this is a man who, while environment secretary, went on live television to blame the failure of a badger cull on the fact that “the badgers have moved the goalposts”, and who now regularly appears on the radio to tell the CEOs of multinational car manufacturers that Brexit will be great and it is he, not they, who knows how to run a car company. But this was still right at the top of the Paterson scale.

Whether it takes a special kind of chutzpah or a special kind of stupidity to commend a man for showing “we are serious” about no deal by hiring a shipless shipping firm on a contract that can only be defended by shout-twitching that you don’t have any intention of activating it, is a matter of personal taste. The footage is on the parliament TV website should you wish to judge for yourself.

Next it would be Steve Baker’s turn to claim that the sheer temerity of the Labour Party to ask about the details of a government contract now shown to be palpably ridiculous, was because they “had not an ounce of sense or concern for the national interest”.

Shortly after this happened, the transport secretary would go on to claim that Labour’s doubts about whether a shipping company with no ships was the right choice for an emergency shipping contract was because “Labour hates small business”. This, without question, is the most risible comment I have ever heard from either despatch box of the House of Commons.

But for Chris Grayling, it was just another day in the office on Planet Brexit. We’re serious about no-deal Brexit. Just don’t challenge us on the details, because none of them are serious.