In Amsterdam, Brussels and Dublin, May begged for help. They told her, 'Nothing has changed'

What a farewell tour it was for the Prime Minister. Everywhere she went she held out the mic and they shouted back her greatest hit.

Tom Peck
Political Sketch Writer
Tuesday 11 December 2018 18:53 GMT
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Theresa May gets locked inside her car as she attempts to meet German Chancellor Angela Merkel

It’s possible Theresa May will come to feel she hasn’t quite had the career she dreamt of, but at least the Farewell Tour could hardly have gone any better.

Amsterdam. Berlin. Brussels. London. Dublin. Five cities in twenty four hours. Some have had the temerity to call it “desperate”, or “an embarrassment”, or “a humiliation”, but in my humble opinion, “Nothing Has Changed Live” represents one of the most ambitious projects of any major rock, pop or bullshit artist.

It has taken until what will surely be her final days, but at last Theresa May has emerged as the kind of star that can just hold the mic out over the crowd and have them shout back the words unaided.

Because that’s exactly what happened, everywhere she went. As she made her way from European capital to European capital, desperately seeking to renegotiate a Brexit deal both her and everyone else have spent the last three weeks saying cannot be renegotiated under in any circumstances, there they all were shouting her own lyrics right back at her.

“Nothing has changed!” they shouted in Amsterdam.

“Nothing has changed!” Angela Merkel shouted in Berlin, loud enough to be heard through a locked car door.

“Nothing has changed!” Jean-Claude Juncker bellowed out in the grand arena of the EU Parliament building in Brussels.

There is no more renegotiating to be done. The can has reached the end of the road. In one kick’s time it just bounces back off the wall.

Back in Westminster, stripped of their headline act, MPs did their best to put on a show. Instead of the “meaningful vote”, which they would have been voting on today, Labour Party brought an “emergency debate” to debate just how bad it was that they wouldn’t be having a meaningful vote. Think Glastonbury, except The Rolling Stones have failed to show and been replaced at the eleventh hour with McBusted.

Jeremy Corbyn was back at the despatch box to conduct the outrage. By my count, in the last two weeks, the Labour leader has told Theresa May, in the House of Commons, to “make way for someone who can” negotiate a better Brexit deal, on four separate occasions. He is, however, at time of writing, yet to table a motion of no confidence in her government, which is the traditional route by which Prime Ministers make way for leaders of the opposition. Perhaps he is waiting for her to bring a motion of no confidence in herself? Nothing would surprise anymore.

“Our Prime Minister is traipsing round the continent in pursuit of warm words,” he said. “The unspeakable in pursuit of the unwritten. A waste of time and a waste of public money.”

Quite what this means is absolutely anyone’s guess.

Responding for the government was David Lidington, and in the unlikely event that Strictly producers ever reinvent the format so as to take place entirely on the head of the pin, well it has already found its champion.

There is, of course, no excuse, for pulling the most important vote in decades for no greater reason than that you’re going to lose it, which is not to say that Mr Lidington did not come armed with plenty of them. Why was she dodging the vote, Labour wanted to know. “The Prime Minister has spent more than twenty hours at this despatch box, answering questions about this deal,” he told them.

Which is true, and she was much admired at the time. It’s just that, well, everything she said in defence of it, kind of isn’t true anymore. “This deal is the only deal that’s available,” she said, many many times, before cancelling the vote and heading off to Europe to try and get it changed. “There is no deal without a backstop,” she has also said, before cancelling the vote and, well you get the picture.

Special mention must go to The Conservatives’ Julian Knight, who in the damp heat of this rather pointless parliamentary battle, managed to forge a whole new instrument through which to deflect blame.

Labour’s Rachael Maskell was worried about the two per cent that had been “wiped off the value of the pound in the last twenty four hours.” At this point Knight stood up, with a sharp answer for her.

Knight told her that, actually, the pound fell, “Because the markets got a sniff of the risk of a Corbyn government!”

As a business journalist, Knight covered the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath, so perhaps it’s through this experience that he was able to invent the Collateralised Blame Obligation. It’s a remarkable, innovative product, which, at least for the time being, has not been regulated by any kind of blame authority.

Through this ingenious new device, every time the Conservatives cock up Brexit in new and unimaginable ways, the resulting slump in the markets really can now be blamed not just on Jeremy Corbyn, but also the public, for daring to even think about voting for him.

Ingenious stuff Mr Knight. Get your letter in without delay. There’ll be a job going soon enough. As for Theresa May, well, with a farewell roadshow as good as this, the 2019 John Lewis ad can’t be ruled out.

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