One shudders to think what Donald Trump would say if forced to watch the House of Commons for any length of time. The stream of Anglo-Saxon might rival Beowulf.
Mr Trump, in case you missed it, used the F-word in front of White House reporters when discussing Israel and Iran. ‘We basically,’ he said, ‘have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the f*** they’re doing.’
Mindful of the innocence of journalists, he thoughtfully asked: ‘Do you understand that?’
Mr Trump was leaving Washington DC for the Nato summit in Holland, where he will spend time with Sir Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron and other titans. Nato’s official interpreters were therefore refreshing their memories on how to relay ‘f***’ in Hungarian, Latvian, Icelandic and other member-states’ languages in case direct-communicator Mr Trump felt pushed to reprise his outburst.
Meanwhile, with a Trump state visit expected in Britain before long, Buckingham Palace ordered a delivery of smelling salts for emergency use during the President’s speech at the white-tie banquet. Given Mr Trump’s conversational brio, courtiers debated whom they should seat next to him. On the basis that one fights fire with fire, Princess Anne might do, with Lady Susan Hussey possibly on the substitutes’ bench.
But back to the Commons, where another colossus of our times, David Lammy, was making a statement about his ‘China Audit’. The Starmer Government had spent its first year thinking about its policy on Beijing. And the answer? Sorry, too secret.
Before his flight to the Nato summit in the Netherlands, US President Donald Trump said: ‘We have have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the f*** they’re doing’
Mr Lammy explained that the audit was full of classified information and could therefore be shown only to privy counsellors and to members of Parliament’s intelligence and security committee. If he told anyone else, he might then have to kill them with an exploding cigar.
Mr Lammy spent much of his time attacking past Conservative governments for their China policies. Some had been too harsh on China. Others had appeased the dragon. The Labour Government was going to do things differently, just you wait and see. You bet! It was going to do both at the same time!
Sir Iain Duncan Smith (Con, Chingford & Woodford Green) unleashed his customary torrent of abuse on China. Several MPs referred to the controversial ‘super-embassy’ or ‘mega-embassy’ that Beijing hopes to open in London. Mr Lammy went rather quiet about that.
He was noisier when attacking Nick Timothy (Con, W Suffolk), who fired back with gusto. As someone once said, here were two sides that had been fighting so long and so hard that they no longer knew what the f*** they were doing.
The House was also subjected to a statement on our national security strategy. This was delivered by the Cabinet Office’s Pat McFadden, one of life’s punctured bagpipes. Mr McFadden is certainly a more discursive communicator than Donald Trump.
On the basis that one fights fire with fire, Princess Anne might be best suited sitting next to Donald Trump during his state visit, QUENTIN LETTS writes
The purpose of his announcement was to claim that 5 per cent of our national wealth will henceforth be spent on ‘national security’. It soon transpired that this did not merely mean defensive capabilities. It meant things such as, er, telephone lines. These counted as ‘broader resilience’, a nicely imprecise term that should allow Downing Street to fiddle its spending commitments.
Mr McFadden, despite his puncture, still contained plenty of wind. He went grinding on about the challenge to leadership, promoting strength abroad, refreshing key alliances, strategic locations, clear-eyed views, deepening our resilience, whole-system approaches, blueprints, law enforcement toolkits and much, much else. Adjectives and adverbs abounded.
While he droned his way through these scintillating paragraphs, two colleagues on the front bench, the Minister without Portfolio Ellie Reeves and a whip called McCluskey, chewed gum.
And Dame Emily Thornberry (Lab, Islington S) waddled out of the chamber looking peckish. She soon returned with a drink, while chewing something. After a while she opened her palm, which contained several brown chocolate drops, and shovelled them down her gullet in one go.
At least I think they were chocolates. They may have been rabbit droppings.
