PMQs: Loose lips sink failing Grayling’s non-existent ships

Remember last week (or last century was it?) when Donald Tusk said there was a special place in hell reserved for Brexiteers who campaigned to leave the EU with no clear plan on how it would pan out? Well, in invoking the concept of the metaphysical realm, Tusk appears to have opened some kind of portal, unleashing underworld-style chaos. Things just don’t feel right…

You see, if someone told you on the day David Cameron announced the referendum on EU membership (20th February 2017), that a naked professor of economics would be on Good Morning Britain beneath a GIANT Brexit countdown clock (just 44 days left) you would rightly be a little sceptical. Not to mention being told that Chris Grayling would still (still!) be Minister for Transport, and the Minister for Leaving the European Union (third iteration by now) would refer to Jean-Claude Juncker with the loftily papal moniker of John Paul Juncker live on TV.

Brexit might be rocky, you say (still in 2017 here), but how bad can it get? Sensible government, lots of sensible people… British pluck. We’ll be fine!

Well, how wrong you would have been.

You would not have believed, for example, that the topic of PMQs today (44 days everyone!) would have been Transport Secretary Chris Grayling’s decision to give a multi-million-pound contract to a ferry company that doesn’t own any ferries. And you, further to that, would not have believed that Chris Grayling MP, a minister of the Crown, would have given a multi-million pound ferry contract to a company that has no ferries, and whose terms and conditions appeared to be those intended for a fast food outlet (“It is the responsibility of the customer to thoroughly check the supplied goods before agreeing to pay for any meal/order.”) You certainly would have a hard time believing that the man responsible for all of this will play a significant role in contingency plans for a no-deal Brexit.

You also would probably have doubted the following sentence: Corbyn completely skewered May on this in the Chamber today. But how could he not? May repeatedly insisted that due diligence was carried out on all ferry contracts by firms including Deloitte and Slaughter & May, despite, as Benjamin Kentish of the Independent reports, that one of the consultancy firms warned that it could not “make a formal assessment of Seaborne’s financial stability” due to lack of information available.  So you, too, probably would not have believed that due diligence has come to mean something entirely different to what it meant in 2017, apparently.

And you certainly would have questioned the fact that the political commentator Stephen Bush would write in The New Statesman an article titled: “Why it’s fine for the Prime Minister to scrape mould off jam and then eat it” with 44 days left to avoid crashing out with no deal. For context, the Daily Mail broke a story this morning claiming Theresa May told cabinet, where Brexit allegedly was not mentioned once (44! Days!), that she scrapes mould off the top of her jam before digging in. This was done to demonstrate the little bit she does to cut down on food waste. This is good news for the prime minister, since as the clock counts down to 29 March and no deal looks more likely by the day, scraping the mould off our jam may go from optional to necessary.

Much more hellish for May however, is the story broken by ITV journalist Angus Walker on Olly Robbins, her chief Brexit negotiator. Robbins was overheard in a bar in Brussels telling some pals that “he expects the choice for MPs to be either backing May’s deal or extending talks with the EU. He expects MPs in March to be presented with backing a reworked Brexit deal or a potentially significant delay to Brexit.” As the old adage goes: Loose lips sink (Chris Grayling’s non-existent) ships… and possibly Theresa May’s Brexit negotiating hand.

So when Corbyn asked Theresa May about the £800,000 spent on “due diligence” on the ferry contracts (heavy emphasis on the inverted commas there), the prime minister responded that she had dealt with this exact query yesterday, put to her by the SNP no less. “Labour following the SNP?” she quipped, “whatever next?”

Whatever next, indeed.