It was an excitable Matt Hancock who headed out on the morning media round. New start, new tie. Out had gone the stained pink polyester job that he had been wearing round the clock for the past six months and in its place was a brand new powder blue number. It was time to reset the dial. The prime minister was incapable, there had been too much doom and gloom about government U-turns and exam results chaos, so someone needed to step up to give the nation hope. And who better than Tigger? To his disappointmentment, his studio tour hadn’t been a total success. For some reason his efforts to big up “Operation Moon Shot” – the new James Bond nerve centre headed up by Classic Dom in No 10 who had come up with that one on day one! – wasn’t being greeted with the shock and awe that he had hoped. Rather than focus on the new game-changing saliva tests that would allow nearly everyone to be tested for coronavirus once a week, presenters had responded with a bemused scepticism. Wasn’t it pushing things a bit to be bigging up a technology that didn’t yet exist – and might not do so before the end of the year at the earliest – especially given the government’s current iffy test-and-trace system, long-forgotten phone apps and the UK’s unwanted record for having one of the highest number of coronavirus deaths per head of population in the world? Might it not be better to try to concentrate on technologies that enabled as many people as possible to function relatively normally rather than obsess with something world-beating? Just trust me, the health secretary had pleaded tetchily. Only no one did. But it was during his interview with Kay Burley on Sky News that things nosedived badly. Having spent about eight minutes letting Hancock try to pitch the TV rights to Operation Moon Shot, she changed the subject to Boris Johnson’s pick to head up the board of trade alongside Liz Truss. Here Burley was at her most polite. She could have pointed out that the former Australian prime minister was well known for his racism, his climate change denial and for reckoning that most people who had died of the coronavirus had probably deserved what they got. Now was as good a time as any to weed out the weak and the sick. Instead, Burley chose just to point out that Tony Abbott was a homophobe and a misogynist. Did that make him the right person to be negotiating trade deals on behalf of the UK government? At first Hancock merely chose to suggest that Burley might have misunderstood that Abbott was really a bit of a joker – a bit like Boris with his watermelon smiles and letter-box burqas – but the Sky presenter didn’t give up. She merely repeated that she had read some of Abbott’s choicest clips and the evidence was clear. He was a homophobe and a misogynist.
Now Tigger began to visibly panic. Even his normal L’Oréal skin showed signs of furrows on his forehead. “Um … he’s also an expert in trade,” he said. An answer that was wrong on so many levels. The first was the word “also”. As if being a misogynist and a homophobe might be an acceptable tradeoff for his other qualities. Who knows? It could be handy to have someone on the same wavelength as other world leaders who were also homophobes and misogynists. In the same way that Harold Shipman may have been a serial killer but you couldn’t deny his expertise in palliative end-of-life care. What was also open to question was whether Abbott has any expertise in trade deals. If he does then it’s a mystery to many Australians who can’t remember him having made a worthwhile contribution to any trade deal. Indeed one Australian reader got in touch with me to point out that Abbott is both anti-free trade and opposed to many of the treaties Australia already has in place. “Most Asian countries think he’s a dickhead,” he wrote. Realising his mistake, Hancock tried to distance himself from Abbott somewhat – recruitment via LinkedIn did have its teething problems – but by then the damage was done. Little more than an hour later, the House of Commons was sitting for international trade questions with many MPs looking quite subdued. What with the coronavirus and exams, most MPs had rather forgotten that there was the minor matter of Brexit to resolve and that the person in charge of agreeing trade deals outside the EU was the intellectually challenged Liz Truss. And needless to say, in between insisting there was no need to preserve food standards in law because we had no intention of changing the rules on chlorinated chicken to secure a US deal, she and her departmental team were also quick to defend the yet-to-be-confirmed appointment of the former Australian prime minister. First the junior minister Greg Hands welcomed Abbott’s willingness to come to Blighty’s rescue in its hour of need and assured the house that his climate change denial would have no impact on our negotiations on environmental standards. Indeed it was positively dialectically useful to have someone on board negotiating the exact opposite of what he believed. Then during topical questions from Labour’s Ruth Cadbury and Christian Matheson, when directly challenged on Abbott’s suitability, Truss refused to give a direct answer and just went on the attack. John McDonnell had been a misogynist so why wasn’t it OK for Tony and Boris? Sooner or later the Conservatives are going to have to realise Labour has been under new management for the best part of six months. Besides, homophobia, racism, misogyny, climate change denial and lack of expertise were just virtue-signalling from Labour. Sometimes the right person for the job was the one who was the least well qualified. Yet more twisted dialectics. But one thing was unarguable. Between them Hancock and Truss had put forward the ideal show-reels in the BBC’s search for rightwing comedians. Even if they weren’t that funny. Johnson has repeatedly called for the UK to stop being so embarrassed about itself. Something that would be much easier were we not to have such embarrassments in government.