"Nearer My God To Thee! Keep Playing, Boys..."

 

Well, what are we to make of 'Graygate'? We watched the urgent question debate tabled by the government today, and to be perfectly frank, it was like witnessing the death-throes of a wounded animal, trying to claw its way back into the fight. It really is desperation on desolation row for the Tories now: what they seem to imagine is a chink in the opposition's armour appears to be as fanciful as the notion that they actually have any policies, direction or scruples. It really was an unsavoury spectacle, that kicked off with the Speaker admonishing the government for attempting to 'crowd-lobby' - if you will - the question, to get it before the House. The oily legalize of the Cabinet Minister was offset by an angry rant by Angela Rayner, which, though understandable given the circumstances of this politically-motivated farrago of a debate, was wide of the mark and of little use in the context.

The interesting thing about it all, apart from the absence of the principals from either side, was that the Cabinet Minister was extraordinarily careful to frame his speech and comments in a totally non-committal manner, effectively saying that although many rumours regarding the subject abound, he had no firm information regarding anything to do with the situation or its actors supposed involvement in it: very carefully distancing himself from the increasingly rabid - and outside of the House and the protection of Parliamentary privilege - slanderous utterances of his colleagues on the back-benches. As the pomposity index rose on the government side of the House, all input from the sparsely-occupied Opposition benches dried up completely, as if the bear-baiting had served its purpose. Who, exactly, is baiting whom in all of this? I wish I was a fly on the wall of Labour Party headquarters, but a Tory five-line(!) whip and the carbon-copy-lobbying for the debate signals a desperate bid to deflect the press/public from the government's increasingly large portfolio of woes and missteps. I suspect that the omertà currently being observed by the two principal objects in the cross-hairs of the Tory smear campaign is for a very good reason, and that the general principle that while your enemy is digging his own grave, leave him be, applies.

The very interesting thing this afternoon, however, was that none of the debate was reported by either the BBC or even Sky News. I suspect this whole thing to be a very ill-conceived attempt by the Tories to - in their own words, referring to Partygate and their own empty rhetoric about Starmer/Gray - 'stitch up' the Opposition, who I think were wise to this ruse all along, and that the media - well, apart from The Mail and The Express, who will certainly foam at their collective mouths in tomorrow's editions - have decided to wait for some actual facts to appear, before further opening themselves up to potential legal action. I do hope I'm right, because if these bastards get away with this one, we really do need our collective heads banging together and deserve everything we get when they are re-elected with Boris at the helm of the SS Great Britain, going down by the head; having struck the biggest fucking iceberg imaginable...