The Question Mr Slippery Still Cannot Answer

Some of you may recall my long-ago brush with Mr Slippery, during what I think was his sole press conference of the general election campaign in 2010. Laughingly, but reluctantly, he eventually took a question from me , jeering that it was ‘The Peter Hitchens Memorial Question’. He didn’t answer it then, and he can’t answer it now.

 

A full account of this (from this weblog on 3rd May 2010) can be found here

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2010/05/who-made-a-fool-of-whom.html

 

Here’s the relevant excerpt: “There was a bit of banter at the beginning which went (as far as I've been able to piece together):

 

David Cameron (after I'd had my hand up since the start of questions): ‘Let's take the Peter Hitchens memorial question.’

PH: ‘Will there be only one?’

 

DC: ‘No, we'll be happy to take lots of questions from you - actually that was the first lie of the campaign.’ (Laughter)

PH: ‘Would you say you were politically closer to Norman Tebbit or Nick Clegg?’ (Laughter, but more nervous)

DC: (summarised) ‘Blah blah, Norman's written a great cookery book, very much like Norman Tebbit, blah blah, Nick Clegg always changing his position, blah blah blah.’

PH: (summarised, trying to hang on to microphone while DC hopes to move to another question) ‘But you change your position - notably on the Lisbon Treaty - and you haven't answered the question.’

DC: ‘I thought I answered it very well.’ “

 

Now a very similar question has been asked of Mr Cameron by Philip Davies MP ( who I suspect is well aware of the fact that I asked the same one all those months ago) .

 

This is from Column 313 of Hansard for the House of Commons, 9th January 2013

‘Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con): Just in case anybody is in any doubt, will the Prime Minister confirm who he is closest to, politically? Is it Lord Tebbit or the Deputy Prime Minister?

 

The Prime Minister: I managed to get through Christmas without spending any time with either of them. I would remind my hon. Friend that I am closer to all Conservatives than I am to anyone from any other party.’

 

 

This gives me some satisfaction (though also makes me a bit jealous) for two reasons. One, when I asked it the Coalition was not – as far as we know - even a twinkle in Mr Cameron’s eye, though it was in fact just days away. I knew Mr Cameron couldn’t win the election,  and I had suggested a hung parliament and a Con-Lib coalition as possibilities, but I think the question I asked now ranks as quite prophetic, whereas Mr Davies’s version was asked after the fact.

 

The other reason is that while my question was born to blush unseen, and waste its sweetness on the desert air, as my fellow reporters couldn’t be bothered to mention it in their accounts of that odd, rare occasion, Mr Davies’s near-identical question was transmitted at the beginning of the BBC’s ‘Yesterday In Parliament’ report on the ‘Today’ programme this morning. It also attracted  quite a lot of attention in the Internet, and was reported in the Independent by my old friend Don Macintyre.

 

By the way, Mr Macintyre also correctly chided Mr Cameron for dismissing John Spellar MP as a ‘red pest’, a silly mistake which shows that Mr Cameron knows nothing of the recent past and was, to all intents and purposes, born yesterday.

 

Mr Spellar, now the last surviving ‘right-wing’ Labour MP in captivity,  was in fact the chief lieutenant of Frank Chapple, the ferocious battler who destroyed Communist party control of the Electrical Trades Union (ETU) and exposed the left’s ballot-rigging.  I believe it was Mr Spellar who wrote the devastating speech at the TUC conference,  in which Frank Chapple’s successor, Eric Hammond, attacked Arthur Scargill, who had led many members of the National Union of Mineworkers into a disastrous self-defeating strike.

 

Mr Scargill had to listen as Mr Hammond described the poor miners as ‘Lions, led by donkeys’. (The phrase, attributed by Alan Clark to the German general Erich von Falkenhayn, was also applied to British soldiers in World war One, and seems to have been first used by a Russian officer about British troops during the siege of Sevastopol in the Crimea).

 

There was no doubt who the chief donkey was. Mr Hammond was howled down, despite the fact that what he said was absolutely true.  Given this, it was particularly dim of Mr Cameron to call Mr Spellar a ‘red’ . I always thought that one of the points of the clubby atmosphere of the House of Commons, with its many bars, libraries, cafes , corridors, lobbies and terraces, decorated with scenes from British history, was that it gave a chance to rising to young MPs to get to know and meet their opponents, and find out the history of their country through the human beings who had themselves experienced it. For most of my life, for instance, the House of Commons still contained men who had fought in war, or had actually seen the fall of Chamberlain in 1940, and the great wartime speeches of Churchill. I can myself claim to have watched from the gallery some of the clashes between Margaret Thatcher and Denis Healey, Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock , and also the moment when Norman Lamont more or less slew John major with the jibe that he was ‘In office, but not in power’, a barb so deadly and unforgettable that you could all but hear it penetrating Mr Major’s flesh.

 

A note on ‘GPI TV’. I am asked for an explanation of this jibe. Very well then.  ‘GPI’ is ‘General Paralysis of the Insane’, the old name for the appalling tertiary stage of Syphilis. I think that when I discovered this reference I understood for the first time the stinging fury that lay at the back of the wit of ‘Peter Simple’. The column may often have seemed elegiac, partly because of Michael ffolkes’s lovely, wistful illustrations, but in fact it was grounded in a sort of rage of loss.