At PMQs today, Jeremy Corbyn finally asked about Brexit – and he did it fearlessly
It is almost as if there are two Jeremy Corbyns. There is the one who doesn’t know what he’s doing, who asks rambling questions in the House of Commons, pausing to stare with a mixture of confusion and disapproval at Conservative hecklers, and who looks as if he would rather be somewhere else.
And there is the new Jeremy Corbyn, who turned up at the despatch box today and asked five crisp and pointed questions about the Prime Minister’s position on Brexit. The other Jeremy Corbyn avoids the subject of the EU because he disagrees with most of his own MPs about it, but this Jeremy Corbyn was fearless.
Was David Davis, the Brexit Secretary, setting the bar a bit low by saying that leaving the EU wouldn’t lead to a Mad-Max-style dystopia? Theresa May said some words in reply, but I have no idea what they were.
The new Corbyn quoted a former Brexit minister who said May’s transition period was a “gangplank into thin air” and asked about environment and employment law. The Prime Minister said: “He asks about what we want to achieve: I’ll tell him what we want to achieve.” She might as well have said: “He asks a question: I’m not going to answer it.”
Corbyn asked about a subtle change in the Government’s position that someone, presumably Keir Starmer, the lawyer and Shadow Brexit Secretary, had spotted. She had wanted “tariff-free trade”, he said. Now she wants “as close to tariff-free trade as possible”. You don’t have to understand GATT, WTO and MFN to realise that there is a difference.
Theresa May simply denied it, and went back to talking about workers’ rights, which Corbyn had asked about in his previous question. She was limping behind the pace the Labour leader was setting.
Next the new Corbyn asked a short, deceptive question about Brexit: “What is the Government’s desired outcome?”
The Prime Minister, finally catching up, gave a short, deceptive answer: “A bespoke economic partnership.”
“OK,” said New Corbyn, conversationally. “Given that she has ruled out any form of customs union, how does she expect to avoid a hard border with Northern Ireland?”
She said she had already answered that question when the Government published some documents last summer. This was the equivalent of Nick Gibb, the schools minister, saying he knew the answer to eight times nine but he wasn’t going to say.
At this point New Corbyn used his chance to ask a sixth question to go into his prepared speech for social media, but even so it was short and to the point. So much so that he forgot to ask a question, which is something the Old Corbyn sometimes does, but this time it was a stroke of New Corbyn tactical genius. Theresa May couldn’t refuse to answer because she had her prepared joke to deliver.
So he said: “This Government isn’t on the road to Brexit, it is on the road to nowhere.” And she had to congratulate him on not asking her to sign a blank cheque – “I know he likes Czechs.”
It wasn’t a great final exchange but at least it was short. Indeed, the whole Leader of the Opposition versus Prime Minister segment, which usually takes 20 minutes, was over in eight.
New Corbyn has finally been reprogrammed to keep his questions short, easy to understand and to the point, and he made Theresa May look defensive, uncertain and evasive.
