Chris Grayling is the Berk du Soleil as Frottage maps out a road to nowhere
- Marina Hyde
Say what you like about Chris Grayling – and I’m about to – but his face at least has the decency to “get it”. No matter what bullish self-justification is coming out of the transport secretary’s mouth, the face knows the truth. Look at literally any photo of Chris Grayling – honestly, go to Google Images now – and you will see the eyes of a man whose inner monologue is telling him, right at that second, that this one was a follow-through. Now it’s just a question of butching it out till he’s off-camera.
As I write this, Chris is on a hat-trick. On the very morning it emerged that Grayling’s probation reforms from his era as justice secretary will cost the taxpayer at least £171m, it also emerged that the government has been forced to pay £33m to Eurotunnel over his no-deal Brexit ferry fiasco. By the time I have finished typing, Chris could have lost a battle of wits with the A358, or de-invented trains. If you want to put how expensive Chris Grayling is into some kind of meaningful perspective, he’s cost more than new Leicester City manager Brendan Rodgers’ entire transfer budget.
Grayling’s calling card is breathtakingly extravagant feats of incompetence that feel almost technical in their execution. To watch him is to have tickets to Berk du Soleil. There is no interval, and you will sit through the entire spectacle to the bitterest of all ends. When Theresa May finally leaves No 10 to become a cricket pundit for beIN Sports, maybe we’ll find out what precisely Grayling had on her to make him this untouchable.
As for when that will be, when will anything be? The message of this week in Brexit is that the clock is ticking, but also: what even are clocks? I have two favourite vignettes from the voting lobbies on Wednesday night. The first is the news that one minister told the Tory chief whip, Julian Smith: “You don’t know what you’re doing,” to which Smith replied, “I do know what I’m doing”. The second is the revelation that, during the division itself, one MP took the opportunity to ask Theresa May to sign a bottle of wine. I wonder if the abdication crisis was like this, or whether elected representatives were able get through it without asking Stanley Baldwin to autograph their match programmes or their boobs or whatever.
For now, a certain cavalier shamelessness does seem to be in the air. On Friday morning, Dominic Raab gave an interview in which he accused the EU of being dishonourable for honouring the Good Friday agreement (which he famously didn’t read), in the withdrawal deal that he, as Brexit secretary, famously helped to negotiate. If Raab seeks an aide memoire, there is extensive press conference footage of him perspiring next to Michel Barnier. Yes, I’m afraid Dominic Raab is the missing woman’s boyfriend who helps with the search.
See also David Davis, the former Brexit secretary (Territorial), who this week granted an interview with Tatler. Has he got the qualities required to be PM? “Yes,” judged Davis. “And if this were an application for a job as a chief executive, I would probably win it.” Or, as his former permanent secretary has put it: “He could hardly even be bothered to go to Brussels.”
Journey of the week, though, belongs to Nigel Frottage. On Tuesday, Nigel took to the airwaves to say that if the eventual choice was between May’s deal or remain, he wouldn’t campaign or vote – a threat arguably without bite for at least 48% of the country. According to Nigel, he’d “rather go on holiday”. Mmm. A lot of people are saying Nigel might have to “go on holiday” to America soon anyway, so maybe a way to synchronise the two possibilities might be found.
By Thursday, though, Nigel had rallied somewhat, and announced a 12-day, 280-mile march from Sunderland to London. This will begin in about a fortnight, and be led by Frottage and Leave.EU founder and property entrepreneur Richard Tice. Are you familiar with Tice, who seems to be taking more of a front seat as we near the business end of Brexit? He always appears to have wandered in off the set of Howards’ Way, where he’d be part of a plotline involving the 19-year-old daughter of a rival boat designer. Hey – she’s old enough to make her own decisions.
As for the march, think of it as a road movie, but where the main characters walk. The thing about road movies, of course, is that those on the journey learn things about themselves. So if this were the movies, by the time they reach London on 29 March, Nigel will have fallen for a continuity remainer he met while passing through Wetherby, while Tice will have realised it was about the friends they met along the way.
Failing these developments, though, the drama will have to come from somewhere else – and on that I fear we can certainly count. The Brexit campaign event the march seems most closely designed to recapture was the Thames flotilla. (I often think the entire referendum can be boiled down to the moment on that vessel when the Telegraph’s Michael Deacon noted Frottage was back on the fags, and Nigel went: “I think the doctors have got it wrong on smoking.”)
However, the key thing about the flotilla is that the River Thames is relatively inaccessible. The walking route from Sunderland to London is … less so. Even if Leave.EU are charging £50 for the chance to be part of the “core marchers”, you have to think any land-based event is subject to varyingly aggressive forms of entryism. Are we reaching the stage of Brexit where farce repeats itself as riot? As with most of the worst outcomes over the next few weeks, you’d be mad to rule it out.
