Ken Clarke and the ghost of de Gaulle

The other day, out of morbid curiosity, I watched another of the BBC Parliament Brexit Lectures.  This time Ken Clarke blaming it all on de Gaulle as the populariser of the referendum as a means of bypassing parliaments…. 

Ken these days it seems is the father of the house – a quaint term for the kind of sitting MP who hasn’t got the message yet that their party wants them to get lost, die or go to the Lords.  Or who has got the message and doesn’t care.  Ken Clarke clearly belongs to the latter category.  After years of failed leadership bids – always the Chancellor never the Prime Minister - Mr Clarke has now retired to the back benches to spend his dotage making popularist pops at his own party for not being Europhile enough.  Exactly the same pops that have kept him out of the top job all his life.  Ah well, that’s principles for you.

Mr Clarke has indeed become something of a pin up for the remaining Remainers.  His speeches, like this lecture, are highly popular because like the late Tony Ben he has mastered the art of public performance to a high degree ... if not the art of implementing policy.

Direct stinging angry self-righteous attacks on the government or the Referendum or the Brexiteers are not Ken’s style.  Aware this might get the whip withdrawn (not that I suppose he cares that much about that with a majority of 10,000 and at an age of 78) he instead cloaks his attacks in multiple layers of self-depreciation – describing himself as garrulous, self-indulgent and pretending to be just a silly old fool to get his harsh criticisms under the wire ... even to the extent of having a glass of red wine permanently on his right hand side like a latter-day Rowley Birkin. 

In the words of the late Sir Humphrey Appleby “it is necessary to get behind someone in order to stab them in the back” and so Ken also plays the loyal party member card with aplomb.  He professes to entertain enormous empathy for the government for the difficult position it finds its self in of having to implement a policy it “doesn’t believe in” and uses phrases like “I do know the tools of my trade” to hint that if Prime Minister he too might try to silence debate … which is, of course, much nicer than outright just saying “Mrs May is trying to silence debate”.

Usually when he speaks in the House the Tory MPs behind him engage in pantomime theatrics to display their displeasure – such as eye rolling, sighing, looking bored or even falling asleep but without these distractions and with only a red board and a statue of Big Ben behind him Mr Clarke’s criticisms are much much starker for all his comedy theatrics. 

It’s like watching a child being beaten up by their grandfather as he rattles through a myriad of constitutional issues and technical problems in a … I’m not being critical but I don’t think anyone’s thought this out way …

Referendums bypass Parliament, all Trade deals involve the pooling of sovereignty, the soft border in Ireland will create a smuggling epidemic, you’d be better off choosing policy by lottery, I couldn’t do a deal with Obama you think you’ve got a hope with Trump?  The Chinese government never loses in its own courts so what chance you got?  What happens to intellectual property?  We’re now going to exclude ourselves from our own free trade deals we spent years negotiating inside the EU.  It’s a masterclass in verbally skewering your opponents yet somehow never quite winning the arguments…