RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: Put your trousers on, Boris – you’re nicked!
Nothing bears testament to the tenure of John Bercow in the Speaker’s chair as eloquently as the manner of his departure.
Yesterday’s vomit-inducing self-tribute was precisely what we have come to expect from this partisan pipsqueak, who has brought disgrace on one of the great offices of state.
Rather than remaining impartial, he has turned Parliament into the Bercow Show, bending the rules to breaking point to further his own political prejudices and assist Labour.
Bercow has allowed Parliament to pass a law which forbids Boris Johnson from taking Britain out of the EU on October 31 without a deal. Remainers are gloating that if Boris defies this law, as he swears he will, he can be arrested and jailed
No wonder that at the end of his boastful, lachrymose resignation announcement, he was given a standing ovation by the Opposition benches.
All but a handful of sycophants on the Conservative side of the House sat silently.
Who can blame them? Bercow has moved heaven and earth to stop Brexit. He has pitched Parliament against the people.
Most recently he has employed every trick in the book to help Remainers seize control of Commons business and paralyse the Government.
So what is supposed to happen now? Johnson is sticking to his pledge to leave on October 31, do or die. In that event, will the Speaker —in his last service to a grateful nation — call on Scotland Yard to take him into custody?
The Speaker has stood on its head the tried-and-tested relationship between Parliament and the executive.
Incredibly, shamefully, and against all constitutional precedent, he has engineered a crisis which could see a British Prime Minister sent to prison for trying to keep a solemn promise to the electorate.
Bercow has allowed Parliament to pass a law which forbids Boris Johnson from taking Britain out of the EU on October 31 without a deal.
Remainers are gloating that if Boris defies this law, as he swears he will, he can be arrested and jailed.
Nothing bears testament to the tenure of John Bercow in the Speaker’s chair as eloquently as the manner of his departure. Yesterday’s vomit-inducing self-tribute was precisely what we have come to expect from this partisan pipsqueak, who has brought disgrace on one of the great offices of state
Consider the enormity of this. The Prime Minister is facing prison if he dares to attempt implementing something which was promised in the General Election manifestos of both main parties, endorsed by Parliament, and — more importantly — voted for in a referendum by the largest single number of people in our history.
It’s the modern equivalent of Charles I being dragged into Whitehall and beheaded in 1649.
Which might seem far-fetched until you remember that Bercow reached back to a long-forgotten, archaic rule from 1604 in his demented quest to frustrate Brexit.
When I wrote about the madness gripping Westminster last week, even I couldn’t have foreseen that the Speaker and the Opposition would conspire to create circumstances in which the Prime Minister could have his collar felt for carrying out the will of the people.
Complete and utter lawyers like fanatical EU disciple Dominique Grieve and the Wicked Witch’s former sidekick Ken Macdonald, ex-head of the Crown Prosecution Service, say that Boris must be arrested if he defies the law.
But the law didn’t exist until about five minutes ago.
It was rushed through the House by Bercow, not as a long-overdue piece of legislation, but as a naked political device to banjax Brexit.
A Parliament which, under this Speaker, has spent three-and-a-quarter years deliberately failing to take Britain out of the EU, took less than a day introducing a law designed to stop us ever leaving.
So what is supposed to happen now? Johnson is sticking to his pledge to leave on October 31, do or die.
In that event, will the Speaker —in his last service to a grateful nation — call on Scotland Yard to take him into custody?
The Prime Minister is facing prison if he dares to attempt implementing something which was promised in the General Election manifestos of both main parties, endorsed by Parliament, and — more importantly — voted for in a referendum by the largest single number of people in our history
Will there be a dawn raid on Downing Street, complete with helicopters, dogs and an armed response unit?
Put your trousers on, Boris, you’re bleedin’ nicked!
How the hell did we end up here? As I said last week, we live in a Looking Glass world, in which words mean whatever politicians want them to mean.
Even worse, Bercow has so corrupted the office of Speaker he has decided rules mean whatever he wants them to mean. He has behaved more like an absolute monarch than a mere referee.
He is determined to stop Brexit come hell or high water and, although he announced his resignation yesterday, intends to be there at the death, to preside over Boris Johnson’s humiliation.
Just think, as this ghastly, conceited gargoyle is being carried out shoulder-high in triumph on October 31 by the massed ranks of opportunist Corbynistas, die-hard Remainers and Tory turncoats, our PM could be driven away in a Black Maria.
This will be Bercow’s legacy. This is how democracy dies.
Carry On Up The Conservatives
Penny Mordaunt was on the brink of tears as she told how she’d been offered up for auction at her first party conference in 1996.
The former Defence Secretary and Naval Reservist said it happened at a party fundraiser when she was just 23.
Sadly, even if it was only a joke, this kind of boorish behaviour was par for the course among a certain type of Tory chap back then.
Still, I always thought Miss Mordaunt, now 46, was made of sterner stuff. Anyone prepared to wear a swimsuit on prime-time TV must be game for a laugh.
There’s something gloriously old-fashioned about her, the kind of no-nonsense woman who’d give as good as she got.
I imagined that any man trying to take advantage of her would end up looking foolish, so it’s disappointing to see her coming over all #MeToo.
She was born to wear a blue serge uniform and would have been in her element alongside Hattie Jacques and Joan Sims in Carry On Constable, inflaming the passions of Kenneth Connor and Leslie Phillips.
Ding, dong!
Sadly, even if it was only a joke, this kind of boorish behaviour was par for the course among a certain type of Tory chap back then. Still, I always thought Miss Mordaunt, now 46, was made of sterner stuff
A masked gunman killed himself when he was hit by a blast from his own shotgun.
He was banging on the window of a parked car in Sydenham, South London, when the gun went off.
The full circumstances are still being investigated, but it appears to be a spectacular own goal.
One witness said: ‘He came to shoot someone else, but ended up shooting himself.’
No one seems to have told the local MP, Ellie Reeves.
She tweeted: ‘Shocked and saddened to learn of the fatal shooting in Sydenham. My thoughts are with the victim and his family.’
Why?
It only goes to prove the cynical insincerity of these self-serving, off-the-shelf expressions of sympathy.
Bring out the Portashrines!
The ‘victim’ here
was the architect of his own demise.
If he’d lived, someone else would have died. Yet Miss Reeves thinks his self-inflicted death is some kind of tragedy.
Surely, it’s one to be filed under: Oh, dear, how sad, never mind.
Barely a day passes without the NHS bleating that it needs more ‘resources’.
It emerges that one reason the health service is short of cash is because it is having to pay out £200,000 a week in compensation to patients suffering from bedsores.
Could this have something to do with the fact that these days nurses are trained to degree level and many consider changing sheets to be beneath them?
Florence Nightingale said more than 150 years ago that bedsores represented a failure of basic nursing standards, as patients need to be moved regularly to stop them developing. An inability to do that cost us £10.3 million last year.
Nurse!
For years, we’ve been warned to avoid red meat. Now Oxford University researchers have declared that eating chicken gives you cancer, too. I suppose we could always try washing it in chlorine.
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