Every government has a couple of them: expendable, middle-rank ministers who can be sent to the Commons to sponge up trouble when a nakedly sticky scandal erupts.
In the Cameron years it tended to be David Gauke — “uncork the Gauke!” the cry would go — or Alan Duncan. Slowly, stoically, they would repeat the party line while opposition MPs screamed and shook their digits and pelted them with dung balls.
The task at these occasions is not dissimilar to that of a cricket nightwatchman: duck the bouncers, play a dead bat, don’t attempt daft shots. Hold the government’s position, no matter how bad the sledging becomes.
Labour’s Anneliese Dodds had secured an urgent question about David Cameron lobbying the chancellor on behalf of covert-coated chancer Lex Greensill. There had been private drinks with Matt Hancock. There had been “great-to-chat” smarming of a Downing Street adviser.
Dave had been in line for personal kickbacks which would have made him richer than Sir Nick Clegg. Which, please, would only be fair.
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Dodds had had her hair sheep-dipped for the occasion. Black as onyx it was. She unleashed screeds of displeasure. Why was Rishi Sunak “hiding”? Was he “frit”? Opposition MPs bristled behind her, breathing so heavily we could see their facemasks puff and suck like oxgen bags in an intensive care ward.
That big-boned donkey Toby Perkins (Lab, Chesterfield) lowered his mask specially to let rip with ruderies. Little Wes Streeting (Lab, Ilford North) was almost levitating with vexation. Owing to his mask, all one could really see of wee Wes was his eyeballs, swollen as a prize ram’s crown jewels.
The current government’s first choice for a nightwatchman is usually a suave, dapper fellow called Chris Pincher, but he is minister for housing (and wine correspondent for The Critic magazine). Mr Speaker might have complained if “Captain Peacock” Pincher had turned up to pour his special blend of oil and water over proceedings. And so the whips fielded their second-string punchbag, a business minister, Paul Scully. Scruffy. Red-framed spectacles. Splay-footed gait. A cuff-shooter, albeit tremulous.
Was Scully dreadful in his attempts to explain events? Of course he was. He claimed it would “not be appropriate” for him to comment on matters that were now to be the subject of a hastily arranged inquiry. All decisions by officials had been taken “independently” and “usual procedure” had been followed.
Indeed it had! You seldom heard such gratuitous jock-rot but that was not really the point. The minister coughed up his scripted words, reverting to them time and again. He did what he had been told to do. Pincher might have done it with more languid poise but Scully stayed at the wicket.
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“Shady back-door lobbying efforts,” said an SNP man. “Dave was indeed and remains dodgy,” cried Labour’s Emma Lewell-Buck. “Crony Cameron!” honked another. Scully gasped that it was “inappropriate” to call a former PM such names.
Scully kept patting the top of the dispatch, as if to test the hob of an Aga. He blurted his words. He hopped from foot to foot and did a lot of “errrming”. But he managed not to laugh when Tory colleagues provided covering fire and suggested the controversy was purely partisan.
What about the fraying of public trust in politics? Scully seized on this. It was indeed a problem. And it was caused by “the politicisation of issues”.
Things seemed to take a theological turn when Jon Trickett (Lab, Hemsworth) demanded that “high office should not be a grubby route to riches in the afterlife”. Scully deflected that, as he deflected everything, without so much as a blush.
Eventually his 39-minute vigil came to an end. He clipped shut his folder, tweaked his neck and sauntered out of the distant double doors with a matey gait, whistling like a chimney sweep. Another dirty job done.
