“THIS is a doomed Bill!” cried Diane Abbott as the ID card debate was in its final throes last night.
As she spoke a crash shook the Commons. Crack! Boom! Bash! Ms Abbott looked surprised and, for a moment, stopped speaking. MPs stared, for nothing has ever silenced her before.
Then Ms Abbott realised the true meaning of what had just happened. God had intervened on her! He was speaking in the ID card debate! “You see, even the Almighty thinks that this is a doomed Bill,” she cried. “Even if thunder and lightning cannot stop this Bill, something about it is DOOMED.”
Well, she was right about one thing. Something was doomed last night but many of us suspected it would be the revolt. The storm broke about 8.30pm. Lightning flashed and thunder crashed. It was like something out of the Addams Family. I speak, of course, of the Commons, which was even weirder than usual.
The climate change had been dramatic. It was a dark and stormy night but it had all started out so differently. For in the afternoon we had been entertained by the House’s own version of the Chas and Dave show. This is Charles Clarke and David Davis. What a duo! They were in the sunniest of moods.
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They had a lot in common which, to be frank, was a bit scary in itself. Both had to perform well (and did) and both tried to claim George Orwell as their new best friend. “I argue the ID card system is a bulwark against the surveillance society, the Big Brother society, and not a further contribution to it,” cried the Home Secretary. This was met with laughter from the Tories and incomprehension from Labour MPs.
It’s a very new Labour argument and reminds me of their plan to stop binge drinking by allowing pubs to open for 24 hours. It’s all rather puzzling but it is Mr Clarke’s job to pretend that it isn’t. Mr Clarke allowed what seemed hundreds of interventions, almost all of them critical. He met most of these attacks as if they were long-lost friends. He laughed and joked. There was even a terrifying moment when he started to flirt.
Lynne Jones is a Labour MP who is small, rebellious and rarely lost for words. She kept shouting: “Will my friend give way?” Mr Clarke returned to his old grumpy personality for just a nanosecond. “I told you I will,” he snapped. “Wooooooo,” shouted the Tories, as if they were a steam train.
Mr Clarke then retrieved his happy identity and told the Commons that he rather liked having the “Woooooo” factor. He turned to Ms Jones and oozed: “I now give way to my admired friend.” Ms Jones did not ooze quite so admiringly in return.
Maybe it all started to go wrong when the “woooooos” started. Mr Clarke started promising everything to anyone. The one thing he seemed really clear about is that ID cards would help us to check out library books. How could Orwell be against that?
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The Shadow Home Secretary thought he could. He referred to ID cards as the “plastic poll tax”. Mr Clarke, who suffered a sense of humour failure when Mr Davis stood up, glared. This only encouraged Mr Davis: “A vision rather like this was originally set out by a man called Blair who later changed his name to Orwell and wrote a book called 1984. It was supposed to be a warning. This Government has used it as a textbook.”
The ID card opponents are an odd lot (even without the addition of the thunderclap) but no one could say they lacked in drama. There was the Labour rebels, the Tories and the Lib Dems, plus Gorgeous George Galloway who sat waiting to be called for about five hours before storming out. Come to think of it, that’s when the serious thunder started.