Well, things looked bleak for a while but, on Monday night, what was once lost was found.
Ladies and gentlemen, let’s give a big round of applause for something we’d assumed had disappeared forever: Douglas Ross’s backbone!
Ooft, that wasn’t much of a welcome back. Come on, you can do better than that!
He chose standing up for what his constituents believe in over currying favour with his boss, and voted that he had no confidence in the prime minister. Surely that deserves a bit of a cheer?
OK, OK, I know that he did actually retract his original statement of no confidence in the PM (the one he first issued after the Met issued Boris Johnson with a fixed penalty notice), but there was a war on! Not our war, but still.
Mr Ross had very good reasons for that first take-back. Didn’t you hear him? “It would play into Vladimir Putin’s hands if Britain was to go down the route of changing leader now.”
Oh no, wait, sorry. That wasn’t Douglas Ross. That was his colleague, Andrew Bowie MP, on April 25. And Mr Bowie has… also now voted that he has no confidence in the prime minister! So, surely he also deserves a great big round of… No?
Anyway, what Mr Ross actually said, on March 11, was that “the only person who would gain from the removal of a UK prime minister from office would be Vladimir Putin.”
I know, I know, the two statements do sound suspiciously similar – almost like both MPs were reading from a script they had not written and had very little understanding of – but give them a hand! They stood up for what their constituents wanted, not only to their boss but also to Vladimir Putin. That’s right. Oor brave boys totally just gave Vlad a bloody nose, so they did.
Or… actually, wait. This is confusing. Didn’t they just “play straight into his hands”?
Well, they would have done, if the vote had been successful. But it wasn’t. Thank goodness for that, eh?
Can you imagine what would happen if Putin got even the tiniest sniff of weakness about our prime minister? Imagine the enormous tactical advantage it would give Russia in their assault on Ukraine if they somehow got the idea for just one second that Boris Johnson was an unpopular, indecisive, corrupt or flawed figurehead?
Whose war is it anyway?
Actually, hang on a minute here, ladies and gents. Do Mr Ross and Mr Bowie… they surely don’t mean that they have now switched horses completely and are backing Putin, do they? It’s a bold move, but I’m not entirely sure their constituents will be with them on that.
If there is one thing that we know, it’s that the survival of Boris Johnson as prime minister is absolutely essential to the Ukrainian war effort
Oh, wait, no. Here’s Mr Ross to clarify things, in the statement he issued only on his Twitter account just before the vote on Monday. “While war in Europe continues and the UK Government is providing such strong support to President Zelenskyy and the people of Ukraine, the timing of this vote is far from ideal.”
Having listened closely to people in Moray who re-elected me and people across Scotland, tonight I will support the motion of no confidence in the Prime Minister. pic.twitter.com/YXE0rEyvsn
— Douglas Ross MP MSP (@Douglas4Moray) June 6, 2022
So, there we go. That sorts that out. If there is one thing that we know, it’s that the survival of Boris Johnson as prime minister is absolutely essential to the Ukrainian war effort. We know this because a large number of cabinet ministers allied with Boris Johnson have told us.
This was cabinet minister Nadhim Zahawi, interviewed right after the narrow margins of the confidence vote were announced: “What do you think president Zelensky will be thinking tonight?”
He seemed to be pretty concerned that both Severodonetsk and Lysychansk had been turned into “dead cities” in the report I read about him on Monday. But I clearly do not have the special wartime intel of the education secretary for England and Wales, because Mr Zahawi went on to say: “He’ll be punching the air because he knows his great ally Boris Johnson will be prime minister tomorrow morning. That’s what we’ve got to focus on.”
Zelensky might have other things to worry about
Priorities, people. Priorities like using a horrendous humanitarian catastrophe to save your flailing embarrassment of a leader because he once did a photo op with a globally popular war hero.
Volodymyr Zelensky did actually find the time to inform the UK press that he was “very happy” that the PM lives on another day to fight (his own backbenchers). Now, I’m a pacifist, but I very much hope they gave the Ukrainian president all the weapons he needed as a thank you for this gigantic, trivial waste of his time.
Anyway, doesn’t this now mean that Ross and Bowie are actually on the wrong side of history? How will they flip that one?
Oh, I don’t know about you, ladies and gents, but I’m finding this exhausting. And boring. Talk amongst yourselves. I’m off to have a nap.
Kirstin Innes is the author of the novels Scabby Queen and Fishnet, and co-author of the recent non-fiction book Brickwork: A Biography of the Arches
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