Kwarteng follows dirty work at Treasury with bonus cap farce
One of the themes of the coverage of our late Queen’s life has been what a good sense of humour she had. But I did not see any references to the day it fell to her to make her speech at the opening of parliament on 21 June 2017.
On that day her monarchical duty, in the Queen’s speech, was to outline the proposed legislation that would prepare the UK for its departure from the European Union.
As the BBC reported, it did not escape notice that the design on the Queen’s hat that day bore a remarkable resemblance to the flag of the European Union. Before the 2016 referendum there had been a malicious report in the rightwing press that the Queen was a Brexiter. The message on the hat was a neat riposte. As Guy Verhofstadt, then the European parliament’s chief Brexit negotiator, observed: “Clearly the EU still inspires some in the UK.”
The snap general election of 2017 took place before Boris Johnson, the Brexiter-in-chief, had elbowed Theresa May out as prime minister and taken over himself. We are living with, and trying desperately to cope with, the consequences first of the Brexit referendum, which the mendacious Johnson and his crew foisted on the public, and secondly with the way he managed to pollute the Conservative party. Not to put too fine a point upon it, by sacking everyone in his cabinet who was not a Brexiter, Johnson handed the membership of his party precious little choice when it came to their choosing his successor.
They have now achieved the counterpart of what Labour did in adding Jeremy Corbyn to the list of candidates in 2015. He was basically a joke candidate. So was Liz Truss. But he was selected, and so was she; and here we are, once the commemorations of the Queen’s life recede, back with an economy in
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