Parliamentary Sketch

THE TIMES
Parliamentary Sketch

Straw breaks his own record on opaqueness in clear obfuscation.
By Ann Treneman

JACK STRAW is a man who thrives in murk. He demonstrated this when, in the throes of what may have been a middle-age crisis, he threw away his little round spectacles. Since then he has had trouble admitting seeing things that are right in front of him. This is a man who shook the hand of Robert Mugabe only because it was too dark in the room to see.

Perhaps because of this, the Foreign Secretary is very fond of telling us that things are clear and plain. Yesterday, as he told the Commons what had been decided about the referendum on the EU constitution, almost everything was clear and plain. This is always a bad sign. Gradually it seeped out that the Government had decided not to make a decision on a referendum or the status of the treaty.

Mr Straw exceeded even his own opaqueness record. If he were an octopus, the blue black ink would have been swirling round him. By the end of his non-statement, the Foreign Secretary was almost completely obscured, though periodically a bit of him would emerge. His love of confusion means he usually elicits only polite giggles. Yesterday there was nothing polite about the Tory guffaws.

It was Liam Fox's task to penetrate the murk. Dr Fox has enjoyed some publicity in the Sunday papers after a particularly refreshed evening in Paris with some students. I don't think he was drinking any vodka and tonics yesterday but it was certainly refreshing to watch as he tackled the vexed question of whether the EU constitutional treaty was dead.

"I may no longer practise medicine but I can tell a corpse when I see one," he cried. Labour MPs started pointing to Dr Fox himself, who ignored them. And this constitution is a case for the morgue if ever I saw one. This is aDEAD constitution.

Up in the peers gallery were Tony Benn (despite being very much not a peer),Lord Tebbit, and the pro-European Baroness Williams of Crosby. If only thought bubbles were compulsory. Down below, Dr Fox was on the brink of exploding with outrage. And what is the response from our Government? he cried. Is it to be bold and give a clear direction? No, it is and I quote, We see no point in proceeding at this moment. What does that mean? Do they want to proceed at another moment or soon or never? Or are they waiting for a lead from the people of Luxembourg?

By now we could all see the treaty, lying inert on the floor. It certainly looked dead. But, in politics, the dead are often merely resting. Dennis Skinner wanted to make sure that this was not the case. He faced Mr Straw,who seemed to shrink back as Mr Skinner shook a finger at him. Will you tell Chirac and Schröder we are not going down the road they are preaching? Send a copy of Monty Python's dead parrot sketch. It is deceased, it is kaput, it is no more.

Whatever Mr Straw thinks, he wasn't telling us, but at least he didn't say that the treaty was only stunned.