Brussels-Bashers can look a bit batty on television – how sweaty and bendy-eared Basildon & Billericay’s John Baron has been in some interviews in recent days. And how the BBC loves to stitch up these Tories.
Yet in the Commons these trouser flappers, these E.L. Wisty-voiced ‘train spotters’ (train spotting in fact being a perfectly decent hobby) are in their element.
Walruses may be ungainly out of the water but once you put them in their preferred environment, down there in the surging briny, these tuskers become graceful.
Soon Clegg was up to his oxters in doo-doo. It is rare to hear such obvious lies at the despatch boxWe saw this yesterday both at Prime Minister’s Questions and in the final day of the Queen’s Speech debate, in which the same Mr Baron made damaging interventions on Labour’s Ed Balls.
Shadow Chancellor Bawls was making another of his brash, blow-hard, broad-brush, blustery bombastications.
He leaned one elbow on the despatch box, honking hard, energetically insulting Government ministers. Of the economy, which is now in recovery, we heard little.
Mr Baron admitted he would indeed vote to leave the EUMr Balls was making much violent noise, hurling paper notes here and there.
His little Miss Moneypenny, Shadow Treasury Minister Chris Leslie, was acting as powder monkey, passing his adored boss his ammunition.
How imperiously Mr Balls treated little Leslie. He flung back documents without even glancing at the shaver.
Then Mr Baron unwrapped his long legs. With the exaggerated creakiness of an older statesman (he is 53 going on 70), he rose.
Mr Balls, fancying his chances, accepted the intervention on the condition that Mr Baron say if he would vote to leave the EU here and now. Here and now? Well, yes I would, said Mr Baron.
But I would prefer to wait and see if David Cameron can extract an improved deal from Brussels.
In return, Mr Baron invited Mr Balls to say if Labour favoured an in-or-out referendum on Europe. Ballsy flew into repeated whinnies of chaff.
The final upshot (after about 10 minutes)? Er, no. He did not favour a referendum.
This from the man who is said to be the most Eurosceptic of Labour’s top dogs.
Recent Commons manoeuvrings have seen non-binding amendments here, private members’ Bills there – finicky stuff.
But yesterday it was possible, despite Labour jeers, to see that Eurosceptic Tories really may have done David Cameron a favour.
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His Lib Dem rival, Tim Farron (Westmorland), watched from the far end with a queasy smile.
Then Edward Leigh (Con, Gainsborough), another of Euroscepticism’s ancient mariners, produced a smoking blunderbuss: a 2010 election leaflet in which Mr Clegg called for an in-out referendum. Now the same Cleggy is blocking the idea.
Mr Clegg was like a dairy farmer whose gummies have become bogged in mire. He tried to manoeuvre out of it and – plop! – out came a naked ankle.
Soon he was up to his oxters in doo-doo. It is rare to hear such obvious lies at the despatch box.
My late father would have been 85 yesterday. How he would have relished yesterday’s debates, which so exposed the referendum blockers.
He would particularly have enjoyed a snorter of a speech from Richard Drax (Con, S Dorset).
‘Millions of voters believe we have a major problem with Europe and we have to deal with it,’ said Mr Drax. ‘If we do not we will lose the respect of this country.’
My dear Papa is now on the electoral roll of Elysium Central rather than some terrestrial constituency.
But what about today’s Britons, particularly the young? Was there meat here for them? I’d say so.
Mr Drax argued that the EU is ‘finished – look around! Wake up!’
France was ‘a basket case’ and Spain, with its 50 per cent youth unemployment ,was ‘on the verge of civil war’. A Labour MP, bored, disdainful: ‘Oh my God.’ The authentic voice of inertia.