QUENTIN LETTS from the Commons: Churning on half a propeller, this was a bluff-athon from David Lammy when discussing Syria
Anyone know what’s going on in Syria? David Lammy certainly didn’t. The Foreign Secretary lumbered into the Commons and proceeded to claim that Syria was ‘next door’ to Libya. Close. They are only a thousand miles apart.
If anyone is looking for Christmas present ideas for Brother Lammy, a globe might do.
You can get them these days with space inside for tumblers and a bottle of Bell’s.Mr Lammy, once of TV’s Mastermind, was in heavy-seas mode.
He rose to the despatch box with portentous tread. He spoke exceedingly slowly, perhaps hoping no one would notice he was churning on only half a propeller.
He tried statesmanlike denunciation, washing it round his mouth like a delicious malt and dropping his voice to the bottom of its register. Then he went all whispery. Man of destiny. A poet catching the miseries of war.
None of this quite disguised a lack of substance. John Healey, Defence Secretary, was sitting next to him and wore the face of a man who had just bitten on some hard butterscotch and chipped a filling.
Mr Healey did not stay for the entire 80 minutes of his colleague’s bluff-athon. Nor did Emily Thornberry who chairs the foreign affairs select committee and therefore really should have seen things to the bitter end.
She asked a windy question about the United Nations and sat down with a magnificent thespian flourish, half-twisting her torso, fluttering her eyelashes. It was like seeing Judi Dench resume her pose at the end of a gala performance of Portia’s soliloquy in The Merchant of Venice.
Foreign Secretary David Lammy lumbered into the Commons and preceded to say that Syria was ‘next door’ to Libya
Lammy spoke exceedingly slowly, perhaps hoping no one would notice he was churning on only half a propeller
Shadow foreign secretary Priti Patel speaking at the dispatch box. She noted that the Conservatives ‘called for Assad to go a decade ago’
Some 15 minutes later her ladyship wound a long white scarf round her stubby neck and waddled out. Not such an important debate after all, clearly.
At times of international peril, particularly one so fast-moving and in which we have no embassy in the affected capital, a foreign secretary will usually be terse, taciturn and unshowy. Mr Lammy could not resist giving it maximum gravy.
He became David Hammy, going into a long riff about how ‘we said no’ to Assad who had been ‘a monster’, ‘a dictator’, ‘a criminal’, ‘a butcher’. He was ‘never, ever going to change’.
Some saps, reflected Mr Lammy with disgust, had regarded Assad as ‘the lion of Damascus’ but it was now apparent to all enlightened souls – such as me, the far-sighted Lammy! – that he had been ‘the rat of Damascus’.
Yet in 2013 the same D. Lammy voted against finishing off Assad. He even said it was ‘great news’ the Cameron government was prevented from moving against the tyrant. Now he was calling him a rat and pretending to be a moral prophet.
Priti Patel, Shadow foreign secretary, could have speared this bogus pose but settled for noting, albeit tartly, that the Conservatives ‘called for Assad to go a decade ago’.
Dumfriesshire’s David Mundell (Con) said he never regretted voting to act against Assad in 2013, even though the peaceniks won that vote. Mr Lammy actually nodded in apparent agreement at Mr Mundell’s words.
It was left to Sir Julian Lewis (Con, New Forest East) to make the intellectual argument for that 2013 moment of hesitation.
An opposition fighter steps on a bust of the late Syrian president Hafez Assad in Damascus
Syrians in the UK gather at Piccadilly Circus to celebrate the fall of Bashar Assad’s government
People celebrating the overthrow of Assad with the presidential palace in the background on Mount Mezzeh in Damascus
Sir Julian remained of the view that ‘one should never idealise the oppositions in these scenarios’ and that it was again a choice between ‘monsters and maniacs’.
The optimistic noises at present reminded Sir Julian of things that were said at the fall of Saddam in Iraq and Gaddafi in Libya (which, as Mastermind Lammy will tell you, is practically a suburb of Damascus).
Mr Lammy informed MPs that he had spoken to numerous foreign ministers round the world. One suspects that the conversations, at least from the London end, may have included the words ‘Where is this place Syria again? Is it near the Chagos Isles?’
But Mark Sewards (Lab, Leeds SW & Morley), my favourite backbench bootlicker, was ecstatic, expressing wonderment at Mr Lammy’s ‘detailed and nuanced answers to some very complex questions’.
