Inside Politics: Posturing

Is Michael Gove ok? The levelling up secretary gave a bizarre interview to BBC Breakfast yesterday morning, adopting Liverpudlian and American accents when Dan Walker dared to ask him why the government didn’t include any measures to ease the country’s spiralling cost of living crisis in Tuesday’s Queen Speech. The peculiar nature of the Surrey Heath MP’s performance was such that some observers – and even a few MPs – jokingly asked if he might have been on drugs. The Lib Dems are now writing up a general election manifesto pledge to have the mysterious substance legalised.

Commons action gets underway at 9.30 with any urgent questions. This will be followed by the weekly parliament business statement from Commons leader Mark Spencer. After that comes other ministerial statements and the Queen’s Speech debate will resume. Fairness at work and power in communities are the proposed subjects.

And so it continues. The government’s threats to rip up Brexit’s Northern Ireland protocol go on and on. Boris Johnson, speaking at a press conference in Sweden yesterday, once again reiterated that his government is prepared to override parts of the post-Brexit trading arrangements. Liz Truss must have had the day off ahead of her meeting later with Maros Sefcovic, the EU Commission vice president.

The prime minister also repeated his support for the Good Friday peace deal, saying it is “the most important agreement” as far as Northern Ireland is concerned. “We need to sort it out,” he added. Perhaps someone should tell him who “we” is? For what seems like an eternity now London has been threatening to unilaterally scrap parts of the protocol unless Brussels significantly eases checks on goods entering NI from GB.

While the tough talk by Johnson and Liz Truss – the foreign secretary who it seems is on constant manoeuvres to replace him as Tory leader – may be going down well with backbenchers, it has been less well-received pretty much everywhere else. US president Joe Biden last night warned the government to pull back from the brink while the EU says it will retaliate with a trade war.

And then there is Northern Ireland itself, where there is one huge big obstacle in the way of Downing Street’s alleged plans to “tear up” the protocol. It is called democracy. A majority of voters in NI, taken out of the EU against its will in the first place, cast their ballots in the recent assembly election for parties who are not opposed to the protocol. No 10 has no democratic mandate to act unilaterally across the Irish Sea, which is why Truss’s latest “72-hour deadline” warning rings hollow and further adds to a feeling that all the tough talk we have been hearing in recent days is nothing more than posturing before diplomats get around the table for negotiations.

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Will they, won’t they? The conservation about whether or not the government could intervene in the cost of living crisis has now taken more twists and turns than Alton Towers’s Smiler rollercoaster. Johnson addressed the issue while speaking yesterday in Norway - which is expected to announce later that it will make a bid to join Nato (Sweden is likely to follow soon after) - and appeared to offer some clarity, telling reporters that help for families with their rising food, fuel and energy bills would come in the “coming months” rather than days.

The PM’s comments seem to put to bed speculation that Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, could call an emergency budget before the real thing this autumn. A report this morning in the Mail says that Sunak is warming up to the idea of a windfall tax. It was murmurings in the media about said emergency budget that got under the skin of Michael Gove, the levelling up secretary, in his bizarre BBC interview, where he told people to “calm down” in a Scouse accent, suggesting the issue is no big deal.

Johnson’s cabinet is in Stoke-on-Trent today for a team-building exercise following the Queen’s Speech earlier this week. The cost of living crisis, the economy and “levelling up” the country will be high up on the agenda at what could well be a pressure cooker environment with the PM still facing serious questions about his future amid the fallout from the Partygate scandal.

Ahead of the visit, the PM said: “I’m delighted to bring cabinet to Stoke-on-Trent today, a city which is the beating heart of the ceramics industry and an example of the high skilled jobs that investment can bring to communities.” Let’s hope he’s as chipper when he gets back to London.

“The most important agreement is the 25-year-old Belfast Good Friday Agreement. That is crucial for the stability of our country of the UK, of Northern Ireland. And it’s got to be that means that things have got to command across community support. Plainly the Northern Ireland Protocol fails to do that and we need to sort it out.”

PM says his government needs to sort out Brexit’s Northern Ireland protocol.

“Jake Berry, chairman of the Northern Research Group, tells me Boris Johnson has begun to show “more than a little bit of ankle” over tax cuts in his conversations with Tory MPs.”

Sky News deputy politics editor Sam Coates hears tax cuts could be on the way.

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