Sketch: Sssssssshinzo Abe, no one's listening
After the success of the Obama intervention, the Japanese Prime Minister gave his views on Brexit on the only day of the year it is illegal for anyone to hear him
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Your support makes all the difference.In a forest on the second floor of 10 Downing Street, the Japanese Prime Minister fell over but nobody heard it.
Consensus of opinion has not yet been reached on whether or not the Obama intervention may be said to have backfired, and it against that backdrop that we should not speculate on whether the second world leader to come over here and tell us to get to the back of his queue did so on a day on which it is illegal to broadcast a word he said.
It is tempting to imagine this was all David Cameron’s doing, but Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is one of great far eastern statesmen of his age, and so the chances of him not possessing a deep knowledge of British local council elections and the purdah restrictions that go with them are slim.
Would it be wrong then, to deduce that Mr Abe was not especially disappointed that, as he unfolded his piece of paper and read out a long list of reasons why Britain must remain in the European Union (all of which he had of course come up with himself), the chances of the footage ever being seen were very close to zero?
Entirely of his own volition, Prime Minister Abe had come to very similar conclusions to President Obama. Japan would rather do a deal with the whole of Europe, not ‘individual states’. For Japan, the ‘UK is a gateway to Europe’, Tokyo would be ‘paying very close attention’ to the referendum, just as it is a ‘matter of very deep interest’ to Obama.
He also reminded that there are 140,000 people employed in the UK by Japanese businesses, of whom at least six will not have been replaced by robots within five years.
For the travelling Japanese press corps, this was all scintillating stuff. There were around 40 of them. When it came to questions, they could only drum up one between them. Abe gazed upon them longingly. Surely someone must have something to ask about the common agricultural policy? No? Subsidiarity? Nigel Farage? He got nothing.
The Brits already had to cope with witnessing their American counterparts actively applaud Obama a fortnight ago. This was the kind of deference that makes one feel uneasy. On any other day, you might wonder if they’d got camera shy.
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