Spoke this evening in the debate on the economy – the final stage in the wider debate on the Queen’s Speech – and focused on the appalling damage being done to the construction industry in North Wales and the lack of effective Government support for the sector.
Ken Clarke wound up for the Opposition – apparently, his first wind-up for some 20 years. He was both hugely entertaining and forensically destructive of the Government’s position. His closing remarks were as follows:
I am a great fan of Benjamin Disraeli, and I looked up a passage that I often quote slightly inaccurately. Denouncing the dying Government of Mr. Gladstone in the early 1870s, Disraeli—he was about my age then, and sustained himself with a very large amount of liquor while making his three-hour speech in Manchester; only water is sustaining me—used a very grand phrase. He said:
“The ministers remind me of one of those marine landscapes not very unusual on the coast of South America. You behold a range of exhausted volcanoes. Not a flame flickers on a single pallid crest.”
That quotation is not really suitable for today’s debate, however. These Ministers could not be described as volcanoes. They were merely foothills when they started. The Queen’s Speech shows that they are finished, and it is a pity that they go out on such a low note.
The replying Minister, Pat McFadden, rose to his feet to cries of: “Follow that!” He had a broad grin on his usually funereal countenance, as if he deemed it a great privilege to be insulted by Ken.
Which, thinking about it, it probably was.
