Who will speak for Britain?

“Speak for England, Arthur!”

It’s one of those iconic moments in the long life of the British House of Commons. It was nearly eight o’clock in the evening, on the second of September, so night was falling outside, with the lights coming on in the Commons chamber. However, a much deeper night was falling across the whole of Europe, indeed most of the world, since the year was 1939 and the day before, Nazi German troops had crossed the border into Poland.

“Peace in our time”: a PM duped by Hitler
or how Neville Chamberlain proved unfit to speak for Britain

The then Prime Minister, the Conservative Neville Chamberlain, had just made a statement which was, above all, ambivalent. Britain, like France, had a treaty in place with the Poles which obliged both countries to go to war in Poland’s defence if it was invaded. Well, the country had undoubtedly been invaded.

Chamberlain was clear that if German troops were not withdrawn, war would follow. But he focused on a last attempt at a peace conference, possibly on an Italian initiative, to resolve the differences between Germany and Poland by peaceful means rather than by force. It sounded horribly as though the British government was trying to find a way of not honouring the Polish treaty.

Cheers had greeted the Prime Minister when he first rose to address the House. Gradually, though, as it became clear that the government was dodging around to find a way duck its commitments, the cheers gave way to jeers, especially loud on the benches occupied by MPs from the Prime Minister’s own Conservative Party (well, there were a hell of a sight more of them: the Tories won 429 out of 615 seats in the most recent general election, of 1935).

The leader of the Labour Party and therefore leader of the Opposition, Clement Attlee, was ill and in hospital. So his deputy rose to reply to the Prime Minister. Arthur Greenwood started by stating he would speak for the Labour Party.

“Speak for England, Arthur!” came the cry, not from the Opposition benches but from the Tory side of the House. 

Most people attribute the words to the veteran Conservative, Leo Amery. Some though think it was Bob Boothby, another Tory MP, and he shouted “Speak for Britain”, which would at least have the merit of including the Welsh and the Scots.

Either way, what matters is that it was clear that evening that few any long believed that the Prime Minister spoke for Britain, or even just for England. His apparent reticence to honour an agreement freely made, to rise to a challenge despite its difficulty, meant that he was standing back from values most Brits regard as fundamental to their image of the country. It meant he was no longer someone who could be trusted to represent or lead the nation.

I like to think it was Amery who shouted out. Because eight months later, on 7 May 1940, he gave what he admitted himself was the best-received speech of his parliamentary career. He attacked Chamberlain pitilessly and ended with the words Oliver Cromwell threw in the faces of the Rump Parliament three centuries before: “You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!” 

The next day, Chamberlain resigned, opening the door to the wartime leadership of Winston Churchill.

It’s curious to think back on those times today. It feels to me as though now too we have a Prime Minister who’s lost all touch with the values that make Britain a place worth cherishing. 

• We know he’s provided a shortcut to the front of a queue for government funds, to a mistress who wanted a commercial hand. 
• We know he introduced shortcuts to Covid-related contracts, in principle to make for more efficient provision of needed supplies, but most contracts went to businesses with contacts with the Conservative Party and not all of them, by any means, represented any gain in efficiency. 
• We know that he bullied and coerced his own MPs to back a measure that would have spared a colleague found guilty of breaching Parliament’s code, and then had to backtrack when it became apparent that the scandal was too big for even him to brazen out
• We know that he’s accepted gifts about which he refuses to be transparent, in at least one case, from a man to whom he has granted a peerage prior to making him a minister
• And we know so many other shameful actions in which he’s taken part

Britain is now a nation described by a former Australian Prime Minister as an ‘old theme park sliding into the Atlantic’. China now refers to it as ‘Little Britain’. This Prime Minister has turned the country into an international laughingstock, and only Brexiters can still claim it’s becoming ‘Global Britain’.

On top of all this, just like Chamberlain, he seems intent on refusing to honour an international agreement into which he entered freely and, indeed, persuaded Parliament to back. He signed the Northern Ireland protocol himself, but it’s clear today that he never had any intention of being bound by the commitments it implied. Or possibly, and this is scarcely less honourable, he never understood them.

Buffoon on a zip wire
or how Boris Johnson proved unfit to speak for Britain

Time to call again on someone to “speak for Britain”. And why not, again, turn to the Labour Party? Because the Tories, mired in sleaze, certainly can’t.

Above all, there’s no way Boris Johnson can.