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Rowley but surely?

It wasn’t so much a Queen’s Speech as a Queen’s Manifesto. With a general election looming, and little time to actually pass any of the 26 bills she read out, Boris Johnson turned Her Majesty into his very own prime time campaign ad for cracking down on crime, investing in the NHS and, yes, delivering Brexit.

But in many ways, it wasn’t the 93-year-old Monarch who mattered most. It was the 39-year-old Tory MP for North East Derbyshire, Lee Rowley. The PM’s decision to pick Rowley as the first respondent to the Humble Address in the Commons was a very carefully calibrated campaign message all of its own.

North East Derbyshire is a seat that voted by a whopping 63% to Leave the EU in the 2016 referendum. It’s a seat that had elected Labour MPs solidly since 1935, until Rowley came along and triumphed in 2017. Along with Mansfield, Walsall and close-run-things in the north east, his election is seen by some in No.10 as offering a path to a majority.

Rowley used his speech to explain he was a “working-class kid who grew up in the north during the miners’ strike”, whose aunt was NUM leader Arthur Scargill’s secretary. He was also canny to cite Tony Benn as the local MP who had once taken him as a sixth former on a tour of the Commons and reminded him never to forget that MPs get their power from the people. While Benn’s own son Hilary is now synonymous with a law to delay Brexit, Rowley is a reminder of that other Benn tradition of deep distrust of Brussels.

But as impressive as his speech was in the Commons, Rowley is not just the poster boy for a new breed of Tory MPs in traditionally Labour areas. He is also one of the hardcore of 28 ‘Spartans’ who voted three times to defeat Theresa May’s Brexit deal. 

And today he signalled he was happy to swallow the PM’s compromise plan, as imperfect as it is. “If there is light at the end of the tunnel later this week – and heaven knows I hope there will be – we have a fundamental responsibility in this place to try and resolve this most vexed of problems,” Rowley said. 

That’s serious support from a backbencher whose dislike of May’s own compromises once led him to tell her in a particularly bruising 1922 committee meeting last December: “Stamina is not a strategy”. Johnson’s own ‘trust me, I’m not Theresa’ message seems to be working. If, and it’s a big if, the message can work on the DUP (which has been largely disciplined so far not to comment in detail) too, there could well be that elusive majority for a Brexit deal. 

But as ever, the real issue is whether Johnson has left this all too late to hit his ’do-or-die’ October 31 exit deadline. Finnish PM Antti Rinne, who currently holds the rotating EU presidency, warned there was no “practical or legal way” to find an agreement before Thursday’s summit. Irish deputy PM Simon Coveney said the talks may “move into next week” and a special emergency summit is mooted.

Don’t forget the Benn Act sets a deadline of this Saturday for Johnson to have “concluded an agreement with the European Union under Article 50(2)”. The PM’s deal may even be half-done (or half-baked some would argue) but few think it will be ‘concluded’ by this weekend – and under the law that means a delay to January 2020.

That’s perhaps the real reason that Johnson didn’t further try to embarrass the Queen by getting her to say her government “will” leave the EU on Halloween. Instead, she began the whole thing with this much weaker line that “my government’s priority has always been to secure the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union on 31 October.” A ‘priority’ is not a promise.

None of this means Johnson can’t politically survive a short delay. But he’s going to need a heck of a lot of Lee Rowley-style victories to have a hope of winning that election, whenever it comes. And Labour, for so long terrified of losing ground in its heartlands, is slowly waking up to the fact that most of its own voters even in Leave seats actually voted Remain.