Home Europe Boris Johnson’s MP grilling: 6 things you need to know

Boris Johnson’s MP grilling: 6 things you need to know

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LONDON — Boris Johnson spent almost two hours taking questions from the U.K. parliament’s liaison committee — the supergroup of committee chairs who periodically get their moment in the spotlight with the prime minister.

When he wasn’t trying to run down the clock, or sparring with his own party, Johnson did make some news. Here are POLITICO’s takeaways from Johnson’s latest committee outing.

Chinese doublespeak

Johnson may be getting his national security adviser to review the takeover of a Welsh microchip factory by a Chinese consortium (he broke the news to the committee) — but he was keen to stress he’s not anti-China.

Quizzed by foreign affairs committee chairman Tom Tugendhat, one of a handful of MPs banned from entering China, on the news Nexperia has taken over the Newport Wafer Fab factory, Johnson struck a note of caution.

“I do not want anti-China spirit to lead to us trying to pitchfork away … every investment from China into this country,” he said.

The fiscal hawk is back

The PM appeared keen to avoid the wrath of Chancellor Rishi Sunak and managed to duck any un-costed spending pledges. He played down the idea that a £20-per-week uplift to the universal credit welfare scheme, introduced during the pandemic, could become permanent.

The top up was extended by six months in March, and the opposition Labour Party wants it to continue beyond the fall.

“If you want me to make a choice between more welfare, or better, higher paid jobs, I’m going to go for better higher paid jobs,” Johnson told MPs on the committee, in what he described as a “pretty clear steer” of his thinking. (Westminster policy wonks were not so convinced.)

The government has been forced into major welfare u-turns during the pandemic — including on school holiday food support for low-income families following a campaign by the England footballer Marcus Rashford. Johnson had better hope Rashford is distracted by England’s Euro 2020 campaign.

No big eco-bills for ‘ordinary people’

Johnson has promised big on climate change — but MPs wanted to see the receipts. They demanded specifics as Britain prepares to host the COP26 summit later this year.

Labour MP Clive Betts’ line of questioning on how exactly the government plans to move millions of British homes away from fossil fuel boilers by 2033, as demanded by the U.K.’s own climate advisers, was most telling.

Johnson would not directly commit to that 2033 target, and acknowledged making the switch would be “very difficult.” And he warned: “What we can’t have is a situation in which ordinary homeowners, ordinary people living in their own homes, are suddenly faced with an unexpected, unreasonable cost to put in a ground source… heat pump.”

Instead, Johnson made clear his government is betting on “building a market, working with producers [and] manufacturers” to drive down the cost of alternatives to fossil-hungry heating. “Let’s be frank, these things cost about £10,000 a pop, okay?” He said. “This is a lot of money for ordinary people.”

It’s not all over

Brexit used to dominate these hearings — yet it was almost a postscript to this one. That didn’t make Johnson any less forthright.

The U.K. and EU have only managed to agree a “stay of execution” to a bitter row over the post-Brexit movement of chilled meats between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Johnson said, adopting a British phrase used to signal putting off a decisive moment.

Despite Brussels last week agreeing to Britain’s call for a three-month extension to a grace period on chilled meats, underlying issues with the protocol are “very far from fixed.”

Britain had, he said, agreed “to do certain checks on stuff that could circulate in theory, in Ireland itself after arrival in Northern Ireland, as an act of neighborliness,” and an attempt to look after the EU single market.

But, he added: “We also agreed, unfortunately, that the EU could have a say in how this was done. And that has been the problem. And they’ve been implementing the protocol in a way that is producing the types of anomalies that I’ve been describing, and we need to fix it.”

Hancock hangover

The specter of the recently-departed health secretary Matt Hancock only briefly entered proceedings.

Hancock left government last month after pictures emerged of him kissing an aide while Britons were under strict restrictions on contact with people beyond their own household. The day before his resignation, a Downing Street spokesperson told journalists Hancock had Johnson’s “full confidence” — yet two days after Hanock resigned Johnson strongly implied he had made the decision himself.

Labour MP Chris Bryant asked Johnson three times if he had sacked Hancock, but the prime minister’s answers left MPs none-the-wiser on the distinction between a sacking and resignation. Johnson said only that, after reading the story “on the Friday, we had a new health secretary on the Saturday.”

“Considering that we are in the middle of a global pandemic and it’s quite a thing to move your health secretary, I think that was quite fast-going if I may say so,” he added.

Pre-match nerves

Coming in the few hours before a critical England football match, it was unsurprising that both the MPs and Johnson had seemingly little patience for either evasion or questions deemed unfair.

While clashes with the Labour members, and the Scottish National Party MP Pete Wishart were to be expected, MPs from Johnson’s own Conservative Party also had terse moments with their leader.

In a moment of impatience at Johnson’s style of answering questions, Tugendhat of the foreign affairs committee interrupted the prime minister to call for “answers to my questions, not the questions you wished I’d asked.” Johnson also had no problem biting back at MPs from his own party, snapping at former minister Caroline Nokes after a tough round of questioning on his record on women and saying he was “getting the feeling that you would find fault in almost anything we do.”

In a typically Johnsonian move, the PM even interrupted Tory MP Philip Dunne for using the word “vicuña” (a small camel) instead of lacuna (an unfilled space) when talking about glaring gaps in the U.K.’s climate plans, with Johnson quipping that the U.K.’s biodiversity strategy would protect vicuña, but doing little to address the MP’s point.

If the spikiness was down to nerves over England’s approaching clash with Denmark, Johnson’s dedication to the national side fell slightly short of knowing when the game starts.

The England badge-clad Johnson joked as proceedings ticked just past 5 p.m. that “viewers may be switching over to the football” — even though England’s crucial semi-final match wasn’t due to kick off for another three hours.

This article was updated to correct the number in the headline.

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