Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone. A low threnody emanated from the Commons benches as MPs gathered for transport questions to say goodbye to one of their finest. This was to be Chris Grayling’s final appearance as a minister – not even his closest friends expect him to continue to fail upwards in a Boris Johnson government – and the mourners were out in force to pay their respects.
If you have tears, prepare to shed them now. There will never be another Failing Grayling. At least one seriously hopes not. He is the failure’s failure. A parliamentary museum piece who has yet to find a job he can’t do badly. No other minister has wasted quite so much money while justice and transport secretary.
At the latest count he has cost the country £3bn in the past five years. That means we could have paid him £1bn to stay at home, doing nothing but watch TV and mowing the lawn, and still have been £2bn better off. Just by diligently turning up to work each day, Grayling has prevented two hospitals from being built.
What makes Failing Grayling even more of a collector’s item is that he hasn’t just wasted £3bn on one bad call. It wasn’t just a rush of blood to bet the house on a no-deal Brexit. Rather he has worked assiduously to squander the money at regular intervals over a prolonged period: £2bn on the Virgin Trains East Coast franchise in 2018, £437m on a botched privatisation of the probation service in 2014.
Nor does he neglect to sweat the small stuff, pissing away £72,000 on a failed legal challenge to his plans to stop prisoners reading books. Say what you like, Chris is a details man. A man who understands his job perfectly. To make all those around him look slightly less half-witted.
But it’s been Brexit that has brought out the best of Failing Grayling’s incompetence. First he couldn’t even managed to engineer a fake traffic jam on a Kent airfield to prove his department wasn’t ready for a no-deal Brexit and then he had to make an out-of-court settlement to Eurotunnel for forgetting to put contracts out to tender in the appropriate manner.
Yet all this paled into insignificance over his decision to offer a £13m contract to a ferry company that didn’t have any ferries for services to ports that had no facilities to receive them. That was Inspector Clouseau levels of genius. An act of extreme stupidity to which no other minister would dare dream.
All these past triumphs appeared to weigh heavily on Grayling’s mind as he took his seat in the chamber. After a quick glower at all those around him, he slumped back, his mind focused on the eternity of imminent retirement. He rose briefly to reassure Conservative Geoffrey Clifton-Brown that all was on track with the improvements to the A417 in his constituency but then lapsed back into silence. As did Clifton-Brown. A promise from the transport secretary almost certainly meant nothing would be happening to the A417 in the near future.
So it was left to junior transport minister Michael Ellis to defend his boss’s honour. Shadow junior transport minister Karl Turner enquired whether Grayling might like to use his last outing at the dispatch box to apologise for having wasted so much money and whether there were any other crimes he would like taken into consideration. Ellis shook his head. His client would be pleading the fifth amendment.
Lilian Greenwood, chair of the transport select committee, and Andy McDonald, shadow transport secretary, pressed a little further. It had long been clear Grayling had given up any pretence of running the railways and only the previous day he had said that he didn’t do buses either. So what exactly did he do? Grayling’s familiar cheek-twitch, that had hitherto been kept under control, began to pulse uncontrollably. The minister’s track record spoke for itself, Ellis replied gravely. Under the circumstances not the most tactful defence.
It was more than 50 minutes into the hour-long session that anyone thought to bring up Brexit. Not because no one cares about it any more, but because there’s no point. The transport secretary knows even less about the practicalities of leaving the EU than Boris Johnson. Which is quite some achievement.
Eventually, though, Labour’s Clive Betts did mention that Rotterdam had brought in 100 extra vets to cope with a no-deal Brexit and wondered what measures the department was taking to to offset the costs and delays of leaving the EU without a deal.
“We’re leaving, twitch, with a, twitch, deal, twitch,” Failing garbled. So everything, twitch, would be, twitch, OK. These were almost the last words he uttered as a minister. So it was entirely fitting that, like so many of his other pronouncements, they had been at best misconceived and at worst entirely inaccurate. Not even his loyalty could save him now.
He left the Commons hastily, unnoticed and unmissed, before getting into his ministerial car for a last-chance powerdrive. To wind down the windows, feel the sun on his face and get the chauffeur to burn rubber round Parliament Square. In the distance, the bells of Westminster Abbey pealed. The requiem for a dunce. A man who had bizarrely managed to over-achieve and underachieve at the same time. He will be missed by me. If by no one else.
