A Westminster committee has drawn comparisons with the now-infamous Handforth Parish Council Zoom meeting, after several terse outburst from MPs threatened to plunge a hearing on post-Brexit fish and meat exports into farce.
While the first 49 or so minutes of Thursday’s hearing of the Commons Environment, Food and Rural Affairs select committee passed innocuously enough, trouble was evidently brewing in the digital corridors of power.
It all came to a head as Labour’s Barry Gardiner pressed environment secretary George Eustice over the UK’s apparent blindness with regards to the amount of fish that EU boats are still catching in British waters, following a report in Fishing Daily reported that – after the near collapse of a Brexit deal over fishing quotas – not a single European vessel was inspected at sea in January or February.
Mr Gardiner’s insistent questioning and somewhat measured delivery – apparently aided by extensive on-screen notes –appears to have pushed committee chair Neil Parish beyond the brink.
Bursting forth with pent-up frustration, Mr Parish exclaimed: “Barry, for goodness’ sake, we are are hour into this.”
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“Your questions are too long, Barry,” Mr Parish continued to shout, eventually interrupting an indignant Mr Gardiner’s protestations to bellow: “Well let him answer the question, Barry.”
Gesticulating heavily, Mr Parish, added: “For goodness’ sake please, it’s going on too long, your question. Get to the end of the question.”
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Yet a defiant Mr Gardiner sought to hammer home the importance of his questions, saying: “Three months on, we still have no realtime knowledge of what 1,500 EU boats are catching, do we? And that includes the super trawlers that…”
But he was again interrupted – this time by Tory MP Sheryll Murray, who interjected to question “on a point of order” whether Mr Gardiner’s point was related to the EU, or was in fact a “fisheries management” issue.
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A distinctly glum-looking Mr Gardiner responded curtly to affirm that the monitoring of EU fishing catches was indeed an issue related to the EU.
At this point, after arguably prompting the furore with his initial outburst, Mr Parish – who was later gifted the additional surname of “Council” by The Independent’s deputy political editor on Twitter – said: “Right, let’s not have an argument”, calling on Mr Eustice to “give an answer to Barry, please, and then we must move on”.
A possibly relieved Mr Eustice prefaced his somewhat vague response with the phrase, “in the interest of time” – going on to insist that he had not laid eyes upon a press release by his own department stating that at-sea inspectors had boarded 41 EU vessels last month, which Mr Gardiner alleged was published “in the last hour … no doubt because [Mr Eustice] correctly anticipated a question following the Fishing Daily report”.
Seeking to move beyond the fracas, Mr Parish then even went to far as to side with Mr Gardiner in demanding that the secretary of state should provide the committee with a written explanation “of what’s happening, how we are going to board the boats, [and] how we are going to check the data” – following his department’s last-minute revelation that just 41 EU boats were inspected last month.
But the committee chair could not resist rolling his eyes skywards as he granted Mr Gardiner “one last question, please”.
The exchange – somewhat less staid than those typically observed during parliamentary committee hearings – drew hilarity on social media, after a clip was posted to Twitter by The Daily Telegraph’s Whitehall editor Harry Yorke.
“This may be one of the funniest things I’ve ever watched at a Parliamentary select committee,” he wrote. “Barry Gardiner and Neil Parish go full Handforth Parish council over [fish]”.
Other social media users wasted no time in drawing similar comparisons to the furious and eternally quotable parish council meeting that set the internet abuzz in February, encapsulating for many the awkwardness thrown up by the lags and pauses of current videoconferencing technology, not to mention shining a spotlight on the eccentric, combative – and all-too-often unseen – world of local democracy.
“He has no authority here,” one Twitter user quipped, while another clearly felt the committee needed its very own acting clerk, writing: “Where is Jackie Weaver when you need her?”
