Lord Digby Jones is always good for a laugh. One of the great idiots of our time. A man with so much confidence but so little to be confident about. He has opinions but doesn't know anything and isn't prepared to learn or think and is usually invited onto our TV for light relief from reality and intelligent conversation with a bit of imbecile baiting thrown in. Newsnight invited him on the other night in what was pure comedy gold. You can see it on BBC iPlayer (HERE) for the next 29 days - about 36 minutes in.
For reasons that have never been clear to me, the BBC and other channels conduct interviews and entire programmes sitting in an open gazebo on College Green outside parliament. Guests and presenters are clad in scarves and overcoats, their breath coming out in great clouds while a hoar frost settles over them. So it was on Newsnight. Why?
Anyway we had already had a German MEP from Merkel's CDU party and former environment minister, Norbert Roettgen telling Emily Maitlis (26:55 secs in) that there would 'definitely' be no reopening of the Withdrawal Agreement. Then we get Digby Jones telling Maitlis if he was PM he wouldn't go to Brussels, he would go to Berlin (39.35 secs) 'because Germany bosses Europe' and to compound the fantasy, he says they're, 'desperate to avoid no deal'.
This is David Davis' script from July 2016 and we can see where that got us - nowhere. But Jones somehow cannot get the idea out of his tiny mind that BMW and Mercedes are going to save us, because they and VW secretly control the EU. Juncker takes his orders from Stuttgart and Wolfsburg apparently.
Digby Jones says he campaigned for Brexit and made it 'clear in every speech' that the UK would be 'economically worse off'' (37:50 secs in). This is the man (HERE) who told us in July 2016, 'there's not going to be any economic pain [from Brexit]'. His defence was that the leaflet the government posted to every household (HERE) told us we would be worse off so nobody should be surprised. This is disingenuous. First of all, it doesn't say we will be worse off at all, it is a model of balance. It does say the pound might slump and cause prices to rise, which is exactly what happened. But, the Brexiteers said it was all 'scaremongering' and our own MP said we might have used it for loo paper if it was more absorbent (Hansard Column 85).
No, Brexiteers told us to ignore the warnings and we would be better off out of the EU.
But later on Newsnight (41:00) he defends the £350 million a week for the NHS and claims in 'five years, probably less there will be £350 million more [money] available to the NHS'. The other guest Femi Oluwole from Our Future Our Choice, ridicules him that we can't be both better off and worse off, but even then Jones won't concede he's facing both ways at once.
No, Brexiteers told us to ignore the warnings and we would be better off out of the EU.
But later on Newsnight (41:00) he defends the £350 million a week for the NHS and claims in 'five years, probably less there will be £350 million more [money] available to the NHS'. The other guest Femi Oluwole from Our Future Our Choice, ridicules him that we can't be both better off and worse off, but even then Jones won't concede he's facing both ways at once.
This sums up the Brexiteers doesn't it. We warned you that Brexit will make you poorer but, at the same time, you will also be richer as well! And where was Jones' bus with the Brexit will make us worse off message. I can't remember seeing that one.
