This rainbow government

By Chris Bryant MP / @ChrisBryantMP

The government is rapidly turning into an episode of the children’s TV show Rainbow, with ministers getting themselves quite a reputation as either a clumsy mess-up merchant Bungle or a foot-in-the-mouth Zippy. Not so much a rainbow coalition as a rainbow government.

First off was Liam ‘Zippy’ Fox who infuriated the very people our troops rely on in Helmand by holding forth that Afghanistan was ‘a broken thirteenth century country’. He then spent three days giving off mixed messages about why our troops are in Afghanistan before effectively being confined to barracks by Downing Street.

Next, in a quite outstanding performance, came Michael ‘Bungle’ Gove, with his cancellation of the Building Schools for the Future programme. Rarely has an announcement been quite so spectacularly bungled. First he didn’t have a list of which schools would go ahead and which rebuilds would be cancelled. Then he did, but it was wrong. Then he issued a new corrected list – and that was wrong as well. Five lists later we discovered that his officials had warned him not to go ahead without checking his facts. Surely every primary school boy knows that? Now we learn that some councils are going to take Gove to court for the cost of all this bungling, so money will be spent on lawyers rather than rebuilding schools. It’s rumoured the PM is thinking of sending Gove to detention.

Then came Deputy Prime Minister Nick ‘Zippy’ Clegg. First he told us that the government’s plans for constitutional reform amounted to the most important changes since the Great Reform Act of 1832 ‘which extended the franchise beyond the landed classes’. Wrong. It didn’t do anything of the kind. It was still only men with property who got the vote in 1832 – and women didn’t finally achieve full equality until 1928. Then, standing in at Prime Questions he made such a right royal mess over Iraq and Yarls Wood immigration centre that Downing Street apparatchiks were falling over themselves to issue retractions and explanation.

Next to amble into the spotlight – Crispin ‘Bungle’ Blunt. He was the minister who decided to lift the ban on prison parties and took a swipe at the PM’s membership of the Bullingdon Club at Oxford. Hell hath no fury like a PM scorned and only hours later Downing Street was giving him a severe dressing down and the policy was reversed.

Then this weekend, the twin Bungles, Anne Milton and Dave Willetts, were let loose. One is minister for public health, the other the supposedly double-brained minister for universities. Both boldly declared that the free school milk programme for under fives provided no medical value and was going to be scrapped. Willetts was busily announcing it on TV at 9.40 on Sunday morning – only to be told that the Prime Minister had decided that the scheme should be kept. After all he didn’t want to be known as the heir to milk-snatcher Thatcher. At 9.54 Willetts was admitting it was his plan that was being scrapped, not free milk. Talk about egg on face – this was an early morning scrambled omelette.

But top of the list is Dave ‘Zippy’ Cameron. In the USA he said that Britain was the ‘junior partner’ to America in 1940, despite the fact that the Americans didn’t enter the war until December 1941 and in 1940 we were virtually on our own fighting fascism. No history lessons at Eton Dave? Then, whilst visiting Turkey, he deeply offended Israel by referring to Gaza as a ‘prison camp’. Not a word of how the Kurds are treated in Turkey, or the situation in Cyprus, where Turkey could help unblock the stalled peace process.

In India Cameron then turned on Pakistan, saying it was looking both ways in the fight against terrorism, despite the fact that Pakistan has lost more than 3,500 people to terrorism in the last three years. He ended up having to kowtow to the Pakistani President.

And last week Cameron messed up yet again by saying that Iran has a nuclear weapon. Now, Iran may want one. It may be trying to get one. But it hasn’t got one and we need to make sure that the whole international community ensures they don’t get one. Stupid mistakes like this give the Iranian hardliners precisely the political ammunition they need in arguing that the West is out of touch.

Considering Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the battle against terrorism in Afghanistan and Pakistan and the Middle East peace process are the most important foreign policy challenges facing the UK these were enormously dangerous booboos and they’ve left the PM with a reputation as a foreign policy klutz.

So in just 100 days the government has managed to make more unforced errors than a British tennis hero at Wimbledon.

One episode of Rainbow began with Zippy counting banana skins. I’m guessing that’s what Cameron’s been doing these last few weeks. Rainbow ran on ITV ran for nearly 20 glorious years. Let’s hope to God that this lot don’t.