17 May 2023 , 15:27
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Around this time last year, Oliver Dowden took me and a bunch of other journalists on a rollercoaster.
He was party chairman at the time, and was running the Tories’ disastrous (and never to be repeated) ‘Spring Conference’ in Blackpool. Alas, the purpose of the jaunt was not at all clear to me.
A couple of months later, Dowden resigned as chairman, after having overseen two by-election drubbings that a glaucomic mole could have seen coming a mile off.
The trip to the Pleasure Beach was starting to look awfully like a “what can I get away with while I still have a proper job?” situation.
But British politics being what it is, in just over a year, Dowden has gone from admitting abject failure into being a slip-and-fall away from No10.
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And so it was that he took to the despatch box as Deputy Prime Minister for the first time, filling in for Rishi Sunak in what Angela Rayner, his Labour opposite number had built up as “the battle of the gingers”.
Rayner, now a veteran of fully three DPMs in just a few short years, opened proceedings by joking that Dowden, with his comprehensive education, was proof that nowadays Sunak actually does have a “working-class friend”.
The former Culture Secretary demonstrated a basic working knowledge of daytime telly (PA)Dowden responded by saying Rayner and Keir Starmer were warring like cats in a sack, and branded them the “Holly and Phil of Westminster”.
It was a perfectly decent gag. The current popular culture reference bordered on impressive - and he’s one of few Conservatives you can actually imagine knowing who Holly and Phil are to any level of detail.
But the delivery lacked something.
Predecessor Dominic Raab used to say his lines with unvarnished menace, as if auditioning to be Jason Statham’s understudy in a trashy revenge movie.
Dowden, on the other hand, has all the rhetorical heft and flourish of a career middle-manager at a provincial insurance firm.
And an impressive grasp of the battle of the This Morning sofa notwithstanding, Dowden displayed very little awareness of the world around him.
“I will proudly defend our record in office,” he declared, before reeling off a bunch of the usual broadly meaningless “achievements” and an attack on Jeremy Corbyn, who hasn’t been a member of the Labour party since before Dowden’s last go on a rollercoaster.
“That is why the British people will never trust the Labour Party,” he declared, apparently failing to notice the 1,000 or so council seats his party lost last week. Remember, he resigned in disgrace for losing 9,998 fewer elections than that.
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Rayner’s questions weren’t even up to her usual standard - they were a bit floaty and unfocused, and one of them wasn’t even really a question.
Even so, Dowden threw his jibes up, no-doubt, aiming for punchy and witty, and they landed somewhere nearer ‘fussy, passive-aggressive substitute teacher.’
He even leaned into the “I’m a comprehensive schoolboy” thing, which is a bold move when you possess all the gravitas of a 13-year-old.
In fact, given his general demeanour, fondness for fairground attractions and knowledge in daytime television, has anyone checked whether Oliver Dowden is actually two kids in a trenchcoat?