She was meant to be leading her first cabinet meeting and preparing for her first conflabs with Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande. But today Theresa May instead remained caught up in Parliament, proudly listing the names of all those places upon which she would happily drop a nuclear bomb.
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn may have erred on the side of caution when he admitted, in an interview last September, that he would never make use of Britain’s nuclear threat, but as new Conservative Prime Minister, May was not the least inclined to make the same mistake.
Whenever you ask her if she would be willing to press the big red button you hardly have time to specify that you’re talking nuclear before ‘Yes!’, she interjects loudly, ‘Yes I would!’, and there’s your answer.
And so it was in the Commons yesterday when – ahead of a vote to renew the UK’s Trident nuclear programme, which ultimately passed by a majority of 472 to 117 – the Scottish National Party MP George Kerevan asked of the Prime Minister, ‘Is she personally prepared to authorise a nuclear strike that could kill a hundred thousand innocent men, women and children?’.
‘Yes’, came May’s swift rejoinder, ‘And I have to say to the honourable gentleman the whole point of a deterrent is that our enemies need to know that we would be prepared to use it, unlike some suggestions that we could have a nuclear deterrent but not actually be willing to use it, which seem to come from the Labour party frontbench’.
Bitterly stung, Corbyn still mustered a response, noting that the country’s on-patrol nuclear submarine currently carries 40 warheads, each eight times as powerful as the atomic bomb that killed 140,000 in Hiroshima in 1945. ‘What is the threat we are facing that one million people’s deaths would actually deter?’, Corbyn wondered.
But it was too late. May was rapidly listing all those places where yes, she would readily authorise a nuclear strike. Iran, Iraq, and Syria, Libya and Nigeria, North Korea, Russia, Mexico and Colombia, Argentina, Montenegro, Cuba, Burkina Faso, Jamaica – she went on and on, in what one backbench MP described as ‘The Beach Boys’ ‘Kokomo’ gone oddly wrong’.
