Never mind the pollocks, here's Michael Gove

It wasn’t until about 20 minutes in that the first pun was heard. That was a sign of just how seriously the subject was being taken. Normally you only have to mention the word fish and the handful of MPs that are still in the chamber fall over themselves to come up with any old pollocks about red herrings and dab hands. Now everyone was trying to be on their best behaviour. These were worrying times for British fish and the occasion deserved to be treated with due solemnity.

In recent months Michael Gove has been seen so rarely that some were beginning to wonder if he had become an endangered species. But the environment secretary finally broke cover to answer an urgent question in the Commons on fishing in order to show there was nothing the government cared about more than the British fishing fleet. For 45 minutes, anyway.

Liberal Democrat Alistair Carmichael was unconvinced. It had only been a couple of weeks since the prime minister promised that British fishermen would be free of the EU common fisheries policy at the end of March 2019. Now it turned out they were expendable and that, as part of the Brexit transition agreement, Britain would be staying in for an extra 21 months. Only with significantly fewer bargaining chips than before.

If the government could sell out the fishermen over the transition deal, how could it be trusted not to do the same when it came to the final trade agreement? Hadn’t the chief whip basically reassured Tory MPs worried about the U-turn that there were sod all fishermen anyway and the ones still in business would never dream of voting Labour whatever the government did?

A tear welled up in Gove’s eye. His father had been a fish merchant. His grandfather had been a trawlerman. His great grandfather had been an octopus. That explained a lot. Fish were in his blood and he would never dream of betraying them. Yes, the deal that Britain had negotiated was not what he had hoped for, but everyone had to keep their eye on the bigger prize.

Even as he was speaking, there were huge schools of cod, mackerel, hake and tuna that were deliberately hiding from rapacious EU fishing vessels in secret underwater caves. But come the glorious 1 January 2020, they would all make a beeline for British coastal waters with their blue British passports tucked inside their gills. These were British fish through and through, whose only desire had ever been to throw themselves into nets thrown overboard by British fishermen. And if they could wait an extra couple of years for their dreams to come true, then so should everyone else. A time of plenty was nearly in our grasp.

The Scottish Tory MPs who had been spitting blood just 24 hours earlier were slightly mollified. Though they insisted they felt let down by the government, they were prepared to take the minister’s word that better days lay ahead. In Gove we trust. Jacob Rees-Mogg was rather more suspicious. From the tone of the Brussels press conference, it sounded very much to him as if the EU had outmanoeuvred the British negotiators at every turn so far, so he found it hard to believe that the UK was going to end up with an acceptable final deal.

Now Gove started to get angry with the doubters on all sides of the house. He wouldn’t hear a word against the British negotiators. They had done their best. It hadn’t been their fault the EU officials had been so difficult. Indeed the fact the EU had been so intransigent was all the more reason why Britain had been right to concede. Not to stoop to their level.

Time and again, he returned to his main theme. The prize of Brexit was all that counted. However it turned out. Only time would tell if he had just done everyone up like a kipper.