Blair costs Redwood's £5 billion of waste against a royal yacht and a prime ministerial spaceship for bilaterals with the planet Portillo — and the joke outlived the entire Cabinet it described.

28 June 1995, day six of the strangest episode of the Major years: the Prime Minister had resigned the party leadership — 'put up or shut up' — Redwood had resigned from the Cabinet to stand against him, and Portillo's supporters had been caught installing forty telephone lines in a Westminster house for a campaign he was not yet admitting to. Blair, eleven months into the Labour leadership with Clause IV already rewritten, performs the full New Labour repertoire: statesmanlike on Bosnia, communautaire on enlargement, then the pivot to ridicule with a discipline Major's benches could only envy. The planet Portillo joke entered the language within the hour and never left; the telephone lines pursued Portillo to his Enfield count in 1997, the era's emblematic decapitation. Major won his contest 218 to 89 a week later and it settled nothing — the nine positions on Europe kept multiplying through the beef war and the referendum party to the 179-majority landslide of May 1997. The 'ungovernable party unfit to govern' construction became the template attack of the campaign to come; the deeper irony matured more slowly, as the European division Blair mocked outlived them all, consuming his successors' successors in 2016.

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