Just to remind MPs of whom to curse for bringing them back to Westminster in the middle of their summer holiday – the Wise Man of the backbenches, Chris Mullin’s name will live in infamy. He made a career in the later 2000s as a ‘parliamentarian’ (one up from being ‘a good constituency MP’) by recommending September sittings in a report, and promptly resigning. Mullins Day looms large over August for every salaried Commons worker. His enormous head is shaped, by happy chance, like a dartboard. At least we have that.
MPs were brave about their dislocated vacations. Keir Starmer got a louder than usual cheer from his reshuffled party – what with the defenestrated, demoted and disappointed absenting themselves. The PM got a louder welcome again, with MPs even below the gangway rattling their order papers. They must be relieved there can’t be much more than six months more of this.
LOTO turned in his seat to shake the hand of the young man sitting behind him. He later explained that Keir Mather had won his seat by overturning the largest majority ever. It was shocking – very shocking for us reactionaries. Shaking hands in Westminster is completely out of order. It is simply not done. No one knows why it is like this, which adds to the potency of the rule. If it is a portent of an incoming Labour administration, we are all in very serious trouble.
Of course, we’re in very serious trouble already. It’s the greatest achievement of the last 13 years of Tory government, conditioning us to be used to it, when the apocalypse arrives.
Keir Starmer takes an irredeemably negative view of their success. He complained today about hospital roofs falling in on patients (it’s the single biggest cause of reduction in cancer deaths). He said children are “cowering” under steel joists in schools (we never had steel joists to cower under). He had harsh words for ‘cowboy builders’ saying that “the cowboys are running the country”. What about the speed at which cowboys work? Their ability to run five jobs at once? Their demands for payments that even lawyers envy? Without cowboy builders nothing in Britain would be built.
Keir concluded by saying that the Prime Minister’s tax rises were “for other families to pay” and “his school cuts are for other families to endure.”
He’s absolutely right. The PM literally only thinks of others.
Rishi’s responses were an object lesson in rapid response. Those who were expecting him to apologise for taking decisive action must have been disappointed by his reply. He said, quite baldly, “We make no apology for acting decisively.” He spoke most decisively, but mainly at great speed.
Two thirds of everything was fine and the 1% that wasn’t actually would be. Because professional advice had evolved over time, Labour had done nothing, and the Tories’ 20% increase in maintenance was the highest in a decade, so Labour should get their facts right instead of being needlessly expensive and excluding 80% of schools solely on the basis of ideology because we had the best readers in the western world, tripling the per pupil spend and that’s why inflation and the cost of living and the arrival of small boats was DOWN!
This was met with joyful incredulity from the benches opposite.
So, we had Sir Keir speaking for the children, a Tory speaking for pregnant dogs illegally shipped with piteously cropped ears, but who will speak for Andrew Bridgen? The squat little scrum-half of an MP has jinked his way across the House and now sits high on the wrong backbenches, having transferred his affections to the For God’s Sake Enough Is Enough wing of the Reclaim, Renew, Rebuild and Reinvent party.
The Speaker uttered the words, that the wee man most loves to hear: “Andrew Bridgen!” he cried.
The smallest party leader asked whether the PM was proud of his achievements. Rishi said he was, rather.
And that was the end of that.
It was 11.59 and – waiting, waiting, waiting for a pause in the proceedings, our PM was held at the side of the Speaker’s chair, like a greyhound in the slips. It’s the dog day of the session, and your sketch writer couldn’t help wonder if the chief whip would give his leader the expert twist that racing handlers administer near the base of the tail, to give their dog a yelping start to the race. Something must have happened because it was an unusually lively half hour.
Starting from the bottom, Mark Francois of the Defence Select Committee launched a punitive attack on the “silly” and “naïve” chair of his committee. “I was astounded to see a statement from our chairman,” he began. Was the Defence committee one of those chaired by a Putin-appeasing opposition member? No, actually, by Tobias Ellwood, the amiable Tim-but-Dim who won the chair by the circuitous route of tackling an armed terrorist on the estate. He has advocated “talking to the Taliban”. As his proposal was more conciliatory than he ever made about “talking to the European Research Group” (of which Francois is a leading leper) he provoked this remarkable – unprecedented – crowd-pleasing – intra-party attack on the floor of the House. Ellwood’s proposal “was not made in our name” Francois said, and asked the PM to make clear it wasn’t in his name either. Rishi’s diplomatic skills enabled him to make clear no such thing.
In further EU news, Labour’s Old Abraham, Barry Sheerman, rose to grieve at the grave of the 2016 referendum. He shook his withering fist at the sky and called down justice on the heads of the wicked. Wrath failed to appear. Even God pretends he can’t hear Old Abraham. Rishi, laughingly, said, “Get over it, you booby, it’s ancient history and no one cares what you think, anyway.” Such was the tune, the words may have differed.
Our principals, fresh from a two-week absence, put on a dancing display, each taking turns to lead.
Parliamentary standards continue their Cresta Run. In the gallery, many of us weren’t wearing a tie, one of us wasn’t wearing a jacket and Angela Rayner’s PAd wasn’t wearing a shirt. He’d come in his vest. That was a first. Coming to PMQs in a wife-beater. Knocked Oliver Dowden’s prolier-than-thou performance out of the park. But then, it’s a very small park.
The Prime Minister’s sock puppet, speaks like he’s building sentences out of Lego. The poor fellow clicks words into clauses and clauses into clusters and holds the results up for approval and applause. This he did with his climactic joke – Keir Starmer had said he hated tree huggers “but they seem very keen on hugging the magic money tree.”
He held his humorous construction high into the rising silence. Only the cruellest spirits and the strongest stomachs were able to laugh, and even we had the decency to smother it down to snorts.
The Left declared a swingeing victory for Rayner, the Right – as usual – said nothing at all.
Ms Rayner told the House she was “filling John Prescott’s boots” as the last time a Prime Minister had missed two PMQs in a row was 1996 when Prescott was Shadow Deputy Prime Minister. And here she was, asking the same questions as he had, nearly 30 years ago. Child poverty. Tory Mortgage Bombshell. Crashed economy. Had anything changed?
In those days, Nicholas Soames used to sledge Prescott at the despatch box with, “Bring us a gin and tonic, Giovanni.” That at least has changed.
In those days, the Tories reduced unemployment by shifting the unemployed onto sickness benefit. These days – the trick is simply to shuffle the question. Why has child poverty risen by 75%, Rayner asked. “Because we have lifted 400,000 children out of poverty” was the answer. “And they have the highest reading standards in Europe.”
Aha. Try this, then. Perhaps one of the most recherché questions ever asked in PMQs: “How many kids today don’t have a permanent address?” He replied, “How the **** should I know?”
No, he didn’t. He said, “We can exchange numbers all we like, but the important thing . . . ”
Sorry, as you were, “How the **** should I know,” was his response, if not his reply.
The numerical answer was 55,000, apparently. Child poverty, and so forth. “Why are we asking the exact same thing?” she demanded. There were cries of Shame! Shame!
It is a question many of us fear to confront full on. Angela is telling us that we are again the sick man of Europe. The 90s had us as an ERM basket case, we have recently been the Brexit leper – but today, we are worse. This cultural and economic combination of sleeping sickness, elephantiasis, and necrotising fasciistis is consuming us from the inside.
And Labour is surely the proof of that old pudding: “If you think things can’t get any worse – it’s just a failure of the imagination.” How on earth will a Keir Starmer government cope with these multiple, chronic and rather disgusting disabilities?
Dowden finished with a well-constructed piece of Lego. That Labour always left office with unemployment higher than when they had got in. But now they were even stopping people getting to work – Just Stop Oil protesters blocking the roads, union paymasters calling train strikes, and the hated ULEZ stopping cars in the capital.
The best that can be said of their duet – it was over.
Next week is the last PMQs of the session. They will be much missed.
*
For the warm-up half-hour, it was Kemi Badenoch, a sometime Tory leadership candidate who caused quite a flare of excitement at the time of the election. Young, attractive, patriotic, successful – she soared across the firmament and made a dazzling landing in her first department and then in her second: Women and Equalities.
At the despatch box, she shows signs that the pace of political office is fast and hard. To conserve energy, she reads her answers off her prominently-held iPad, avoids troubling the House with controversy, and represents those of her constituents who express disdain and contempt for parliament. It’s brave of her, and original, and maybe exactly what the Conservative Party – if not needs – then thoroughly deserves.
One of her seconds, Mims Davies, makes unusual use of her yellow highting pen. In her A4 briefing pages visible from the gallery, every single line was highlighted. Page after page. This is to misunderstand the nature of highlighting – to separate the wheat from the chaff. And the stalks. And the bird droppings, crushed insects, field mice, clods of earth and clots of congealed silage. Does that have a bearing on the things Ms Mims says from the despatch box? Does it explain the clots, clods and crushed insects in her replies?
It began as it went on, Members banging parliamentary pots and pans “for the NHS”. It is the service’s 75th anniversary. Everyone who worked in it, voted for it, used it, died in it was “celebrated” and had “tribute” paid them. Not a dissenting voice was raised. Oliver Dowden called it “a treasured national institution”. With its near-£200 billion budget it’s a national treasure, all right.
As someone in favour of a national health service, I am prepared to risk the mockery of my peers by conceding the possibility that Lucy Letby and Harold Shipman aren’t the sole role models for the medical staff. But even we reckless enthusiasts must recognise that the NHS – by indolence, inertia, incompetence, ignorance, bureaucratic idiocy and occasional sadistic malevolence – has killed more people than the British army. As the police have admitted that one of their core values is “structural racism” will the NHS be forced to confront the reality that “genocide” is one of its strategic outcomes?
Mhairi Black, the deputy leader of the implosive SNP, made a rather brilliant cross-party point as she read out two very similar quotations arguing for more private sector involvement in the NHS. She asked if Dowden could say which quote belonged to the PM and which to the Leader of the Opposition. When Dowden referred to King Charles in his reply, she laughingly flicked her fingers to and fro across her throat in that execution way. This was a very popular hate crime in the House, and as one of our more attractive hate criminals, Ms Black will be much missed when she quits at the next general election. Dowden said as much, noting that they had come in to the House together. “And we’re pretty certain to be leaving together,” she responded to shouts of laughter, not least from Conservative members.
High in the Tory backbenches, far out of his natural environment, Matt Hancock fiddled with the end of his tie. The death toll from lockdown hasn’t entirely come in, but when it does he will have achieved parliamentary immortality.
Is our PM afflicted by some secret sorrow? Have the cares of office worn his high spirits away? Does he secretly want to accede to Chris Bryant’s parliamentary request this afternoon: “Will he admit he is literally the worst person possible to be leading the country?”
In a world containing Yevgeny Prigozhin, Lucy Letby, Prince Harry and Chris Bryant himself, there is stiff competition for that particular slot. The thought that Rishi Sunak might be worst of all possible premiers was so unfair it must have been calculated for the Today programme.
Rishi, as we know, is normally pert as a pixie. He likes to make people happy. Today, his head was down, his shoulders dropped, his spirit curdled which made the wrong sort of people happy in the wrong sort of way. He was quite curt with the Leader of the Opposition, and actually rude to Stephen Flynn. He called him “economically illiterate,” giving that SNP leader the opportunity to shout “Brexit! Brexit!” and a number of other ancient Caledonian curses.
Keir Starmer – this is reported without side – looked for the first time to have established an upper hand at the despatch box. Considering Keir’s natural qualities he deserves some sort of Invictus award. He asked short and unanswerable questions such as, is the PM for or against building 300,000 houses? Can he name anyone who believes he will build 300,000 houses? And then assertions which may or may not be true, but which many will be inclined to agree with – mortgage rates, and so forth, “Housebuilding at its lowest level since the Second World War!”
Rishi responded with his own assertions that may or may not be true. That we currently have the highest number of first-time buyers in 20 years. That Labour will build out the Green Belt. That the Tories have put local people in control of house building.
”There’s your problem,” as builders say. Was it really wise to put local people in charge of house building? You’ve met local people, you know what they’re like. If you’re reading this you’re probably a local person yourself – would you honestly put yourself in control of housebuilding? Any answer other than “No,” indicates complete unsuitability for that great national undertaking.
The Tory Mortgage Penalty is Labour’s new communications objective. and probably the best bruise to be punching at the moment. Keir kept at it, left and right, finishing with a big swing and miss on account of his friend, or contact, or voter – James from Selby whose mortgage is going up by £400 a month.
Unfortunately, for Keir, James doesn’t come from Selby.James comes from Jarrow. Or… Jacksdale. Or – scrub that, almost nowhere in England begins with J, and James isn’t a Labour name. If Selby is the important Middle England demographic they’re after they’d need a Scott, or a Shawn or at a pinch, a Sam. Sam from Selby could be a standard-bearer for Labour’s lower mortgages. Scott from Scunthorpe has children who now have to share bedrooms.Shawn from Shoreditch is having to move to a smaller house in Shadwell. Or Shoreham (very nice, too). Sheepwash is nice at this time of year – any reasonable listener would ask. “Why don’t they move to Sheepwash?”
No, it all lacks credibility.
Come on chaps, get the basics right! This ignorance at the highest levels of our political apparatus is actually shocking. James from Selby!
It’s as bad as when they talk about modular nuclear reactors, and solar generation and vast new wind farms that will bring energy prices down – but they have no idea it takes 15 years to get connected to the grid. All they’d have to do to find out is to ask Nellie from the National Grid and she’d tell them. Fifteen years! And the 80,000 new pylons they’re going to need to carry the power – Fenella from the Future Systems Operator says that there may be local resistance, that’s what Desi from DESNZ and Dizzy from DSIT said, tearfully on the Today programme.
