Rayner delivered a good attack on Dowden at PMQs.
“I read with interest that the Right Honorable gentleman has been urging his neighbour in No 10 to call an election because he’s worried they might get wiped out. Has he finally realised that when he stabbed Boris Johnson in the back to get his man into No 10 he was ditching their biggest election winner for a pint-sized loser?“
Ouch…
The battle of the deputies at PMQs has kicked off with Rayner attempting to pre-empt Dowden:
“I know the party opposite is desperate to talk about my living arrangements but the public want to know what this do government is going to do about theirs.“
Dowden hit back with an even better jibe:
“It is a pleasure to have another exchange with the right honorable lady in this house – our fifth in 12 months! Any more of these and she’ll be claiming it as her principal residence.“
Cue roars…
UPDATE: Another hit:
“She once said: ‘You shouldn’t be waiting for the police to bang on your door. If you did it then you shouldn’t be doing your job.’ The Right Honourable landlady should forget her tax advice and follow her own advice.“
In the speed skating Winter Olympics of 2002, the racer coming in dead last won gold when, on the last lap and in sight of the finish line, everyone in front of him fell over.
He had kept up. He was still racing. He shimmied through the carnage and pipped it with a puffed-out chest.
If, in the last lap before the general election, Labour all fall over, Rishi will be right there, still racing, shimmying his pixie hips to the finish line (imagine how angry his family will be!).
It’s not impossible. Although it having happened before in 1992 makes it less likely in 2024 – but whether or not he is in the race, he is still in racing form at PMQs.
Keir Starmer, relaxing into the role of PM-in-waiting a little too thoroughly, fluffed his joke about Liz Truss’s book (the “rare unsigned copy” joke from the film Notting Hill) and left the PM to comment on her statement that her budget was “the happiest moment of her premiership” asking, “has he met anyone with a mortgage who agrees?” (Silky delivery followed by knowing laughter).
Rishi’s answer created a record for this Parliament. “All I can say is, he should spend a little less time reading that book and a little more time reading his deputy leader’s tax advice.” Tsunamic Tory laughter halted proceedings for 32 seconds (roughly a week in parliamentary time).
It wasn’t a complete answer to LOTO’s question, it wasn’t exactly spontaneous wit, but what a wallop. Keir’s equally prepared counter – “a billionaire smearing a working class woman” – lacked chivalry, some thought, but it produced counter-cheers and a pointing contest which everyone enjoys.
The PMIW proceeded with a well structured series of questions introducing “the Tory obsession with unfunded tax cuts”. He declared that’s what caused Truss’s budget collapse and subsequent interest rate hikes. It’s what people think, true or not. He then asked more than once how the PM’s “unfunded £46 billion promise to scrap National Insurance” was to be paid for. Was it to be by cutting the NHS budget, cutting the state pension or by “another Tory tax rise”?
The PM found a number of different ways of saying, “if you think I’m answering that you’re more of a noggin than you look.” Among them – Keir habitually sides with our enemies. That he twice tried to make his own Trident-denying, NATO-sceptic, anti-Semitic predecessor elected Prime Minister. That he, Rishi, had campaigned on the dangers of Liz Truss’s approach. That the triple lock had been promised for the next Parliament and NHS funding was at record levels.
The PM didn’t mention the third option, so it might well be that they are planning to pay for the tax cuts with tax rises.
Whatever the merits of the arguments, there hasn’t, with the partial exception of Cameron, been such an accomplished Conservative Leader at the despatch box since Mrs. T. Light on his feet, quick, deft and well prepared, he can even talk and think at the same time – a talent usually exercised only by angry wives – which he will need if Labour does fall over, he does squeak the election and he does have to have that frank conversation with Mrs. Sunak.
P.S.: The most memorable parliamentary stoppage your sketch writer has witnessed was caused by one Brian Binley after Gordon Brown had seen private polling and failed to call the snap election in 2007 that might have given him his mandate. Binley rose for the first question in PMQs to ask in a pleasant, cross party sort of way if the PM would visit his constituency where a record investment had created a world class, state-of-the-art bottling factory.
They say there are corners of the gallery where echoes of the consequent laughter can still, oh so faintly, be heard.
Three-day weeks, ballooning debt, a crippling energy crisis, a slaughterhouse of a health service – there’s one particular difference between this and the 70s.
Our modern leaders have so little personal effect that listening to them is like reading them off an iPad.
When Edward Heath spoke in the Commons – I only heard it once over 20 years ago – it was an event. The rafters trembled slightly. Tigers sound like he did, surrounding their listeners. No one has a voice like that in modern politics. Heath had been on Normandy Beach, of course. Denis Healey had been Beach Master at Anzio.
But enough of that. While it hasn’t been Normandy Beach or Anzio, fair play to Sir Keir – he has survived a pretty hostile environment in the Labour party. Understandably, most weeks he compares his personal courage with the PM’s, pointing out how he has stood up to his party and transformed it while the Tories are holding the Sword of Damocles over the PM’s head – in the case of the Leader of the House, “literally” (sic).
He began with a description of a Bladerunner Britain broken in ways old and new. Prison system wrecked. Murderers and rapists on the streets. Porous borders. Pensioners having to eat their grandchildren to keep warm because Tories. Why, Keir asked, with what sounded to supporters like silky wit, “is he so scared to call an election?”
Rishi retaliated with a silvery reply: A late election would at least give Labour time to come up with a plan of its own.
What might that be?
Stephen Flynn entertained his own party, plus the Tories and also a covert but considerable part of Labour when he said: “With his back benchers looking for a unity candidate to replace him, which of the now numerous born-again Thatcherites on the Labour front bench …” laughter drowned him out. He resumed with “the conspiracy of silence on the front benches regarding the £18 billion of cuts,” and the general similarity of Rachel Reeves and Jeremy Hunt.
It was “a serious point to be made,” he said, concealing an even more serious point. While there may be little to distinguish Labour prudence with Tory austerity, £18 billion of cuts is neither here nor there in the current disintegration.
Any plan to “unlock” the necessary billions of investment as the shadow chancellor suggests will need a period of creative destruction more extensive than democratic politics allows. The general population has at last universally understood that it can, in the old phrase, “vote itself largesse from the public purse”.
How can Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer, with their adenoidal oratory, sell us national rejuvenation with all the carnage that requires?
Layla Moran’s description of the NHS treatment of one of her constituents was a successful exercise in wither-wringing. Held for an emergency operation and nil by mouth all day – the man failed to secure a slot in the operating theatre.
Taken in overnight on the threat of missing his place in the list, he was held in windowless cell for eight hours on a plastic chair and then on a pillowless gurney, to be told in the morning the operation has been cancelled for lack of personnel.
It was all too believable.
But for a parliamentarian to blame this on Tories is to misunderstand Parliament’s impotence in the face of the Declaration of Independence made throughout the public sphere. Police, Health, Justice, Energy – they are not out of the control of Parliament, but beyond control.
The question on which Edward Heath fought the 1974 election was “Who Governs Britain?”
The answer then was, “Not you, chum.” The answer after the next election will very likely turn out to be, “And not you, either.”
