One must say this for the Home Secretary, she is a Parliamentary Pugilist. While the general demeanour of the government in which she serves has a Sir Robin the Chickenhearted attitude to parliamentary spats (one can imagine the adenoidal cry of ‘Run Away’ ricocheting around No. 10 every Wednesday), Shabana Mahmood seems to enjoy a fight with all and sundry.
Nobody epitomises the arrogance and intellectual expiration of the Labour party better than Stella Creasy
She had fun at the despatch box earlier this week, trolling Green MPs into lengthy tantrums. There was unfinished business for the Home Secretary from one particular bout. Step forward Max Wilkinson, the smarmy Lib Dem spokesperson who has the air of a Hare Krishna, radicalised by excessive lentil consumption. On Monday he snapped at Mahmood after her statement, condemning her ‘immoderate language’ and accusing her of over-reacting. For round two, he deplored any abuse or discrimination based on race or religion. His party, of course, turfed out a parliamentary candidate and their former leader Tim Farron from the top job for being Christian.
Mahmood asked her opposite number Chris Philp to apologise for Boris Johnson’s time in office. Politics has become a sort of round of reparations – each party having ballsed up the country to such an extent that only grovelling is allowed. Soon, Mahmood will no doubt be called on to apologise for Blair, Kemi Badenoch for Eden and so on until you get to Lord North or whichever caveman it was who first shouted ‘order, order!’.
Even the Home Secretary seems unable to escape that scourge of Labour ministers – the ambitious backbencher. A shouty woman called Natalie Fleet had turned out to do the standard bottom-crawling ‘does my Rt Hon Friend agree with me’ non-question. Interestingly, for all the Westminster rumours of a Labour Marston Moor about to break out, very few of Mahmood’s own backbenchers had turned out to criticise these changes. Warinder Juss called for settlement for asylum seekers to be made ‘quicker and easier, and not more difficult’. As ever the intellectual capacity of the current crop of MPs is awe inspiring. I genuinely believe that we could swap every Labour backbencher with a member of the London Zoo Monkey House and experience absolutely zero detriment to the good governance of the country.
Of course nobody epitomises the arrogance and intellectual expiration of the Labour party better than Stella Creasy. She gave a profoundly embarrassing, sub-Richard Curtis speech on the primacy of love. If I were a Channel migrant I’d be sending her a polite note asking her just to hold off with the old parliamentary speeches for the time being. As she emoted, the Home Secretary quietly smiled: there could be no better advert for her policy than the opposition of Parliament’s most sanctimonious MP.
Yet for all Mahmood’s success, there was a ghost at the feast; Nick Timothy wondered why the government wanted to make low-skilled workers who were net recipients of welfare wait longer for indefinite leave to remain (ILR) rather than just booting them out. He also pointed out that measures so far implemented by the government were predicted to reduce net migration figures only slightly.
The Home Secretary adopted a different tone – much more relaxed, as if she were speaking to someone more simpatico – as she admitted that ILR would not really be affected. She smiled at Mr Timothy, she promised him written answers, but for all of the fact that she is by far the best Commons performer that Labour have, her eyes suggested that there was little substance behind her words at all.
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