It’s official. The Labour party now has two leaders. Both are knights. But it’s hard to say which is the real Sir Keir Starmer. Not even Sir Keir Starmer seems to know. Good Sir Keir is the kindly, decent comrade who wants to aid his fellow man at a time of crisis. Wicked Sir Keir is the dastardly villain who plots to unhorse his foe with a poisoned lance or a hidden dagger.
At PMQs he began as Good Sir Keir. He thanked Boris for extending the furlough and for voicing his opposition to racial prejudice.
Then he got all dastardly. He read out a fistful of statistics proving that Britain has suffered the world’s worst corona-shambles. Our excess death toll, at 63,000, is shockingly high. Then this:
‘Last week he said he was proud of his record. There’s no pride in these figures, is there?’
This was nifty footwork. The trick is in the positioning of the phrases. First the cold hard fact. ‘63,000 deaths’. Then the warm human emotion. ‘Pride.’
He wanted us to believe that Boris has personally wiped out enough Britons to fill a premiership stadium and has since been gloating over the body-count.
‘I strongly disagree with the way he characterises it,’ said the PM.
And he accused Sir Keir of flip-flopping on schools.
‘I can’t work out if he’s saying it’s not safe enough [to go back to school] or if we should be going back more quickly. It’s one brief one day, the other brief the next. I understand how the legal profession works.’
Sir Keir proposed ‘a national task-force’ on schools. Which is a classic Whitehall fix. You solve every problem by hiring more of the people who created the original problem. Things got juicier when Boris facetiously mentioned a private discussion.
‘I’ve been in contact with the right honourable gentlemen by a modern device called the telephone.’
He suggested that Sir Keir was ‘deviating’ in public from agreements made in confidence.
The Labour leader blew his top – although when Sir Keir boils over it’s more like the frothing of a cappuccino than the eruption of Vesuvius.
‘The task-force has never been a subject of a conversation on the telephone,’ he fussed. ‘The prime minister knows it. So please drop that.’
He was making no headway. And Boris kept peppering his phrases with Graeco-Roman ornaments. ‘Bacchanalian,’ ‘tergiversations,’ ‘obscurantism’, ‘Sinophile.’ This indicates that he’s relaxed and content. He gives himself little rewards by rummaging through his thesaurus and admiring a choice acquisition or two. Like Liz Taylor playing with her diamonds.
Finally, Sir Keir accused him of preparing his replies in advance. ‘I know he’s got his practised attack-lines,’ he said as if this were a criminal scandal from which the PM would never recover. It’s hardly a secret that the pugilists like to limber up before PMQs. ‘Net practice’ is the jargon. Every Wednesday morning Boris spars with a volunteer from the cabinet who plays Sir Keir. Meanwhile, in a separate room, Sir Keir himself practises his shots with a shadow cabinet member doing a Boris impersonation. If these warm-up sessions were televised they’d get better ratings than the real thing. (The burning question is, which Labour MP plays Boris?)
Late on, Kirsty Blackman of the SNP asked about the American president’s response to George Floyd’s death. ‘It’s been horrendous,’ she said. ‘Does Donald Trump have any good qualities? If so what are they?’
Out of order. Betty Boothroyd wouldn’t have allowed that. By convention, questioners must address themselves to the PM’s official responsibilities. And acting as moral tutor to foreign leaders is not Boris’s job.
It’s Greta’s.
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