Was that PMQs? It felt more like the monthly meeting of a particularly soporific knitting circle. The last fixture before Christmas is usually full of mayhem and mischief but Gordon Brown is abroad this week taking his smirk on a tour of the east, so the understudies replaced the regular opponents. In the past Harriet Harman vs William Hague has been an electrifying bout but a sparsely populated house seemed to anticipate disappointment.
Hattie has got the feel for it by now. And Hague? He seems to have lost the feel for it. Or perhaps he deliberately underperformed so as not to overshadow his leader. His tactics were stunningly predictable. His half-hearted call for an inquiry into the Iraq war was easily dealt with. Sure, but not till the troops come home. Then he moved to the very point Dave laboured last week, the lending problems faced by small businesses. The crunch has become pretty soggy by now and Hattie had no trouble deflecting the question. In homage to her boss she used his favourite strategy. The big boring statistic. One point three billion, she said several times, with the air of a schoolgirl who’s been up all night swotting for an economics exam. No one really cared what this referred to. (It’s the sum assigned to Job Centres to help the lengthening dole queues, according to Hattie). And Hague missed his chance here. Instead of probing this dubious figure he wove his way back to material he’d prepared earlier. He gave a list of alarming economic news followed by a punchline. ‘If this is the PM saving the world then God help us when he moves on to the rest of the solar system.’ Scripted gags need to be better than that.
With Hague’s powder spent, the mood became weary and rather worthy. A succession of Labour preferment-seekers stood up and set the ball at a sweet angle for Hattie to knock into an open goal. We heard much. We learned zilch. More schools would be built, women’s rights would be championed, clean energy sources would be discovered, free swimming sessions would be encouraged for asthmatic children and the nation’s pensioners would have their pillows personally plumped up by the Health Secretary.
The Tories were equally feeble, lacking the killer instinct and squandering their efforts on antique and abstruse issues: the National Audit Office and the rate used to calculate pensioners’ income from savings. You what? These aren’t the tools to bring a government to its knees. Hattie must have felt as if she was being pistol-whipped with bits of dental floss. Only Shailesh Vara looked likely to land a bruise on Labour. He asked why Gordon Brown had reneged on a promise made at a party conference. ‘We will not build a new Jerusalem on a mountain of debt.’ But Vara destroyed his own point by explicitly dating (or rather carbon-dating) the quote. It comes from 1986. Lifetimes ago.
The frustrating thing about these ritualistic valedictory exchanges is that we now know just how to liven them up. A pair of shoes has to be bunged at someone important. This week Iraqi democracy taught the mother of parliaments a lesson.
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