The firecracker and the damp squib stood in at PMQs today. With Boris abroad, the deputies took to the dispatch box.
Angela Rayner and Dominic Raab have certain qualities in common. Both are eyeing the leadership of their parties and both are keen to offer a contrast with the present incumbent. The pendulum of popularity tends to swing in predictable directions. The dashing showman is often succeeded by the dead-safe dullard. Major after Thatcher. Brown after Blair. Why not Raab after Boris? And Angela Rayner’s eye-catching flamboyance would be a welcome change from the dreary swattishness of Sir Keir Starmer.
Today was all about appearances. Raab will be pleased to note that he played to a half-empty house and bored everyone rigid. That was his plan all along – to seem sober, pragmatic, risk-averse and eminently trustworthy. Not for him the improvised gag or the extravagant literary metaphor. He delivered his answers like Britain’s most insipid fire-safety expert. An excellent day at the office.
Raab delivered his answers like Britain’s most insipid fire-safety expert
Rayner gave a more complicated performance. She was dolled up to the nines in her hen-do finery. High heels, a cream frock, and her combed auburn tresses plunging dramatically to her waistline. She looked as if she’d spent three hours in make-up. And the supermodel glow was at variance with her rhetorical theme. She wanted to fight Raab on the class war battlefield and to portray him as a rich, out-of-touch toff but she was done up like a catwalk superstar while talking about ‘families working themselves into the ground.’ It wasn’t a good fit.
She sought to humiliate Raab by reminding us that he was on a luxury holiday when the Afghan crisis erupted last month. So she set him a little arithmetic test. How many hours would the average Brit have to work to fund a single night at his five-star digs in Crete? Raab smiled at this effort. Too clever. Too convoluted. Too wordy. At PMQs, the swiftest weapons leave the deepest scars.
He murmured a forgettable reply about the Tories offering free childcare and boosting the value of the national living wage. He added that the economy always nosedives under Labour. Dull, droning answers. Just the ticket.
Then it was Rayner’s turn again. Lights! Camera! Angela! Each time she stood up she smirked and caught her opponent’s eye. And he started to mirror her movements, giggling and chuckling, and responding to her glances with twinkly, suggestive looks. The pair seemed to be enjoying some unseen joke at everyone else’s expense.
She made a predictable quip about the ‘hot air shortage’ being amply covered by Boris. And she raised the recent story that Raab had ‘complained about sharing a 115-room tax-payer-funded mansion with the Foreign Secretary.’
This was a reference to Chevening, the grace-and-favour estate once occupied by the croquet-loving John Prescott. The gag exploded in her face.
‘She should check her facts,’ said Raab icily. ‘Chevening is run by a charity and doesn’t use a penny of taxpayers’ money.’
Rayner probably imagines that she scored a triumph today. Her fan club will doubtless be celebrating a great victory this afternoon. But what has she achieved, apart from reminding everyone that she can seem over-dressed on occasion? She was wrong-footed by a simple error that her researchers should have spotted. And she caused Raab no real difficulty because she was having too much fun lobbing her carefully crafted gotcha questions at him.
Raab survived the encounter well enough. But only because TV got the better of Rayner.
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