Ed Miliband had it easy at PMQs today. The government is bleeding in all directions. And a further haemorrhage has arrived in the shape of Adrian Beecroft, a government adviser, whose proposal to relax employment law has delighted the Tory right and incensed the soft-and-cuddly Lib Dem left.
‘A proposal to fire at will’, is how Mr Miliband described the Beecroft plan. Did the Prime Minister support it or did he agree with the Business Secretary who has covered it in scorn?
Cameron didn’t so much duck the question as swan straight past it. He pretended it wasn’t there. Instead he cherry-picked some positive footnotes from yesterday’s IMF statement on our economy and announced that everything is rosy in the garden.
Miliband tried again to turn the coalition rift into a gaping wound. And again he failed because his attack was based on wishful thinking. He needed Beecroft’s advice to have the status of policy. And he needed Beecroft’s abuser, Vince Cable, to have the status of someone who’s listened to by the cabinet. (You can tell they think he’s an irrelevant goon because they all say how much they admire and respect him.)
Ignored by his opponent, Miliband was left to repeat his favourite new soundbite. ‘This Prime Minister stands up for the wrong people.’ Coined apparently by some slogan-monger with a focus group instead of an imagination, this motto is pure comfort food for Labour’s core. It won’t swing a single floating voter.
Cameron was then treated to a glorious display of late-spring toadying. Chris Pincher (Con, Tamworth) grilled the Prime Minister with this bracing query: ‘Does he agree that although times are tough, the government and the country are on the right track?’
Another underarm delivery came trickling down the green courtesy of Sajid Javid. The people of Bromsgrove, announced Javid, were throwing street parties to celebrate the news that we’ve cleared ‘25 per cent of the irresponsible debt’ racked up by the last government. Had the Prime Minister received ‘one quarter’ of an apology from Labour?
The opposition wanted to sock it to Cameron on sleaze. Labour backbencher Nic Dakin protested that the government was ‘listening to cliques rather than the decent, hard-working people of Scunthorpe’. He said his constituents were scandalised to hear of ‘secret soirees for Tory donors’ at Downing Street. (Although not so secret that they weren’t all over the papers.)
Asked about issue of voting-rights-for-banged-up-murderers, Cameron surprised everyone by calling the ECtHR a ‘foreign court.’ But even that didn’t win Memorable Phrase of the Day. That arrived during an unguarded moment when Cameron was flannelling about technology and innovation. The government had won economic credibility, he said, ‘which we wouldn’t have if we’d listened to the muttering idiot sitting opposite me.’
Muttering idiot! That made the House go nuts. Everyone went completely bananas. And as bananas and nuts attract monkeys so the Speaker joined in. Mr Bercow loves an outbreak of uproar in the chamber because it’s his cue to perform a two-minute set-piece to camera.
Labour members were shouting, ‘Red card!’ and, ‘Flashman!’ at the Prime Minister. Tories were laughing and cheering with unbridled delight. Mr Bercow got to his feet, trying to suppress an outbreak of smirking, and prepared to deliver his one and only joke. He likes to turn to the rowdiest hooligan in the chamber and to claim that he’s worried about the member’s health. In this case, it was a health minister whose health concerned him. ‘He’s overexcited!’ jeered Bercow, clearly in the same state himself.
He asked the Prime Minister to withdraw the word ‘idiot.’
‘I will replace it,’ said Cameron, ‘with “the man who left us this enormous deficit and this financial crisis”’.
Today was a draw, technically. But Miliband’s supporters will have noted that their man hasn’t learned how to convert a poll lead into a Commons victory.
And ‘muttering idiot’ will do Cameron no harm. What counts as a breach of protocol in Westminster looks like a touch of humanity to the wider world. Prezza and his punch had the same effect. It’s strangely endearing to see a tanned and polished Etonian mouthing off like some old git down the pub.
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