Poor grey sad Mr Corbyn. So angry. So useless. And so weird as a visual spectacle. His sharp-featured head looks, from a certain viewpoint, like an anvil pebble-dashed with porridge oats. But guess what? Today he scored a victory against Mrs May. And guess what? He blew it.
First he revealed his team’s latest attempt to turn him into a famous wit. He claimed that Mrs May had yesterday marginalised parliament while claiming to restore its primacy. Then the pay-off. ‘Not so much the Iron Lady as the Irony Lady.’ Why is that a lousy gag? Bad mouth-feel. No punchy consonants. But it looks deceptively good on the page so Mr Corbyn’s comedy apprentices must have hoped it would fly.
Then, perhaps accidentally, he skewered her. Mrs May wouldn’t reveal whether Britain will pay for access to European markets. He asked again. No reply. Job done. He had her. Total triumph. But instead of building on it he did his tetchy park-keeper routine.
‘Still no answer,’ he wheedled, with his head bobbing up and down as if he’d just dropped a man-hole cover on his toe. Yet the advantage was still his. All he had to do was float the query a third time and watch her flounder. But that would have involved keeping his trap shut for a few seconds and Mr Corbyn, uniquely among parliamentarians, likes to hear what Mr Corbyn will say next.
So he moved onto citizenship rights and thus, with supreme adroitness, terminated his own advantage. The session then turned into Discrimination Day. Chris Bryant, who can nearly pronounce ‘Rhondda’ in a Welsh accent, began life as an attention-seeking vicar and has now become a born again windbag. State bureaucrats, he complained, are being relocated from the Rhondda to Cardiff. ‘We in the valleys,’ he said in his prosperous Home Counties tones, ‘we in the valleys feel ignored by the government.’ No one in the valleys says ‘we in the valleys’.
Angus Robertson joined in the grudge-fest. The member for Aberdeen is an international champion of miserablism and he couldn’t wait to tell us how bad Brexit would be. But a pause nobbled him. ‘Scotland’s leading economic forecaster …’ he began. Then he stopped. And in that micro-second the house erupted with mirth. ‘Economic forecaster.’ What a belter.
Mr Robertson decided to play it hoity-toity. ‘Tories jeer,’ he scolded, ‘and Tories cheer but the forecast is … 80,000 will lose their jobs as a result of … ’ Yeah, yeah, yeah. Everyone was laughing. More followed. Mr Bercow rebuked him by name for heckling the prime minister.
‘He’s supposed to be a statesmanlike figure,’ said the Speaker, unconsciously punning on the considerable acreage darkened by Mr Robertson’s shadow. Wild howls of laughter greeted this. One felt tempted, almost, to shed a tear for Mr Robertson. Until one remembered that feeling tempted to shed a tear for people is his entire career.
The prime minister, famous for her Narnian gaze, may turn out to be a computer-generated representation of the word ‘wintry’. She does chilly better than anyone else. She had a great opportunity to turn her sub-zero stare at the SNP when one of its leading bias-jockeys, Ian Blackford, accused the state of ‘penalising highlanders and islanders’ by adding surcharges to their electricity bills.
‘Those of us who live in the coldest and windiest places are being discriminated against,’ he huffed. But who is responsible for this prejudice? The gods? The government? Or the rights of citizens to choose their own habitat? Mrs May suggested an answer. ‘Geography does have an impact on these matters,’ she said icily.
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