Deputy Prime Minister’s Questions stoops to a new low

An appearance from ageing rocker Gene Simmons from KISS, watching from behind his dark glasses in the gallery, was one of the few highlights from today’s stand-in session of deputy Prime Minister’s Questions. This session wasn’t so much glam rock as it was rock bottom boring. Oliver Dowden and Angela Rayner had written a list of stock jokes and attacks that both were very keen indeed to use, regardless of the questions or answers they were actually dealing with.

There was a supportive question in the opening by Tory MP David Johnston about reading standards and Labour party policy. This allowed Dowden to celebrate the recent news that England was now in the top five international rankings for reading in primary schools. The Tories were caught rather on the hop about this at the time, having almost forgotten that one thing they really have managed to do in more than a decade of turmoil is reform schools and drive up standards. But now they are playing catch-up, and trying to mention the reading results as often as possible.

Angela Rayner led on the Covid inquiry, asking how the Tory manifesto pledge to cut down on the use of judicial reviews was going. Dowden insisted that the government had provided more than 55,000 documents so far:

‘We will provide the inquiry with each and every document related to Covid including all internal discussions in any form as requested, while crucially protecting what is whole and unambiguously irrelevant because essentially the right hon. Lady is calling for years worth of documents and messages between named individuals to be in scope, and that Mr Speaker could cover anything: civil servants’ medical conditions to intimate details about their families’.

He added that he found it extraordinary that Labour was lecturing the Conservatives on value for money for the taxpayer. The counter-argument, of course, is that it’s not Rayner who is calling for the messages, and not Rayner who will go through them: it is a senior judge, Heather Hallett. Presumably the chair of the Inquiry, appointed after all by the government, has some level of judgement about what is relevant and what is just a message about someone’s intimate health problems.

Dowden joked that Rayner had purchased two pairs of noise-cancelling headphones, which he said made sense given she had to attend shadow cabinet meetings, and that there wouldn’t be any contact to reveal between her and Keir Starmer. ‘These punchlines are dire,’ said Rayner.

Dowden also punched the Labour bruise on oil and gas development, saying he found himself ‘in agreement with the GMB Union’ on this controversial policy. The pair finished and then moved onto an equally pointless session of backbench questions, where the SNP’s Mhairi Black pointed out that Dowden seemed to be answering totally different questions, presumably because he didn’t want to waste what he’d prepared.

PMQs isn’t exactly the pinnacle of parliamentary scrutiny at the best of times. DPMQs is more of a party political attack session. But all today’s session suggested that both parties hadn’t quite honed that, either.