Imagine a school assembly run by the most boring narcissists imaginable. Right – you’ve come close to picturing the first parliamentary business questions after recess.
Lucy ‘Paraffin’ Powell, the woman who can always make a bad situation worse, began with a list of all the MPs who had married, had children, or otherwise managed not to out themselves as perverts over the summer break. Inevitably this was accompanied by self-back-patting on how much more family-friendly parliament was under Labour. Well, it increasingly resembles a crèche, of that there is no doubt.
I pity Jesse Norman, one of the unambiguously impressive and intelligent MPs left in parliament. He has to suffer Powell’s clattering platitudes as he tries to ask her questions. Take his attempt to get an honest answer about the parliamentary time required to scrutinise the government’s massive tax increases. Instead he got the depressingly predictable harangue about Liz Truss’s mini-budget. On current form the government will be blaming the heat death of the universe on Kwasi Kwarteng. Mr Norman looked sort of depressed as she did so, like the man who realises that a ptarmigan cannot actually be taught the principles of nuclear physics. The gap in class was chasmic.
Class was also something Powell tried to exploit. She criticised Mr Norman for ‘dying in a ditch’ while trying to save the hereditary peers. ‘We know on which side they are on’, she shrieked – as if the enemies of this country are impotent Dukes, Earls and Marquesses elected by their peers rather than the all powerful lanyard-flunky class who aren’t elected by anybody.
Powell earnestly seems to believe she is at the vanguard of the great progressive future
She accused the Tories of being ‘for the few, not the many on education’; which was presumably a reference to their opposition to the VAT raid on private schools. Interestingly, neither Powell nor Bridget Phillipson have so far managed to explain when the promised 6,500 additional teachers that the spite tax was supposed to fund will materialise in state schools. This policy has the advantage of being neither for the few nor the many – shafting them both at once.
As she made these statements I could hear one cheer above all others from the Labour benches – the terminally embarrassing Dr Jeevun Sandher, angling for a pat on the head from the party’s apparatchiks. Dr Sandher is a dignity vacuum, a sailor clamouring for promotion aboard the Titanic just as the last lifeboat is lowered.
Hilariously, Powell tried her ludicrous ‘right side of history’ schtick while also riding into battle to defend the Deputy Prime Minister’s tax evasion. Mr Norman confessed he had a soft spot for Big Ange as she was ‘the one member of the front bench seeking to lower tax burdens rather than raise them.’
Paraffin became incensed at this jibe against Ange’s obviously immaculate financial probity. ‘She is a huge, huge asset to this government.’ Well she’s certainly got hold of some huge assets while in government. Parrafin continued: ‘They have a go at her because she’s so bloody good at her job’. Lucy Powell has many faults and now we can add lame, twee swearing to them. She honestly thinks she is a plucky heroine in a Mike Leigh film as opposed to a footnote in one of the most embarrassing governments in postwar history.
This continued as she listed the government’s ‘achievements’ in the ‘highly ambitious legislative programme’ when she allowed her chest to puff out, like a pigeon on anabolic steroids. It then dawned – despite all the evidence reality keeps on throwing up to the contrary – that these people really think they’re doing a good job.
It’s becoming increasingly clear that one of Labour’s biggest problems is the monumental gulf between how they see themselves and how the general public see them. Powell earnestly seems to believe she is at the vanguard of the great progressive future. Alas, she’s not Rosa Parks, she’s a future answer on ‘Pointless’.
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