Miliband survives! That news should steady Labour nerves. For today at least. Their leader has the knack of turning near-certain defeat into absolutely-certain catastrophe, but he bumbled through PMQs this afternoon without suffering a serious setback.
He has so little ground from which to attack the government that he had to lead on a niche issue. Rail fares. He asked the prime minister why the operating companies have managed to hike prices by 11 per cent on the busiest routes.
Cameron: ‘Because of a power given to them by the last Labour government.’
With that lethally terse response the PM sat down. To his credit, Miliband wasn’t rattled. But the exchanges that followed were about as illuminating as blind-man’s-bluff played in a pot-hole. ‘The Prime Minister is wrong’, said Miliband. ‘No,’ Cameron replied, ‘the Opposition leader has got it wrong.’ ‘He’s wrong,’ countered Miliband. ‘Well, I know he’s had a difficult start to the year,’ said the PM, ‘but he’s getting it wrong.’ On it went.
Dusting off some abstruse detail, Cameron claimed that Labour, in office, had ‘introduced flexibility of 5 per cent above RPI’, but relaxed this limit in election year in order to sweep Gordon Brown back into Downing Street. ‘No,’ retorted Miliband, ‘the Prime Minister is wrong about the facts.’ Well, hey ho. Nothing like a tussle over percentage points to get the year off to a flyer!
Leading on transport was feeble and foolish from Miliband. Cameron was never going to be vulnerable on railways when he’s just sunk £32 billion into the Birmingham bullet-train. Miliband’s in a tangle here. Unless he forms an alliance with the Buckinghamshire hearties, and opposes the plan to invest three Olympic budgets helping Londoners spend 20 extra minutes in Birmingham, he’ll get zilch from transport between now and 2015. As Cameron showed today, the coalition has a ready answer to every question on railways. ‘Look at that,’ they’ll say, pointing to the mountainous HS2 package, ‘we’re spending oodles on our new train-set. Now ask something else.’
After his rail failure, Miliband turned to Scottish independence. And at this point, the punch-up turned into a therapy session. Both leaders were in total accord. It felt rehearsed. It was almost a musical. ‘Stronger together, weaker apart,’ they sang in cross-party harmony.
Cameron warned that the SNP were having so much fun with the process that they were in danger of losing the substance. ‘A referendum is fine’, he said, ‘but not a never-endum.’ No one knew what that meant but it sounded clever.
Angus Robertson took up the issue. He’s a large-ish fellow who acts as Alex Salmond’s vicar in Westminster, and he rashly decided to indulge in a spot of Sassenach-bashing. This united the House against him. As soon as he hoisted himself to his feet he was cordially jeered. He mocked the Tories for having ‘fewer Scottish MPs than there are giant pandas in Edinburgh Zoo’ and he accused Cameron of trying to do a Thatch and interfere in Scottish politics.
Not at all, said Cam, we’re trying to give Salmond’s referendum legal force. And he added a smart-alec debating point which he’s probably been polishing all Christmas: if the Nats want to secede from the Union now why are they delaying the poll for two years?
Cameron was as buoyant and sunny as he’s ever been in the House. And his anger-management problems seemed to have evaporated too. Mind you, Labour’s ageing goons played straight into his hands. Michael Meacher, like many an elderly leftie, seems obsessed by the Sunday Times Rich List. Meacher informed us how appalled he was that affluent people are good at making money. And he lamented that the UK’s thousand wealthiest citizens had added £136 billion to their coffers last year. His brilliant scheme is to tax all the swag and use the proceeds to create a million jobs. Surely, said Cameron, when Meacher refers to plutocrats he means ‘the prime minister he served under.’
One flicker of hubris marred Cameron’s performance. David Simpson (DUP Upper Bann) asked about Nick Clegg’s recent statement that the European treaty, rejected in December, would in some mysterious fashion become ‘folded into’ our existing EU obligations. In reply, Cameron seemed to dismiss his deputy outright. And with him the entire Lib Dem rump. ‘What Coalition partners put into their manifestos at the next election,’ said the prime minister airily, ‘is up to them.’
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