Today’s Prime Minister’s Questions could have been memorable purely for the novelty of Emily Thornberry deploying a tremendous amount of sass in her questions to Damian Green as the pair stood in for Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May. But it was also memorable because as well as leaning across the despatch box and delivering one-liners in comedy voices, the Shadow Foreign Secretary also asked some good, searching questions about the government’s position on Brexit, particularly on what would happen practically if there was no deal.
Unlike Corbyn, who has always struggled to ask questions on Brexit at this session because of his own ambivalence about the matter, Thornberry is quick on her feet and is able to ask questions that drill into the previous answer, rather than ones she has memorised before entering the Chamber. She stuck to the implications of ‘no deal is better than a bad deal’ rather than jumping around many different issues, and this allowed her to expose some of the questions that the government still isn’t answering on Brexit, such as border controls in Ireland: something Green couldn’t answer either, though he did claim that negotiations were going well and that Thornberry was overstating the risks of no deal. What he did reveal was that tomorrow the Office for Budget Responsibility will publish a report on the fiscal risks of Brexit – but the OBR has made clear that it will not be assessing no deal in this report.
But Thornberry was able to exploit the confusion between ministers about the implications of no deal, pointing to David Davis, who she said couldn’t agree with himself on the matter, let alone his colleagues. It was the first time that Labour, which has its own struggles on what to do about Brexit, has managed to highlight quite how confused the government is on Brexit. Normally the government is perfectly good at doing this job itself.
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