‘That’s the difference a Labour government makes!’ The Prime Minister has taken to ending the self-congratulatory rants he deploys in lieu of answers in the House of Commons with this irritating catchphrase. As if the colony of gremlins currently running the country are to be advertised to us like 1950s household goods. One can imagine Sir Keir, strapped into a pinny, removing a burned cake from the oven, turning to the camera and saying, ‘that’s the difference a Labour government makes!’
He wheeled out this supremely annoying verbal tic a number of times at Prime Minister’s Questions. The problem with it, of course, is that most of the differences a Labour government makes are negative ones. A difference is being felt for sure, just not a good one. He might as well shout ‘that’s the difference coastal erosion makes!’ ‘That’s the difference ringworm makes!’ ‘That’s the difference gonorrhoea makes!’
Nowhere is this truer than the economy. Mrs Badenoch had another decent outing at PMQs this week. She challenged the Prime Minister to repeat his promise of July that the Budget would not result in tax rises. Again and again, we got the fleshy clucking, the constant blame-shifting and the repetition of unrelated statistics. It was like listening to a bitter, concussed and autistic hen. But nowhere did we get a single promise that tax would not be rising. Even with this government’s capacity for U-turns, the writing is on the wall.
After Mrs Badenoch’s questions, there were tributes to the late, great Prunella Scales. ‘I expect I’m not the only member of the House with a Fawlty Towers box set,’ said Sir Ed Davey, with his usual teatime chat show-weight intro to his usual teatime chat show-weight question. He’s right of course, the issue being that the Prime Minister seems to view Basil’s alienation of all and sundry, raging incompetence and underlying arrogance as an instructional video.
Speaking of which, Lucy Powell was in the House of Commons. Powell, whom Starmer sacked from cabinet, is now nominally the deputy leader of the Labour party. Worryingly for Sir Keir, she was cosied up next to Big Ange, her predecessor and fellow thorn in Sir Keir’s side. Tweedledum and Tweedledumber. She kept looking to Ange for confirmation about when to laugh. None of this bodes well for the PM.
Even Fawlty Towers could not distract the House from their major obsession this week. Reform weren’t granted a single question from among their MPs and yet were mentioned again and again. For all the effectiveness of Mrs Badenoch’s efforts, it was very clear whom the whips felt needed to be on the receiving end of the weekly example of embarrassing backbench self-foulage.
Knowsley MP Anneliese Midgley, who had come dressed as Gordon Gecko, asked the standard pointless planted question along the lines of ‘doesn’t the PM think Reform is ghastly and smell?’ Clearly Labour thinks that the way to get back all those voters who are giving Mr Farage his healthy poll lead is to belittle, insult and ignore them, the cast-iron strategy which worked so well during the Brexit referendum. Sometimes I wonder if, like the Wild Boy of Aveyron or boron or gravel, they are literally incapable of adaptive behaviour, doomed to repeat the same mistakes again and again. A sort of Sisyphean cycle of smuggery.
The Prime Minister bears increasing verbal resemblance to an octopus having a seizure
Indeed, the Prime Minister’s classlessness in this particular direction reared its head again when James McMurdock, clutching his daughter’s teddy bear, talked about the time she had spent in hospital. Sir Keir couldn’t resist bringing up the fact ‘he was elected as a Reform MP’. He managed to shoe-horn the turquoise peril into basically every single answer; from a question about Basildon hospital from Mr McMurdock to one about the Pope and the King by Sir Edward Leigh in which he talked about ‘toxic division’. It’s almost as if he’s scared of them.
And scared he might well be. The polls point to Labour being squeezed between the twin menaces of Polanski and Farage. The Prime Minister’s increasing verbal resemblance to an octopus having a seizure, thrashing in any direction he can, is perhaps because he knows voters are deserting him in droves. After the budget, there’ll probably be even more. ‘That’s the difference a Labour government makes!’
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