It has taken Sir Keir Starmer just under 11 months to enter his Brezhnev era. Portly, autocratic and reliant on past glories, the Prime Minister began today’s PMQs by reading a list that would make Borat proud of the infrastructural benevolences to make benefit glorious region of Red Wall. In Sir Keir’s world, there is no decay or decline: the economy is booming, pensioners and children are well cared for and the streets are safe.
Notable by her absence was the Deputy Prime Minister: those windows of Downing Street won’t measure themselves
The praesidium – sorry, Front Bench – lapped this up. Or those who turned up did. Absent was the Chancellor who had been sent to gawp like an aquarium dweller in front of a group of factory workers who – like most people of taxpaying age – visibly despised her. One man kept plunging his head into his hands every time she spoke as the existential dread took over. This was the Muppet Show meets Rodin.
Meanwhile, back in the Commons, our spam-hued Brezhnev was flanked by the Sage of Tottenham, David Lammy, and Lucy ‘Dog Whistle’ Powell. Hardly the brightest and best and that’s from a cabinet who are, shall we say, unlikely to be troubling MENSA any time soon.
The Prime Minister has a late Soviet attitude to answering questions too. Rather than talk about the child benefit cap as he was asked, he launched into a lengthy diatribe about Ukraine. When pushed on the economic forecast, he talked about the Chagos. There are trained corvids who, using a rock and twig-based communication system, can answer questions more clearly than Sir Keir.
On the Chagos debacle, which he brought up by the way – presumably as serial killers like to reference their previous crimes in their mocking letters to the authorities – he yelled that it was “absolutely clear that legal uncertainty would have threatened our strategic capability.” What is the PM’s benchmark for clarity one wonders? As clear as a Beijing smog? As clear as Lord Mandelson’s conscience?
By this point Mrs Badenoch was getting seriously frustrated; she gesticulated wildly, as if trying to play charades with Helen Keller. In fact, she was more like the wolf, huffing and puffing all she could but still confronted with a smug little piggy happy in his house of bricks.
The backbenches fared no better at eliciting answers. The new Reform MP for Runcorn, Sarah Pochin, asked about the burqa and received an answer about Liz Truss. Some of them, in fairness, didn’t even try.
Every Wednesday an invertebrate desperate for the dear Leader’s dispensations asks a humiliating non-question about how wonderful everything is. Alex Barros-Curtis of Cardiff West was this week’s nominated dignity-vacuum. He gave a lengthy address about the PM’s efforts on steel. Fleshy Brezhnev smiled and said he was “doing very well”.
Yet as always with the USSR – especially in its later stages of decline – the story was more about what was not seen and not heard. Or rather who. Every other evasion (sorry, answer) offered by Starmer contained a direct dig at someone who remained silent throughout the session, the MP for Clacton. Equally notable by her absence was the Deputy Prime Minister: those windows of Downing Street won’t measure themselves.
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