You always know it’s going to be a good PMQs when things start with Ian Lavery. After a winding and angry monologue about things being grim up north – Holden Caulfield meets Ken Loach – Lavery, with supreme comic timing, asked the Prime Minister if there was much to look forward to on the horizon. Doubly funny was that Mr Lavery, a man so aggressive in his basic delivery that he makes an XL Bully look like a maiden aunt, managed to make this sound like a threat. Though, frankly, given the government’s track record it may as well be.
Starmer’s pomposity came back to bite him as Mrs Badenoch mocked him
Up stood Sir Keir for his weekly clucking. The fact that some Tories had found Mr Lavery amusing riled the PM: ‘He talks about poverty and they heckle him, they should be ashamed.’ It’s hard to think of moments when the Prime Minister is likeable (perhaps when he’s sat, static in Number Ten, plugged into whatever device it is that affords him his life-giving juices?) but he is indisputably at his least likeable when he does this faux outrage. Today I counted four calls for an apology, three cries of ‘they should be ashamed of themselves’ and too many uses of ‘shameful!’ for history to relate.
For a man who is overseeing, inter alia, the threatening of trial by jury, a taxpayer-funded giveaway of British territory to a China-allied country, a concerted push to destroy British agriculture and a bill which threatens to push the sick and disabled into involuntary euthanasia, to talk about shame is more than a little rich. It’s like being given a school assembly by Dr Crippen.
The theme of taking responsibility – or the Prime Minister’s aversion to doing so – was the theme of Mrs Badenoch’s questioning. She pointed out that had she been working for a company she would have been fired for lying. Cue howls of injured pride from Rachel Reeves and furious muttering from Bridget Phillipson.
‘She’s losing the plot,’ snarked the Prime Minister with a grin on his face. At these moments the Prime Minister is wont to contort his features into the sort of sneer which only a maker of dartboards could love. It hardly laid to rest Mrs Badenoch’s claim that the front bench has a faintly psychopathic attitude to scrutiny. His pomposity came back to bite him as Mrs Badenoch mocked him by quoting one of his own cabinet ministers who had leaked to a newspaper that the Budget was ‘a disaster from start to finish’. ‘Was it her? Was it him? It was probably her!’ Mrs Badenoch teased, pointing at the Chancellor herself. In many ways it was a compliment, I don’t think many of us would credit Rachel Reeves with that level of self-awareness.
Even Labour members were laughing at this point. Mrs Badenoch is not a natural comedian but with material like this, you could make an Eric Morecambe out of Immanuel Kant. Best of all, even the visiting Montenegrin parliamentary delegation laughed at the cabinet’s expense and they received a translation via earpiece about 30 seconds after everyone else.
No smiles from the Prime Minister however. Instead we got the nasal invocation of the black hole. The government’s rhetoric on this topic increasingly resembles the bloodlust of Aztec priests. They climb to the top of their pyramids, invoking the great and threatened power of the black hole and demanding sacrifices to appease it. Despite its obvious centrality to Sir Keir’s thought world, even he couldn’t say how big it was. In the same answer it morphed from £22 to £16 billion. It’s almost as if, like Quetzalcoatl, it doesn’t actually exist at all.
Mrs Badenoch carried on, pointing out that he had removed the whip from MPs who had rejected the benefit cap and then gone on to lift it anyway. Rachael Maskell, the rebel leader, smiled pacifically. Sir Keir pulled a face like a haemorrhoid with a hangover. It was another strong show by Mrs Badenoch, but again, with material like this it would be more worrying if she missed.
From the rest of the House, there was more of the same. Ed Davey and the Lib Dems were still trying to make rejoining the EU a thing. A Labour backbencher with a voice like strychnine put forward the case for harsher gambling laws. When a Tory backbencher asked about trial by jury, Sir Keir repeated the oft-used emotional manipulation of talking about ‘victims’ rather than addressing the substance of the question. ‘Twas ever thus.
The PM’s replies drew fairly tepid support on the backbenches – save for the row directly behind Sir Keir, where the ministerial bag-carriers sit, which looked more animated. Indeed, PPSes Gill German and Catherine Atkinson nodded throughout at almost everything the PM said, like a pair of bobble-head dogs you’d find on a car dashboard.
We got ‘toady of the week’ too. Andrew Pakes, who looks like a child stuck inside the body of a health and safety inspector, asked a dignity-phobic ‘wasn’t the Budget marvellous’ non-question. One wonders what reward they get for these weekly abasements? I imagine paying a social call to Downing Street at the moment is hardly enticing; like accepting an invitation to a cross between the retreat from Moscow and that episode of Noel’s House Party where someone died.
God knows what the Montenegrins thought of it all. Still, at least they had a laugh.
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