Given how miserable things are for Theresa May at the moment, with her Cabinet behaving like children, her backbenchers urging her to use the authority she doesn’t have to tell those ministers off, and a policy free-for-all caused by having no majority, today’s final PMQs before the summer should have been extremely painful for the Prime Minister. But while Jeremy Corbyn has arguably been a key factor in this whole miserable situation coming about for May, he is still quite handy when it comes to helping her survive what should be deeply miserable sessions in the Commons.
The Labour leader had a good series of questions which linked the Cabinet turmoil to Philip Hammond’s comments on public sector workers being overpaid, reminding her that she might preach public spending restraint, but that she had still been happy to spend money on her deal with the DUP. It was clear when the two parties reached their confidence-and-supply agreement that this money would be used again and again as a compelling argument for spending more on other areas, and Corbyn made good use of it again today.
Corbyn has long preached the importance of a kinder, gentler politics. Given the amount of abuse MPs on both sides now receive, few would disagree with that. But his questions today were an example of why kind and gentle can be pretty bad for scrutiny. Yes, he managed to make May appear rather robotic, as she regurgitated slogans about the importance of a strong economy from not just her own 2017 election, but also the 2015 vote. But he never quite managed to go for the jugular in a way that created new questions and stronger pressure. The exchanges between the two leaders ended with us knowing that the government is in turmoil over public sector pay and the leadership, and that it’s probably going to do something but won’t yet reveal what. We’ve known that for a good while.
What was interesting was that many Tory MPs were keen to use this session to ask questions that, while pointless and demeaning to the jobs they have been elected to do, were helpful to the Prime Minister because they ran along a similar theme of ‘does the Prime Minster agree with me that the Conservatives are very, very good?’. It’s almost as though they feel that the Cabinet turmoil that Corbyn highlighted has gone too far, and that a correction is needed. Good for Theresa May, but like Corbyn’s refusal to be aggressive, not particularly great for scrutiny.
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