How does it feel to wake up and discover that you’re a socialist? We got the answer at PMQs where the TV cameras were trained on Dan Poulter – or ‘Doctor Dan’ as he likes to be called – who recently quit the Tories and joined Labour. But his awakening seems to have poisoned his mood. His cheeks were pale, his eyes lifeless and dull as he glared at his former colleagues across the aisle.
There was more absurd behaviour from the SNP’s Stephen Flynn.
Why not celebrate with a cheeky smirk? He looked like a man whose knee operation has just been transferred to Wales. And he seems to have lost a few silky locks from his lustrous coiffure as well. His hairline is retreating faster than his principles. The seat he chose was just behind Sir Keir Starmer, who wanted to exploit the defection by declaring that throngs of Conservative voters will shortly do the same and skip gleefully into the Labour camp. But, as he spoke, Doctor Dan’s bloodless face smouldered and glowered and stared. It was enough to make you vote Tory.
Sir Keir’s performance was undermined by a second source: Speaker Hoyle. He’s up his old tricks again. After a few weeks of welcome silence, Hoyle has turned into a tinkering hoodlum. He ignores members as they speak and instead he scours the backbenches for signs of inattention which he can chastise with jokes and putdowns. He’s effectively a heckler whose removal is impossible. He disrupted Sir Keir as he examined Rishi Sunak’s vow to scrap National Insurance at a cost of £46 billion. Rishi answered the question but Sir Keir’s reply was cut off by Hoyle who yelled at some rowdy backbenchers.
‘Whoever is banging the furniture will have to pay for it,’ he said, which forced Sir Keir to repeat himself and to restart his sentence. Moments later Hoyle destroyed the climax of Sir Keir’s argument that the Tories are putting state pensions at risk.
‘If £46 billion were cut,’ said Sir Keir, ‘the value of the state pension would almost halve.’ This seismic question matters to millions of voters but Hoyle’s mind was elsewhere. He stood up and shouted at the member for Stoke-on-Trent North.
‘Mr Gullis, you’ve got to be quiet for a while,’ he yelled. As he sat down, he forgot which party leader he’d just interrupted. He called Rishi.
‘Prime Minister,’ he said. That was wrong. Realising his error, he called Sir Keir instead. For a second time, the Labour leader patiently reassembled his question and started again. The Commons deserves thoughtful and competent stewardship not the antics of this in-house hooligan.
There was more absurd behaviour from the SNP’s Stephen Flynn. In Scotland, SNP-watchers are wondering who will succeed Hamza Yousef and whether the new leader will last longer than a campervan holiday. Flynn chose to focus on Gaza, which was rather strange. No resident of Gaza has ever voted for Flynn or for the SNP. Their most recent election was held in January 2006 when Flynn was 17. But Flynn believes he has stumbled on a secret British invasion plan. His fantasy derives from a reply given by an armed forces minister in answer to a question about an imaginary battle. ‘He was neither able to confirm or deny that UK troops would soon be deployed in the middle-east,’ said Flynn.
So what? Armies never share their tactics with the enemy. But Flynn took this equivocation as proof that UK troops are about to storm the beaches of Gaza, perhaps on the anniversary of D-Day. Shaking with actorly indignation he asked Rishi to deliver an assurance ‘that there will be no involvement on the ground of UK military personnel.’ It was easy for Rishi to swat aside his synthetic outrage. But the SNP does itself no favours by indulging in bellicose rhetoric like this. The parents of serving soldiers might, just possibly, take Flynn seriously. Luckily his parliamentary chums weren’t interested. While he thundered about world war three, they could barely look up from their text messages.
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