Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

PMQs: Boris and Keir scrap over Corbyn’s legacy

Photo by UK Parliament / Jessica Taylor

There was an urgent question about jobs at PMQs today. One job in particular. The questioner, Maria Miller, was concerned that she hadn’t yet been hired to head a government department. She made her bid for promotion by strewing petals and scented bouquets at Boris’s feet.

She reminded us that on Friday, 24 July, the nation will celebrate the first anniversary of his outstanding leadership. She hailed his genius as a recruiter of cops and nurses. She extolled his mission to tackle ‘the regional inequalities we still have in this country’. And she described his feelgood phrase, ‘levelling up’, as a ‘vision’ which, she hoped, would guide him ‘through every year of his premiership.’

This was close to religious ecstasy. But the answer, obviously, will be ‘no’. She’s more use to Boris as a petitioner. The longer he rebuffs her, the more lavish her suit will become. Next she’ll ask for 24 July to be declared a national holiday.

Boris and Sir Keir Starmer squared up over the report into alleged Kremlin meddling in the Brexit referendum. Sir Keir accused the PM of trifling with our national security by withholding the report for months.

Boris teased him. All this talk of a Russian conspiracy, he said, was itself a conspiracy.

I’ll tell you what’s behind this. Pressure from the Islingtonian Remainers who have seized on this report to give the impression that Russian intervention was responsible for Brexit.

He accused Sir Keir’s party of acting as Putin’s mouthpiece following the Salisbury incident.

Labour parroted the line of the Kremlin while people in this country were being poisoned.

Sir Keir hated that. He pointed out that he’d helped the family of Alexander Litvinenko after his murder in 2006. So what? said Boris. When he was foreign secretary he’d sent 153 Russian diplomats packing.

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