Cigs and booze. These issues dominated PMQs today. Ed Miliband tried to portray the PM as a puppet of ‘Big Tobacco’ whose decision not to introduce plain packaging for cigarettes was influenced by his electoral guru, Lynton Crosby. Had the PM ever ‘had a conversation’ with Crosby about fag packets? Shifty Cameron dodged sideways and declared that Crosby never ‘lobbied me about anything’.
‘Weasel words,’ said Miliband, looking triumphant. He quoted a Tory GP, Sarah Wollaston, who labelled the decision ‘a day of shame’ for the government.
Up popped the lady herself from the backbenches. Dr Wollaston begged the PM to re-think his decision against ‘minimum unit pricing’, which she claims, will ‘stop people falling into alcohol addiction.’ Plucky Dr Wollaston is waging a powerful campaign on two fronts, public and personal. Publicly, she wants us all to enjoy fewer freedoms and entitlements. Personally, she wants to enjoy as many freedoms and entitlements as she can get her hands on. These take the form of TV appearances and invitations to join waffle-sessions and guff-creation schemes with panels of medical experts and other bores. The first part, her public policy, is going badly. Thank God too. High booze prices simply make home-made hooch – which causes blindness – a viable option. Her crusade to deprive drinkers of their eyesight has left Cameron cold. But he saluted her ‘strong and noble campaign on this issue’. Noble? Is the good doctor heading for the maximum security care-home next to the Commons?
Labour’s backbenches returned to Lynton Crosby. Questioner after questioner tried to depict the PM as Mr Crosby’s corporate puppet. They failed because the format of PMQs is hopeless at exposing insincere or dishonest replies. The ramshackle and near-mutinous atmosphere allowed Cameron to turn every Crosby missile into an attack on Labour’s union links and the influence of Len McCluskey. Not that this stopped Labour from trying. Clearly they were under orders from the top to promote the Crosby connection.
Miliband’s hope is that Crosby will make Miliband more attractive to the people who’d vote for Miliband anyway. (Strange ploy but it’s all Ed’s got for now). Labour members would regard Crosby as a major sleazebag even if he weren’t a Tory consultant. He’s Australian and therefore optimistic; he’s a proven electoral winner; and he hobnobs with wealthy businessfolk. These values – prosperity, professional success and a positive outlook – belong to New Labour. And Miliband is on a bizarre mission to purge his Blairite past and to pursue the scorched-earth, core-vote strategy that worked so badly for Gordon Brown.
For Ed, the upside is that Crosby is unlikely to break his vow of silence and acquire a public profile. And as long as he remains unknown, his value as a hate-figure is infinite. With McCluskey the opposite is true. He rushes towards the cameras like a kid making for a candy-floss van. With each appearance he becomes more ridiculous and less threatening. After two weeks on our TV screens he’s emerged as a gobby but innocuous spiv with a cheese-grater voice and a set of political opinions that belong to the Teasmade era. Even his beer-gut looks a bit 1970s.
Cameron was very Cameroonian today. Fluent, angry, dextrous, cutting. He got so fed up with the Crosby offensive that at one point he began to improvise:
‘Lynton Crosby’s only role is to advise me on how to defeat a divided and useless Labour party. And on today’s evidence I’m not sure he’s really necessary.’
This worked well. And it made the Chancellor double over in a fit of giggles that nearly caused his face to hit the floor. But that looked extremely bad. A chancellor in hysterics is never encouraging. If he does hit the floor, the pound may follow.
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