Poor old Labour. They’re still so crushed by the election result that they put up dead-parrot Harriet Harman against Cameron every Wednesday. Why not let the leadership candidates use him for target practice instead?
PMQs is sometimes a contest of ideas and sometimes a contest of insults. Today it was a contest of moral registers. Harman asked about the EU referendum and Cameron scoffed at her colleagues for voting en bloc for a referendum they’ve opposed for five long years. ‘The biggest mass conversion since that Chinese general baptised his troops with a hose pipe.’
Harman was off. She scrambled to the top of Sanctimony Hill and delivered a sermon on the mount. Cameron was the prime minister, she conceded. ‘He won the election. He doesn’t need to do the ranting and sneering and gloating. He can just answer the question. He should show a bit more class.’
Fat chance. Cameron is a pugilist by instinct and training, and he regards the label ‘attack-dog’ as a far higher accolade than ‘statesman’. When Harman asked about childcare he cited one of her public lamentations over Labour’s defeat. ‘A great number of people feel relieved we’re not in government,’ Harman has said.
‘He just can’t help himself,’ she wailed. ‘Gloat. Go right ahead and gloat.’ And she begged him to give ‘an answer’ to her next question ‘rather than a gloating session.’
Cameron echoed her vocabulary. It’s hardly ‘gloating’, he said, to quote his opponent with approval. He rubbed it in with another of her recent confidences.
‘People tend to like a leader who they feel is economically competent.’ Cameron thanked her for this accolade.
These tactics may seem puerile but they’re hardly blameworthy. No one forces Harman to hand weapons to her foes. Maybe she should think twice before giving the Tories the keys to her ammunition dump.
Angus Robertson maintained the high-minded atmosphere when he spoke about inequality in the UK. Bosses must pay the living wage, he said. The PM was chuffed to reveal that Number 10 is among those generous and enlightened employers.
‘I hope that’s not gloating,’ he added, still grinding his knife into Saint Hattie.
Robertson complained that the UK government’s subsidiary agencies don’t pay the living wage. But all of Scotland’s do.
That, said Cameron, is because Scotland gets lots of extra cash from England. But the consensus on fiscal autonomy has broken down. He quoted an SNP politician who calls it, ‘disastrous’. Another says it’s ‘economic suicide.’ Typical SNP, said the PM.
‘You ask for something you don’t want, then complain when you don’t get it.’
This is just the sort of tacky, school-boy jeering that so many viewers of PMQs complain about. But it’s the lifeblood of parliament. The PM is a politician not a constitutional philosopher. If Aristotle occupied Number 10 we might marvel at his far-sighted profundities for a week or two but we’d soon grow tired and have him replaced with a down-and-dirty cage-fighter.
Saint Hattie’s disciples are supported by Mr Bercow who regularly pines for a loftier tone at PMQs. The risk is that the Commons fills up with self-admirers, do-gooders and tramp-stroking aid-workers whose reverence for ‘the dignity of the House’ is merely a cloak for their touchiness and pomposity.
Cock-pit politics may be squalid, vulgar and unilluminating but it’s far more entertaining than its contrary. And it’s more honest. Politicians simmer with contempt and loathing for their enemies. Why shouldn’t they show it? At least we can see them as they are.
And if voters don’t like it, let them stand.
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