Nope. Nothing doing. Ed Miliband spent all morning racking his brains but he couldn’t think of a single disaster to pin on David Cameron at PMQs. So he made one up. A crisis, he declared sonorously, is about engulf the NHS this winter. Our A&E departments will soon be overwhelmed by flu-victims expiring on trolleys and frost-bitten pensioners spilling out of broom cupboards. He dared the prime minister to deny it.
Forget this winter, said Cameron, there’s an NHS crisis already. And it’s happening in Wales where Labour is in control of the health service. This spiked Miliband’s guns. He was about to claim that the crisis had already begun in England. Instead, he accused Cameron of failing to hit his NHS targets ‘for 15 consecutive weeks.’ The PM said that he had reached all of his NHS targets for no fewer than ‘27 weeks’.
What targets? No one seemed to care. It was like watching two gibbons trying to pelt each other to death with jelly.
The Speaker’s bid for stardom continues. Never a pretty sight. He was in and out of the debate like the hokey-cokey. He rebuked members for ‘shouting at the tops of their voices at the prime minister’. These violations of peace and quiet seem to displease him for aesthetic reasons. ‘It’s low-grade and down-market,’ he chided. ‘Cut it out.’ The hooligans soon began yelling again. Bercow rose and yelled back at them. He likes to twist his mouth sideways as he shouts. And his syntax gets similar treatment. ‘To those who can’t grow up, try,’ he said, inverting the natural word order like a self-conscious sixth-former standing in for the head-master. Later he informed the house that he ‘receives bucket-loads of letters’ from voters who are dismayed by the rowdiness of MPs. No one seems more thrilled by this tidal wave of indignation than Mr Bercow who clearly relishes his role as the world’s leading conduit of parliamentary complaint. Perhaps he writes all the letters himself.
Tory backbenchers plugged away at the economic good news. And they tried to tighten their headlock on trade union militancy. Cameron used the word ‘bullyboys’ to describe Unite’s extremists. And he likened Ed Miliband to a Sicilian mayor who caves in to the mafia.
As the economy improves, Labour are relying more and more on the one weapon that can seriously hurt the Tory cabinet. Moral disgust. Or, in plain terms, the posh-boy smear. But there’s a severe snag. It lacks deadliness when it comes from the Labour leader because, even in his weekend clobber, Ed Miliband looks as trim and prosperous as a Fortnum’s hamper. Put him in a suit and he could be a City whizz-kid on his way to interview a new bloodstock-dealer over cocktails.
The privilege libel is best left to backbenchers who exude disadvantage. White-haired, trembly-voiced David Winnick played the part expertly today. With all the thunder he could summon, he accused Cameron and his chancellor of not understanding the insecurities of the hard-pressed and the low-paid. ‘What is happening is unacceptable. And I find it contemptible,’ he quailed. Then he wilted into his seat as if crushed by the sheer tonnage of Cameron’s moral turpitude. Sarah Elan-Jones put her gentle Welsh lilt to similar use. Cameron does nothing, she trilled, and he lets executive pay outstrip the wages of ordinary workers.
‘Is it because he’s unwilling, or because he’s a bit useless at being prime minister?’
This kitchen-table phrasing subtly complemented her accent. The canny old thing. Cameron advised her that the most useless object on view was ‘her own front bench.’
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