Remember how it was? Many fans of Westminster still recall with fondness the happy afternoons when the Tories used to greet Ed Miliband at PMQs with a storm of ironic contempt. Nowadays the Labour-shambles is barely worth a half-hearted jeer let alone a burst of orchestrated scoffing. When Corbyn stands up at the despatch box, with his Oxfam suit and his whopping tofu-tum, he gets something close to library-silence from the Conservatives. There’s a Chinese whisper of resentment, a few chuntering snuffles, the odd yawned harrumph. That’s all. It’s the sound of 300 well-fed hogs resettling themselves during an afternoon nap. What politics needs is the intoxicating roar of crack-troops moving in for the kill. Something crucial has gone missing from PMQs. Fear.
The Conservatives don’t fear the opposition. The opposition leader doesn’t fear his backbenchers. And the PM doesn’t fear anything. That’s why it scarcely matters that Corbyn fared pretty well today. He was, at least, not a complete disaster (a significant triumph for him.) What Corbo can never overcome is the tragic physical atmosphere he generates. And it’s nothing to do with age. Men far older than Jezza have a manner suggestive of power, warmth, humour, vitality and a winning confidence. Poor Corbo is very meagrely endowed from the neck up. That sad wiry face, with its fuzz of yellowing bristles, makes him look like a vintage tennis ball retrieved from the back of a greenhouse after a decade of rainy summers.
He clashed with Mrs May on grammar schools. Cleverly and deliberately he used the word ‘segregation’ which still carries with it all the baleful toxins of 20th century politics. Segregation is the harbinger of apartheid, of fascism, of gas-chambers even. He submitted three specific questions. Would existing grammars relax their admission policies? Will every pupil at the new feeder schools automatically win a grammar place. And could she name ‘one expert’ who backed her policy?
Mrs May, already suffering from the selective deafness that afflicts every resident of Number 10, behaved as if these questions had never been asked. Instead she treated Corbo to her bitter, cerebral humour. Her lines felt very natural, very ‘her’, and she delivered them with a physical emphasis that seems to spring directly from her character. She leans in close, head lowered and tilted slightly sideways, her lips framed in a smirk that’s partly withering, partly self-delighting.
‘Let me gently remind him,’ she said in her soft, icy tones. ‘He went to a grammar school. I went to a grammar school. That’s how we got where we are. Although my side might be rather happier about that than his.’ She then decided, just for fun, that Corbo was about to be replaced by Owen Smith. She offered a little excerpt from his obituary: he was the Labour leader who didn’t lead Labour. ‘Whoever is the leader it’s the country that loses,’ she finished.
Of course Jezza won’t be replaced by Owen Smith. But he might, at any time, be bumped off by Mrs May. A snap election would terminate his career within weeks. And so with selfish charity, with lethal benevolence, she keeps him where she wants him. Noose around the neck. Feet on the drop. Waiting.
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