Time’s up for Hattie. Her performance at PMQs had a whiff of embalming fluid about it. This was probably her last performance as Labour’s stand-in boss and she declared it ‘an honour and a privilege to lead this great party’. Mentally everyone corrected that to ‘this once-great party’. Labour is on the verge of sundering into two factions: the Labour party in opposition (i.e. Jeremy Corbyn) and the Labour party in exile (i.e. the rest of them).
Magnanimous Cameron hailed Hattie’s three decades on the front bench. He praised her support for women’s rights and said she’d served her constituents ‘with distinction’. Which is half-true. Harman’s offspring enjoyed the ‘distinction’ of selective schooling which her constituents were denied. But it wasn’t a day for cheap political points. Cameron offered her a cordial and slightly gooey paragraph of commendation. It might have sounded more sincere if he hadn’t waited 28 years to deliver it.
She tried hard to get Cameron to tell us how many Syrian refugees he plans to accept by Christmas. He kept schtum. Jo Cox, a new Labour MP, did much better.
‘Does he think he has led public opinion on the refugee crisis or followed it?’
Bulls eye. Or very nearly. Her plan of attack was exemplary. Take the burning issue of the day. Isolate the PM’s main weakness. And expose it in a question so brief he has no time to think. Cameron stalled for a few seconds then recalled that his spendthrift aid programme has always been unpopular. He said this proved he could show leadership when it mattered.
Bernard Jenkin’s mind was in the same area. He asked a coded question that was intended to change the course of history. He called for a ‘full spectrum response’ to the threat of Isis and asked the PM to produce a white paper that would ‘lead world opinion’. What Jenkin means is ‘invade Syria’. Cameron didn’t exactly remove the safety catch and chamber a round. But the thought has been planted.
Labour’s Debbie Abrahams accused Iain Duncan Smith of two offences. First, libelling the disabled. IDS hadn’t mentioned the disabled but he had referred to the able-bodied as ‘normal’. Which is a dreadful blunder. Everyone knows the able-bodied are ‘a hereditary elite composed of overpaid, job-hoarding, wheelchair-phobic body-fascists.’
Ms Abrahams then charged Duncan Smith with murder. It’s a favourite Labour conceit that anyone who dies without a job has been executed by the work and pensions secretary. Ms Abrahams told us that those whose entitlement to incapacity benefit has been removed are four times more likely to peg out than the rest of us. Cameron dismissed this as rubbish. Which is a relief for Ms Abrahams who will now be spared the tremendous bore of arresting IDS.
Nigel Dodds warned that peace in Ulster is in grave peril and Cameron responded with a touch of the Mother Teresas. He asked all parties to rediscover the nobility that had inspired them in the wake of the Good Friday agreement.
Where did that come from? Peace isn’t created when people are being noble but when they’re being pragmatic and rational. War fatigue can play a role. As can economic self-interest. And the most important factor is the vanity of legacy-hunting politicians who fear the posthumous label ‘terrorist’ and choose instead to play the ‘statesman’ before it’s too late. The idea that ‘nobility’ and ‘inspiration’ can end a war is pious guff. Unless Cameron has an eye on the UN Secretary-Generalship. If so he’s making all the right noises.
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