The party leaders were absent today so the understudies stepped in. Angela Rayner filled the vacuum that is Sir Keir Starmer, while Oliver Dowden performed for Rishi Sunak. Rayner had prepared for the encounter by spending the entire morning in hair and make-up. Result, a sharp off-white jacket and matching slacks. And her famous ginger locks spilled out luxuriously over her padded shoulders. An eye-catching display, certainly, but perhaps not the right wardrobe for the deputy leader of the people’s party. She looked like a Miami sales assistant who flogs yachts to billionaires.
She was gracious in welcoming Dowden to the despatch box and joked that he was the ‘third deputy prime minister I’ve faced in three years.’ And she took a swipe at Rishi’s public school background. ‘I’m glad to know that the prime minister has a working-class friend, finally.’
Dowden’s genial manner conceals a sharp wit. He tore at the fake alliance between Rayner and Sir Keir which, he said, has been foisted on the public for electoral reasons. He claimed that ‘they’re at each others’ throats’ as soon as the cameras are turned off. ‘They’re the Holly and Phil of politics’, he said, referring to a pair of TV hosts whose feud is an open secret. And he asked Rayner why she had been chosen as Sir Keir’s deputy in the first place. Everyone knows that the Labour leader hopes to appoint the Lib Dems’ Ed Davey if they form a coalition after the election. Rayner thanked Dowden for proving that the Tories are already thinking like the opposition.
Sickness and poverty dominated their debate. Rayner asked if NHS waiting lists had fallen. Dowden, unable to admit the truth, cited Covid as an excuse (wearing a bit thin by now) and asked the House to consider the healthcare crisis in Labour-run Wales.
Rayner announced that waiting-list numbers have reached 7.3 million. (A great advert for Bupa – let’s hope they give her a decent kickback). She then moved to the anguished topic of ‘poverty’ and she boasted that the last Labour government had ‘made it their mission to reduce [poverty] by one million and we achieved it.’ Dowden replied with an identical claim. The Tories had come to power in 2010 and found a million paupers needing help. ‘We’ve taken a million working-age people out of poverty altogether,’ he said. Rayner countered by calling him a fantasist. Poverty, by her reckoning, has sunk to the same level inherited by Labour in 1997.
Poverty is an imponderable issue because massaged statistics are universal. A Labour backbencher earned gasps of outrage when he said that a million children had received meals from foodbanks last year. That figure gives the impression that a million kids are trapped in famine zones where emergency relief is the only option. How many of those hungry youngsters exist without a phone, a laptop and a TV? Very few. Maybe none. So ‘poverty’ is often conjured up by falsely pricing expensive assets as worthless.
Rayner personalised the issue by recalling her experience as ‘a young mum, and the sick feeling in my stomach not knowing if my wages would cover the bills.’ She berated the Tories for ‘abolishing the child poverty unit.’ And she implied that they impose penury on the public as a deliberate moral choice.
‘What level of poverty does he consider acceptable?’ she asked.
As the session closed, she swanned out of the chamber in her natty white costume, perhaps to sip cocktails beside an infinity pool or perhaps to do a shift at a soup-kitchen. Who knows?
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