Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Rebecca Long-Bailey has exposed Labour’s climate-change muddle

A festival of inertia at PMQs today. A party without a leader, a Government without a purpose and a Parliament without a programme. Theresa May, in Portsmouth for the D-Day commemorations, was understudied by David Lidington who looks like a maths professor but performs like a comedian.

His waggish streak is undermined by his gentlemanly dislike of mocking women. He blushed and giggled as he pointed out that Jeremy Corbyn’s regular deputy, Emily Thornberry, had been ‘despatched to internal exile somewhere’. Her crime, he teased, was to ‘outshine the Dear Leader’ at PMQs. In Corbyn’s place stood Rebecca Long-Bailey. Lidington warned that she too risked being ‘airbrushed out of Politburo history’ if her performance was deemed too effective.

‘He’s full of the banter today, isn’t he?’ said Long-Bailey, making her debut at PMQs. She has many talents and she knows it. Confidence, attack, a firm grip of her brief, and an easy way with a joke. Not a trace of nerves either. Her least attractive quality is her cold and rather sharp countenance which isn’t helped by her boffin’s spectacles. She looks like someone who might enjoy testing shampoo on rabbits. But her warm voice is engaging.

She led on climate change and she accused the Government of taking credit for decarbonisation policies introduced by Labour pre-2010. Then she contradicted her eco-philosophy by complaining that British Steel had been abandoned by the Tories. Steel is a highly-polluting industry and allowing it to collapse must be the greenest policy imaginable.

Lidington boasted about the Government’s successful pursuit of decarbonisation and he mocked Labour’s flip-flop attitude to coal. ‘They want to reopen the mines but not burn the coal they mine.’

Long-Bailey assured him that Labour would keep every coal mine firmly closed. Mrs Thatcher would have been proud of her.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in