A harrowing session at PMQs. Rishi Sunak seemed subdued and de-energised. His fizz had gone flat. The usual hip-wriggling shuffle at the despatch had been replaced with a hunched, anxious pose. Heavy shoulders. Head drooping. The Middle East crisis has snapped his elastic.
The issue Sir Keir had ducked was Gaza. Too hot to handle
Sir Keir, by contrast, was beaming like a City embezzler celebrating his daughter’s wedding. Spreading one arm wide, he turned munificently towards his backbenchers and welcomed the victors from last week’s by-elections. He poked fun at the defeated Tory in Tamworth, Andrew Cooper, who had dismissed the complaints of voters who can’t buy food but can afford a mobile phone.
Sir Keir said that Labour won last week because it ‘had not told constituents to eff off if they’re struggling with the cost of living.’ He pulled a look of outrage. ‘Throwing expletives at struggling families?’ he tutted. He asked Sunak to call a general election. ‘They’ve heard the government telling them to eff off and they want the chance to return the compliment.’
Sunak tried to expose inconsistencies (or lies if you prefer) in Labour’s housing policy. Sir Keir claims that he wants to build, build, build, except when he doesn’t want to build, build, build. His party has hit on a formula that works in constituencies across the country. ‘New housing everywhere – but not here.’ Sunak quipped that Nadine Dorries’s replacement would be a welcome change. ‘I hope the new member may actually support me a little bit more than the last one.’
Tory backbenchers chortled at that, but not very loudly. Their mood was funereal. Muted cheers greeted their leader when he arrived. No one called for ‘more’ when he’d batted away Sir Keir’s six questions.
The issue Sir Keir had ducked was Gaza. Too hot to handle. One false step could ruin his prospects. He’s decided to pretend that the Middle East, like his housing policy, doesn’t exist. Other MPs filled the void. Stuart D. Macdonald of the SNP said that ‘two million people cannot be sustained with just twenty-odd aid lorries.’ He mentioned Israel’s right to self-defence and he called for ‘a humanitarian ceasefire.’ His point about aid conceals an issue that no one wants to raise. Why does Gaza have limitless supplies of weapons but no food?
The SNP’s Mhairi Black used a simile from the arsonist’s lexicon. ‘We risk pouring petrol on fire in a place that only requires a spark to ignite.’ She referred to UK citizens stuck in Gaza with, ‘no food, no water, no medicine and no way out.’ And she raised the stakes by adding a ticking-clock device as if the crisis were a Hollywood thriller. ‘Forty-eight hours of fuel are left to keep the hospitals going but that was 28 hours ago.’ The fuel, she added ominously, ‘runs out tonight.’
Yasmin Qureshi read an email from a fugitive in Gaza. ‘We’re being massacred, relentlessly bombed, homes being destroyed.’ Qureshi said that ‘130 babies in incubators are in danger if fuel doesn’t reach the hospital.’ One child, by her reckoning, is being killed every 15 minutes. Then her question: ‘How many more innocent Palestinians must die before this Prime Minister calls for a humanitarian ceasefire?’
This makes a crude assumption: Sunak is personally slaughtering children but chooses to prolong the massacre rather than call it off. That’s neither true nor helpful. As the session ended, John McDonnell, the former shadow chancellor, asked for a recall of parliament if a ground invasion begins. There could be more of this.
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