Sir Keir Starmer has a sausage problem. Stop sniggering at the back. Not only was there his infamous slip demanding that Hamas ‘return the sausages’, but there is also the fact that he increasingly resembles a great British banger: pink-skinned, spitting and whistling when grilled and filled with all kinds of rubbish. Sir Keir has become the Sausage King of Westminster and today – at the House of Commons liaison committee – he was due a spell on the barbecue.
Part of the problem for the Sausage King is that he’s managed to wind up a fair few of the select committee chairs who make up the grilling committee: quite an achievement given that almost all of them are his own MPs. Emily Thornberry was there, looking extraordinarily jolly for one who’d been passed over for attorney-general in favour of one of Starmer’s lawyer mates. Dame Meg Hillier spearheaded the rebellion that forced his humiliating climb-down on welfare, while Florence Esholami led much of the resistance to the assisted suicide legislation, a bill which purports to be the brain-child (which in this case is unfair on both brains and children) of Kim Leadbeater but which Westminster insiders know has the Sausage King’s porky fingerprints all over it. There’s also the small matter of how badly things are going.
The first few minutes were relatively uneventful; not so much a grilling as a quick go on the sunbed. But soon both Dame Meg and Ms Esholami rounded on him over the housing crisis. Eshalomi pointed out that councils were currently being forced to bid for the same housing stock for multiple uses – thus pitching homeless children against asylum seekers. Did the Sausage King plan to do anything about this?
‘I’m furious’, he said in a voice that betrayed all the emotion of the announcement of a rail replacement bus service. Hillier tried again; ‘precisely’ what accommodation would the government be taking over to house asylum seekers at the expense of local residents, she asked? The PM replied that there was ‘lots of housing’ going spare, ‘and many local authorities that can be used’. With a look of real exasperation Hillier asked whether he could provide just a single example. ‘No, but I’ll write in and give you details’, came the inevitable reply.
Someone who actually was furious was Debbie Abrahams who launched into a remarkable broadside over the government’s botched welfare reforms. ‘This was poor legislation, so far removed from Labour values that I felt ashamed,’ she said, and I promise this is not hyperbole, bristling with contempt. ‘We must do better, Prime Minister’. The Sausage King opened his nostrils and shot Mrs Abrahams a look of genuine venom. The grilling was getting hotter. Sizzle sizzle!
Even possible allies turned on him; Liam Byrne asked about potential tax cuts. ‘No Prime Minister can set a budget six months in advance’, stammered the PM. The sausage turned pinker and pinker.
Dame Caroline Dinenage asked what the PM was doing to support charities forced to cut their staff due to NIC increases. The Prime Minister belched out an answer of purest word vomit; ‘We are looking at what we can do on – sort of, business rates for charities and, sort of, putting in the support they need’.
‘That’s it?’, replied Dame Caroline, raising a quizzical eyebrow. She accused him of ‘balancing the books on the backs of charities like children’s hospices’. By now, the Banger looked like he was actually going to go bang. Dame Caroline went one further when she asked him why his constituents were so mean when it came to charitable giving. After all, she observed, ‘you and your colleagues aren’t averse to being on the receiving end of a bit of philanthropic giving yourselves’.
Finally, the grilling came to its end. In everything from the economy to migration to welfare it had revealed a litany of failures. Dame Meg ended proceedings with a softer tone: ‘What’s been your best moment in the last 12 months?’ The Sausage King said it was walking into Downing Street. On that it was very hard to take issue with him; it’s certainly been downhill from there!
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