It was taxes that eventually did for Al Capone. And Spiro Agnew. And Judy Garland. So now the taxman’s bell tolls for Big Ange – who has often presented herself as a sort of mix of all three of those figures. The hard-partying working-class girl turned union bruiser turned second most powerful politician in the land.
Scandal has become second nature to Labour ministers, to the extent that they now have a sort of standard issue hangdog look to wear in Parliament which indicates to the world that bringing up their bad behaviour is actually not very #BeKind, and so when you think about it, they’re the real victims. Ange deployed this to great effect as she shuffled into Prime Minister’s Questions today. She earned herself a pat of sympathy from Lucy Powell. What is completely astonishing is that no matter how appallingly and hypocritically they behave, nothing seems able to shake Labour out of the intense belief that they are the Good Guys™.
The Leader of the Opposition is like a vampire cursed with haemophobia – every time the jugular is presented to her she manages to avoid it
Inevitably then, surely Ange would be front and centre of the questions today? Not so, only a brief mention from Mrs Badenoch at the start of her questioning before she proceeded to build Sir Keir his own soapbox to pontificate about not taking lectures from the party opposite. The Leader of the Opposition is like a vampire cursed with haemophobia – every time the jugular is presented to her she manages to avoid it.
That Sir Keir seems honestly to believe – or more accurately think we’ll believe – that the country is in the midst of some economic miracle is enough to have him sectioned under the mental health act, but every time Mrs Badenoch mentions the economy it gives him a chance to perform his show-reel of platitudes about trade deals and growth in the G7. She should be skewering him, not letting him play nasal P. T. Barnum. Surely exploiting the fact that his party is reaching Renaissance papacy levels of corruption and the fact that he and his deputy visibly loathe one another ought to have been a better use of Badenoch’s time?
So it went back and forth, nothing changed, no lessons learned. It was like watching a couple fight about whether the heating should be on in their house in Pompeii, AD 79. The other questions weren’t much better. We got the rhetorical equivalent of embarrassing teenage love poetry to the ECHR from Ed Davey, and the standard issue incoherent rant about weather which we’ve come to expect from Ellie Chowns, the woman too unimpressive for even the Green party to elect as leader. There were no questions from Reform – Mr Farage was notably absent in Washington, something Sir Keir oinked about with great glee. Whether he’ll be as happy if Mr Farage succeeds in lobbying the Americans to sanction Britain for its increasingly authoritarian approach to free speech is another matter.
On the subject of which, there were two decent questions – first from new Tory MP Jack Rankin about the arrest of Graham Linehan. Inevitably the Prime Minister didn’t answer the question but went into his usual pseudo-patriotic guff about the ‘proud tradition of free speech’ (which he and his party are doing their best to snuff out). It was sub-Churchillian, by which I mean the dog which used to flog car insurance in the Noughties.
Sir Julian Lewis quoted criticism of the Chagos treachery deal at the PM; former sea lord and Labour minister Admiral Lord West had called the decision ‘disgraceful’. The PM belched out one of the trademark scrutiny-phobic non-answers before abruptly sitting down again. ‘I have the misfortune to disagree with him’, he barked, sounding more than usual like a Dalek with a head cold. To be fair, ‘we are paying a China-aligned country billions of pounds to take over sovereign British territory because my dodgy lawyer mates said so’ isn’t really something you can admit to in Parliament.
So Ange lived to fight another day. Let’s see how the week progresses. Given what she’s managed by way of defence so far it doesn’t bode well. When asked about whether it was accurate that she had evaded tax, she told the BBC it was accurate ‘in a different sense’. Ah yes, that special form of accuracy which only kicks in when a Labour minister as opposed to a Tory one is found snout-in-trough. This isn’t just two-tier governance – it’s the whole tiramisu. Still, a silver lining, things must be bad for Rayner, on her way out of PMQs she got a hug from Rachel Reeves. I give her a week.
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