Statute 343.36 in the US state of Minnesota reads thus: ‘No person shall operate, run or participate in a contest, game, or other like activity, in which a pig, greased, oiled or otherwise, is released and wherein the object is the capture of the pig’. I hope, for the sake of the integrity of their state laws, no Minnesotans were watching Prime Minister’s Questions today. There was one little piggy very much at large, greased and squealing, trying to avoid capture. Its name? Sir Keir Starmer, KCB.
It started badly. The first big bad wolf to come a-knocking was Dr Luke Evans. He did so in a calm and collected manner, simply listing all the scandals the government has successfully crammed into the last 12 months. It was less a question and more a coroner’s report.
Sir Keir was initially ebullient – though the best he could do was dredge up the Priti Patel bullying scandal which occurred three ministries ago. There were not many cheers behind him and next to the PM his new frontbench sat there with the stoniest of faces, like rejected models for the heads of Easter Island.
Labour MPs shuffled out like they’d just been on a Ghost Train
Next came Mrs Badenoch. She has a track record of allowing this little piggy to slip through her fingers and squeal another day. Today, however, Mrs Badenoch had Sir Keir’s number. Did he, in light of the Epstein allegations, still have confidence in Lord Mandelson?
First there was a standard procedural answer about the import of the Special Relationship and the role the ambassador plays. Whenever he doesn’t want to answer a question – which is always – Sir Keir invariably resorts to this garbled rehashing of basic principles. It’s like listening to a sat nav rescued from a road crash site read out Wikipedia. Mrs Badenoch pushed again. The grease began to fly; ‘Full due process was followed!’, he squealed. And there it was, the failed technocrat’s answer to everything.
‘I wasn’t asking a question about process, I was asking about his judgement.’ Wriggle, wriggle! Did Sir Keir still have confidence in the ambassador? We barely got an oink in reply, just a mumbled expression of his confidence delivered to the carpet in the House of Commons.
‘I think it’s embarrassing that the Prime Minister is still saying that he has confidence in a man who brokered deals with convicted child sex offenders.’ Again the reply came; ‘full due process’, ‘procedure’, ‘independent elements’. By this point his own benches were so still and silent that they might as well have been dead – or at least wished themselves in Minnesota where such piggy-chasing is illegal.
Mrs Badenoch then brought up the strikes, she brought up the deputy leadership debacle, she brought up the economy and she brought up the forced reshuffle. The link, she said, was ‘his bad decisions, his bad judgment and his total weakness’. This little piggy had been well and truly sent to market and returned, cured and packaged in rasher form. When even Rachel Reeves looks on you with pity then you know it’s been bad.
Even Sir Ed Davey, who normally asks a question so soft-ball that it might safely be entrusted to a teething toddler, went after our little piglet on the question of Mandy’s nonce-adjacency. ‘Due process has been followed’, the Prime Minister repeated again, devoid of emotion, now resembling one of the more traumatised patients in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
There came little support from the cavalry, save for a few planted grumbles about Reform UK and an embarrassingly fawning question about R’NHS. Proceedings ended with Liz Twist reminding the House that it was World Suicide Prevention Day. Just down the corridor another ghoul from the Days of Blair – Lord Falconer – is attempting, with the obvious connivance of Number 10, to stop the House of Lords from having any real say on the Grim Leadreaper’s Assisted Suicide Bill. With no trace of irony the PM said that he would work across the House on suicide prevention.
So it ended. Labour MPs shuffled out like they’d just been on a Ghost Train. Which they sort of had. In the midst of them, off waddled our little piggy, doubtless to see if Lord Mandelson can arrange for him to be in the state of Minnesota at about midday next Wednesday.
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