Are you tiring of the stand-in routine at Prime Minister’s Questions? Oliver Dowden seems to be. When he first started this now regular gig for Rishi Sunak, the Deputy Prime Minister was clearly delighted that he could deliver the lines he’s been coaching other prime ministers to say for years. Today, as he stood in for Sunak for a second week running, he looked as though he could do with a break. His jokes were not well delivered: he teased Angela Rayner for wanting John Prescott’s old job (which she already has), and he also fluffed what was already a poor line about Keir Starmer hating tree huggers but being ‘very keen on hugging the magic money tree’. That was a reference to a reported put-down by the Labour leader of his shadow net zero secretary Ed Miliband. It was delivered so badly that Dowden appeared to be taking a chainsaw to his own tree joke.
Rayner was still enjoying the session, which she built around struggling families. She remarked that Dowden was ‘no Heseltine’, and said tens of thousands of families were facing their homes being repossessed due to the ‘Tory mortgage bombshell’. Labour seems to have decided to drop its rather less scary sounding ‘Tory mortgage penalty’ in favour of the ‘bombshell’. Continuing the theme of party history, Dowden retorted that without Margaret Thatcher, his parents wouldn’t have been able to buy their own home. Rayner also pressed him on how many children were at risk of homelessness, asking: ‘How many kids don’t have a permanent address today, compared to when Labour left office in 2010?’ And she attacked him on his use of statistics, saying: ‘I think he’s taking tips from the former prime minister on telling the facts.’
Dowden’s theme in his responses was that Labour was ‘just standing in everyone’s way’ because it backed Just Stop Oil, its ‘union paymasters’ were ‘stopping our trains’ and the ‘hated Ulez stopping cars across our capital.’
He did have a number of difficult questions to answer from the backbenches. The SNP’s Pete Wishart asked about what he described as the ‘grotesque’ story about ‘the painting over of Mickey Mouse on a children’s mural as was done by the Home Office at a detention centre’. Dowden didn’t fully engage with the question, instead telling Wishart that ‘real compassion’ involved ‘stopping the vile people smuggling trade across the channel’. There was also a question from Tory backbencher Bim Afolami about house building which pointed to the nerves in the party on declining home ownership and what it means for the voter base. Today won’t have calmed many nerves, but it might have made Tory MPs feel fonder of Rishi Sunak, and long for his return to the dispatch box.
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