Anyone who thinks the House of Commons behaves badly at the best of times would have been sickened today. David Cameron went on the appalling case of Baby P, and twice the Speaker had to remind baying MPs that they are discussing the gruesome death of a 17-month-old toddler. His first intervention should have been enough to silence them (“It will not do, shouting across the chamber when this terrible news has come to us”) and after it, David Cameron switched. Whether deliberately or not he lost his cool, sweeping his notes to the floor. His question did deserve an answer: why should this baby’s death be investigated by the same council supposed to be looking after him?
Gordon Brown waffled for a while, then said: “I do regret [him] making a party political issue of this issue”. Sure, Cameron had been short – but party politics? When Brown gets in trouble, he reverts to playing the national unity card but here it was utterly inappropriate. Cameron then exploded again. “I think what the PM said just now was, frankly, cheap. I asked some perfectly reasonable questions about a process that’s wrong and I ask the Prime Minister to withdraw the attack.” Brown had run out of his compassionate words scripted for him at the start of PMQs, and reverted to his automaton self. It was disastrous.
Cameron then stood up, his face reddened. “You accuse me of party politics about this,” he said. The Speaker rose; Cameron thought he’d get into trouble for saying “you”; but, no, Martin wanted to silence the House – mindful of the reputational damage being caused by the members’ unruly behaviour. They were, he reminded them, talking about “A little child who has gone before us”. Cameron continued. “I was asking a perfectly reasonable question about a tragic case made by his own Children’s Secretary [the self-investigation] – please can he withdraw that I was playing party politics, because he knows I wasn’t.” Self-investigation is “wrong in every other walk of life” why not here?
To me, this display showed three things.
1. Brown’s great weakness is seeing everything for factional advantage, and this is now obvious. As ConservativeHome have noted, there is something offputting about his undisguised glee during an economic crisis, during which 1,500 are being laid off every day. Yes, the agenda plays to his strengths: but only at the cost of hundreds of thousands of jobs. Is that really so much to smile about? He obviously hadn’t reflected very much on the wider impact of the Baby P case, being caught up in the Westminster bubble (like most MPs). Baby P would have hit Cameron instantly.
2. Brown is an over-promoted finance minister who can’t do issues that don’t involve economics. How differently Tony Blair would have handled this. Brown’s zero emotional intelligence was on full display. He started off with words evidently prepared for him: “People are not only shocked and saddened but horrified and angry”. And that was it. He was evidently ill-briefed for this PMQs, and should have had far more to say about the subject. But when it’s not about finance, he just can’t improvise.
3. Cameron can. He not only realised the Baby P case is powerful enough to go on, but he was versatile enough to keep at it and press Brown for trying to play the party card. He sensed Brown’s weakness and went for it. IDS and Howard would never have tore up their six-question script like that, Cameron did. If he was faking his anger, he did so very well.
Of course, Cameron was helped by not having to discuss economics. And the result of all this is to fuse together the perfect television news package: the Baby P story, Cameron’s outrage and Brown’s floundering. But I do not think Cameron was entirely cynical in this. Part of him will have known it was good to have Brown on the defensive on a human interest story. Part of him would, I suspect, be consumed by genuine anger.
And on the economy Nick Clegg just put it beautifully. “Week after week I’ve been calling for the PM to cut taxes… and he’s raising expectations that he’ll do just that., Why should anyone believe him? This is the PM who wont take responsibility for people losing their jobs, but did take credit for a bank rescue plan he copied. This is the man who doubled the tax rate on 5m of the poorest people in this country and called that a tax cut. When it comes to taxes, he may pretend he’s Robin Hood but is no more than a petty pickpocket.” Brown said Clegg would cut spending by £20bn, and Clegg rightly objected – his paltry tax cut comes down to £5bn when you look at it, about 1% of government spending. Negligible.
Labour MPs had come in hoping for Brown to beat up Cameron on the economy, and evidently saw Baby P as a distraction from this. Yet this story – like Victoria Climbe – is one that strikes a chord with the British public. There are some days when you feel sick about the entire political system. I can’t say Cameron emerged as a hero, or sought to – but today showed everything that is rotten about Westminster.
UPDATE: I omitted an important point above – Brown accused Cameron of playing politics in response to Cameron prefacing a question by saying he didn’t expect an answer because he never gives them. Could one argue that this was Cameron using the Baby P tragedy as a platform on which to launch a personal attack on Brown? I’d be interested in what CoffeeHousers have to say.
UPDATE 2: Forget the first update. Brown’s people have a different excuse: that he thought Cameron was trying to make a “Broken Britain” attack by claiming the mother was a 17-year-old girl when in fact she was 27 and privately-educated etc. Hence the party political point.
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