In the last 48 hours the government of Sir Keir Starmer has ended a link between the House of Lords and the Anglo-Saxon Witan by booting out the hereditary peers and beginning the process of removing the right to trial by jury which goes back to Magna Carta. He probably, genuinely, believes this to have been a good couple of days in the office.
After this bout of constitutional vandalism, Sir Keir came to one thing he probably also wants to abolish but currently cannot: PMQs. Mrs Badenoch tried to ask him about fuel duty – Sir Keir, however, thought he had detected a change in Tory tone and policy on Iran and so decided to speak about that instead. The bottom line was that they were wrong and he – the great Nostradamus of foreign policy – was right. There he stood, the great moraliser, like an old pillowcase filled with mince, and shook his jowls in righteous indignation: ‘They won’t want to hear this,’ he said, in his fleshy caw.
All of this was a) a distraction tactic and b) part of his long running campaign to discredit the leader of the opposition as a potential prime minister rather than answer any of her, or anyone else’s, questions. He lectured Mrs Badenoch about ‘the important decisions a prime minister has to make’, as if he represents an example of noble leadership. Sir Keir presumably thinks that he will one day be whispered of in a hall of fame for his reforming government, as opposed to earning a place in the Chamber of Horrors.
He also sought to make political hay by claiming Mrs Badenoch had shown she was weak by U-turning too much. This is like being condemned for implementing insufficient child safety procedures by King Herod or being accused by Henry VIII of being insufficiently committed to a new relationship.
I would say there is a naked shamelessness to Sir Keir in moments like this, but it invokes an image which might live – horribly – in our heads, free of rent. Buoyed by what he clearly thought of as a rare success at the dispatch, Sir Keir launched into a series of counterfactuals about what might happen were Mrs Badenoch in charge. This was so egregious that even Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the somnolent Cerberus of Parliamentary standards, had grown fed up. ‘This is Prime Minister’s Questions, not opposition questions,’ he sighed at Sir Keir and cut him off mid-righteous oink.
Mrs Badenoch asked again about petrol and finally we got something resembling an answer to a question. ‘There’s not going to be a rise in fuel duty,’ squealed the Prime Minister. If that isn’t a sign to get down to William Hill and put the house on an imminent U-turn, then I don’t know what is. It was short lived: he switched quickly into a rant about the RAF.
By the end of Mrs Badenoch’s time, the two were having completely different conversations, indeed they may as well have been in separate rooms. The rest of the session consisted of a Labour MP asking a jokey question about his mum, the Lib Dems continuing their impression of one of those joke client parties who make up the ‘opposition’ in the Russian Duma and, as he does every week, Stephen Flynn of the SNP glowering at Sir Keir with raw contempt. It’s probably a blessing the link with the Witan has been extinguished; one can only imagine what the ghosts of thanes past would make of the day-care centre which parliament has become. Still, we’ll have to tune in next week to see if the Prime Minister answers any questions then, but don’t hold your breath.
