The slow political death of Sir Keir Starmer continued again today. Westminster must increasingly resemble a torture chamber for the Prime Minister. He’s probably looking forward to next week and his party’s evisceration at the local elections as a moment when he might be blessed with the sweet release of career oblivion. In the meantime, we get to watch the intervening thousand cuts.
Talking of people visibly enjoying things, it’s very hard to think of someone who has greater job satisfaction in the world today than Emily Thornberry. The chairman of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee increasingly resembles a tribute act to herself. Today she vamped in wearing a sensational get-up with a faintly gothic air. The two victims of the purring Dame this week were Sir Philip Barton and Morgan McSweeney. It had been reported elsewhere that Dame Emily had said of the latter that she intended to ‘make the little shitweasel sing’. Thus she secures her reputation as the love-child of Liberace and Al Capone. She wasn’t the only one there to enjoy the most recent act of Starmergeddon. Present in the back few rows of the committee was the unmistakable figure of Diane Abbott. I couldn’t be absolutely sure that she hadn’t smuggled in popcorn.
In fact, both committee hearings were a little bit of a damp squib. Thornberry may well have had the air of Sybil Fawlty at her most imperious, but Sir Philip seemed to be taking his cues from Manuel: his basic line was ‘I know nothing’. Thornberry grilled him on what on earth the point of vetting was when Mandy had been given ‘access-all-areas’ anyway. In response, Barton just sort of mouthed at her pathetically, like a goldfish who’d been asked to recite the Aeneid.
McSweeney modestly claimed that he saw the ‘pros and cons’ of appointing Lord Mandelson. The con being that he was close buddies with a turbo-paedo and the pro being … that the US president might have been as well? Honest Morgs claimed that the Epstein revelations were ‘a knife through his soul’ – swiftly followed, courtesy of Sir Keir, by a knife in his back. Lady Nugee looked at him like he was something into which she’d accidentally plonked her stiletto. In many ways, he was.
The Prime Minister’s ‘creative’ relationship with the basic principles of loyalty was the subject of the real business of the day in the House of Commons. The Conservatives had brought a motion to try and drag a squealing and well-greased Sir Keir to the Privileges Committee. The Prime Minister was a great enthusiast for this body as leader of the opposition but has shown remarkably less willingness to engage with it in recent months.
Mrs Badenoch addressed much of her speech to Labour MPs. Her basic line was that the Prime Minister doesn’t care about them and unless they want to spend posterity in the ‘enablers of the nonce-adjacent’ subsection of Wikipedia, then they should vote against the government, which was whipping them to save Sir Keir’s already crispy skin. ‘Why,’ she asked, ‘should Labour MPs ruin their reputations to save a man who has never shown loyalty to them?’
Lots of Labour MPs were outraged at the suggestion that they were somehow being forced to give their backing to a man who hates them. Whilst there are subspecies of moss which show more independence of thought than some Labour MPs, those who had turned up to speak in favour of Sir Keir wanted everyone to know that they were quite capable of humiliating themselves without being asked to do so, thank you very much. To be fair, most of the Prime Minister’s MPs hadn’t bothered to turn up at all, presumably finding out en masse at the last minute that they were washing their hair today.
Those who had still had bits of the barrel from whence they had been rigorously scraped attached to them. Starmerite loyalist and newly promoted Trade Envoy to Seoul, John Slinger, had come, showing signs of Koreaism. The MP for Macclesfield, Tim Roca, who gives the impression of being someone who, while no stranger to having his head flushed down a school lavatory, could really do with it happening just one last time, rose to speak. His intention was to tell the House about how this case was completely different to when Keir Starmer tried to do exactly the same thing, using exactly the same mechanism and with exactly the same intended result, to Boris Johnson.
‘This,’ he huffed, ‘is a party political stunt by the Conservative party.’ ‘Bingo!’ shouted Mrs Badenoch, who had clearly seen the list of risible set phrases the whips had sent out for backbenchers to include. Behind him, even members of his own party looked on incredulously at such a vapid attempt at defence. Only a brave few, including Emma Lewell, pledged to defy the PM and vote for him to be referred to the Privileges Committee.
We were also treated to a walking lesson in indignity by another Starmtrooper – Johanna Baxter. ‘Colleagues on these benches will know that I have my own mind and will express it.’ I’m not sure whether the MP for Paisley and Renfrewshire South realises that this will make people think considerably less of her than if she were being cajoled. It’s quite a state of indignity when people are actively willing you to be suffering from Stockholm syndrome, but that’s where we are with most Labour MPs.
The other opposition parties were just as coruscating as the Tories. Stephen Flynn, who does a good line in Old Testament prophet of doom, cast an intense eye over the Labour backbenchers and told them, ‘It will come back to bite them much sooner than they think.’ Next Thursday, I suspect. Chief flunky to the Prime Minister Darren Jones had once again been sent to tie up proceedings. He accused his opponents, and I am genuinely not making this up, of voting to refer his boss to the Privileges Committee ‘to distract from Labour’s mission for clean energy’.
Yet, for all the drama, there was one critical character missing. Sir Keir was back in the Starmerbunker, feeding Larry the Cat his last bowl of chow and preparing to hand things over to Admiral von Dönitz, sorry David Lammy. Who’d have thought that the man who spent all those years enthusing about standards in parliament would suddenly find that he couldn’t be there. He always has an alibi, and one or two to spare: at whatever time the deed took place – Sir Keir Starmer WASN’T THERE! Another masterclass in absence by our own bequiffed Macavity, the master barrister who can defy the law, the Napoleon of Spam!
