It was always going to be a good one wasn’t it? There was almost a sense of guilt watching today’s PMQs. My fellow sketch writers and I felt like the people who slow down to get a good view of a particularly horrific pile-up on a dual carriageway.
Confirmation of this came when the Prime Minister dispensed with his usual embarrassing self-congratulatory monologue at the start of PMQs and simply told the House he’d had meetings with ministerial colleagues and others. One hopes that the latter category includes the Metropolitan Police.
We started with a little hors d’oeuvre of Labour incompetence. A nondescript Scottish MP had been primed to talk about how the SNP were the enemy of the high street. ‘She’s a superb champion for Paisley’, droned Sir Keir in reply. It’s funny how, even when trying to avoid the topic of Lord Mandelson, the Prime Minister managed to sound like he was praising him. I bet the ex-ambassador never wore a plain-patterned tie in his life.
Mrs Badenoch stood up quietly and, resplendent in a white dress, made her case calmly and yet also furiously, like a wronged bride at a sham wedding. After paying tribute to Epstein’s victims she asked: did the Prime Minister know about Epstein’s links with Mandy when he appointed him? A very brief question and, I suspect, all the more terrifying for being so.
Sir Keir then commenced a speech only marginally less self-indulgent than Cardinal Newman’s ‘Apologia pro Vita Sua’. If anything, Sir Keir was the victim, ackshully. ‘To learn that there was a cabinet minister leaking sensitive information in the aftermath of the 2008 crash was infuriating’. Sir Keir delivered this in a nasal staccato which I think he intended to be a sign of raw human emotion. In fact he sounded like Dalek who’d just been given a parking ticket.
Mrs Badenoch reminded him that she’d asked a simple question and that, quelle surprise, he’d failed to answer it. Did he know?
‘Ah ah, as the House would expect, we went through a process’. Starmer stuttered like, to pick a simile out of the blue, a short-fuelled private jet struggling to land on a private Caribbean island. The words ‘due diligence’ escaped his lips a few times, but without any regard to their actual meaning. As this extended on-stage death scene continued, the Labour benches were funereally quiet. Sir Keir carried on not waving but drowning. A few benches back Big Ange licked her lips. The only reaction he really got was a big laugh when he claimed he was being ‘totally open with the house.’
Mrs Badenoch asked again – did the security briefing detail Mandelson’s relationship with the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein? ‘Yes, it did,’ said Sir Keir. Stop the clocks! Put out more flags! Slay the fatted Morgan McSweeney! This might be the first time ever that the Prime Minister has answered a direct question honestly on a Wednesday afternoon!
Mrs Badenoch got onto the question of the humble address, a legislative measure designed to extend this rare bout of truth-telling to the official documents relating to Mandy. It hinged on Labour MPs having the balls to vote with the Tories. ‘They now have to decide if they want to be accessories to his cover-up’. Mrs Badenoch unusually addressed her comments not to the Speaker nor to the PM nor her own MPs nor even to the gallery, but instead to Labour MPs. The House was eerily silent as it dawned upon even the invertebrates that make up the majority of that latter category, that they were at risk of being branded the eternal paedo-enablers. No rallying call in response from the PM was adequate, despite his appeals to national security. He might as well have been standing in front of a graveyard.
‘Does he have the same confidence in Morgan McSweeney that he had in Peter Mandelson?’ asked Mrs Badenoch. This drew chuckles around the House. Not all of them came from the Tory benches. What’s telling about the depth of the do-do which the Prime Minister is in, is that some members of his own party seemed to enjoy his noonday skewering even more than the opposition did.
Sir Keir wriggled, stopped, started and blushed
In fairness to Sir Keir, he did win the biggest laugh of the day with ‘Morgan McSweeney is an essential part of my team’. Putting aside the comic idea that anyone in Sir Keir’s team is ‘essential’, it was fun to see the smashing of Mandy’s protégé against the rocks in real time. Sir Keir calling you ‘essential’ is the political equivalent of being told you won’t live out the month.
It didn’t get better for Sir Keir. Sir Ed Davey brought up the Polish government’s conjecture that Epstein might have been a Russian agent. Plaid Cymru questioned whether Sir Keir could remain as Prime Minister given how much his judgment had been impaired. There was a glorious question from Tory MP Charlie Dewhirst which was billed as ‘respite from Peter Mandelson’ but in fact turned out to be about his relationship with Phil Shiner, the disgraced former human rights lawyer, responsible for hundreds of vexatious cases against British soldiers. This mention of the infamous ambulance chaser and his proximity to the PM had the double and probably unintended impact of spoiling the next question for the Labour MP for Aldershot, who boasted about her constituency’s Armed Forces Day celebrations. It was perfect comic timing, ruining any possible redemptive arc.
Sir Keir wriggled, stopped, started and blushed in the face of all these questions. Behind him a group of very sad vultures took up their perches: Rayner, Streeting, that angry man they inexplicably put in charge of business. Even ol’ Reevesy looked like a potential challenger.
Given how badly it had gone, there was almost a moment of poignancy when Sir Keir repeated his sub-Asda catchphrase of ‘that’s the difference a Labour government makes’ in response to a question towards the end. He delivered this in a minor key, as if it were a dying leitmotif at the end of a Wagner opera or the last words of a clown. I’d like to say it was pitiable but, having watched him lie, bloviate, patronise and prevaricate for a number of years I can confess, despite the guilt of enjoying it, it was supremely satisfying indeed.
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