You can always tell it’s going to be a good day in the Commons when the government spin operation happens before a Prime Ministerial statement. Clearly predicting a bloodbath, No. 10 tried to trot their lines out early.
We were told that Sir Keir had inadvertently misled the House, in response to which we would see an angry Starmer. This is meant to sound out of character, incongruous somehow – like ‘jolly Bridget Phillipson’, ‘honest Bob Jenrick’ or ‘competent David Lammy’. To be fair, it does sound incongruous that Starmer is angry at the Mandelson affair, but in the same way that ‘man with box of matches and 47 gallons of propane angry that his house exploded’ might sound incongruous.
Actually, anyone who has observed Starmer will know that he gets angry all the time. Especially when he’s being held to account and even more so when it’s a woman doing it. Today then – as he finally dragged himself to the House to face a grilling on the ongoing Mandy saga – seemed specifically designed to light his shortened fuse. Or, put in terms of the PM’s appearance, to send him from resembling an abandoned chunk of luncheon meat to a full-on fiery Pepperami.
Starmer made himself sound like a political Mr Bump
As part of their wider cover for this, alongside the early excuses, the government had released a series of stock lines for Labour MPs to take which varied from the completely incredible to the downright offensive. One, in a sign of just how incapable of learning any lesson about optics No. 10 appears to be, sought to distract from the PM’s plight by quoting an Epstein victim at length. Labour MPs – in a sign of the popularity of our glorious leader – leaked them to unsympathetic journalists within minutes.
Obviously Starmer’s task was twofold. To try and convince people that he wasn’t to blame and, critically, that someone else was. He began his statement and references to ‘opportunities missed by Foreign Office officials’ began to crop up. Olly Robbins, meet the front wheels of the bus.
Starmer’s line was that he is someone who, try as he might, had been regrettably let down despite all of his attempts to do the right thing. He wanted it to be a sort of latter-day Pilgrim’s Progress – Mandy wickedly taking him up the Slough of Despond, that sort of thing. In fact, Starmer made himself sound like a political Mr Bump, unable even to leave his house without crashing into glaringly obvious obstacles.
‘I could and should have been told,’ he bleated. Starmer was essentially arguing that he is so irrelevant to the actual business of running the country that people can take some of the most important decisions of state without telling him. If only that were true.
Starmer played heavily on being disappointed; there are men in the ‘before’ photographs of viagra adverts less impotent than this. However, ‘he’s not malign; he’s just staggeringly incompetent’ might not be the zinger defence of Starmer’s career that the government thinks it is. It also fails to account for the very real likelihood that the PM is both.
‘I simply do not accept that Foreign Office officials could not have informed me,’ he squealed. I bet you’re not the only one, Sir Keir! As he continued weaving his tale, like an exceptionally boring Hans Christian Andersen, he uttered the glorious words: ‘Many members across the House will find these facts to be incredible.’ Cue what I think was the biggest laugh of his premiership.
But don’t worry everyone, we’re going to have – you guessed it! – a review. This was essentially the thrust of Starmer’s speech. Our necrotic political class loves nothing more than a review. A chance to pay civil servants and lawyers vast amounts of money to kick an issue into the long grass and produce a pile of meaningless bumf after two years of seeing how many LinkedIn cliches they can ram into a sentence and still have it legally be in English.
This is the magic wand that the dying Starmerite state waves in response to anything and everything. Were a humanity-destroying asteroid about to collide with the earth’s mass, you can absolutely guarantee that the British state’s last act before obliteration would be to commission a ‘lessons learned review’. Starmer announced an inquiry by Sir Adrian Fulford to a groaning chamber. A review of his own performance by The F—ing Fulfords would probably be more appropriate.
Pending this review, we had Kemi Badenoch instead. The Leader of the Opposition began by repeating Sir Keir’s claim back at him: that he knew Mandelson had failed vetting ‘last Tuesday’. Surely then, she probed, his earliest opportunity to tell the House – as per his duty under the ministerial code – was at PMQs. Sir Keir hadn’t done so. Perhaps he got last Tuesday mixed up with Next Tuesday, which is part of a phrase he presumably hears quite often.
In answer to Starmer’s cries of ‘nobody told me’, Badenoch simply wondered, ‘why didn’t the Prime Minister ask?’
‘I did ask,’ he huffed. ‘I asked the Cabinet Secretary to review the process!’ This might be the most characteristically ‘Starmer’ utterance I have ever heard, and I’ve been doing this job a while.
Mrs Badenoch also posed the Prime Minister six prepared questions. Most of them were challenges for him to repeat past dishonesties made at the despatch box in light of the present events. She listed, too, all the people sacked by Starmer in attempts to save his skin. ‘If he misled the House, he should resign,’ Mrs Badenoch quoted Sir Keir’s own words to Boris Johnson, completing the gloriously Greek tragedy of it all.
Mrs Badenoch got an answer which involved the Prime Minister shuffling his papers, mumbling and saying the words ‘in relation to’ a lot. His defence appeared to rest on splitting hairs about the definition of – or not understanding the difference between – vetting and due diligence. It was about as convincing as a smile from Ed Balls or a sworn affidavit by Meghan Markle.
It wasn’t just Mrs Badenoch who savaged him. An anuran Emily Thornberry basically ribetted a speech of pure contempt at him, pointing out that the Foreign Affairs select committee, which she chairs, had asked almost all of the questions the PM apparently failed to. She sized up the PM as if he were a particularly juicy fly on an adjacent lily pad.
Thornberry wasn’t even the happiest person on the Labour benches. Old, factional scores were being settled; John McDonnell accused Starmer of being dependent on his cronies due to ‘not having much of a base within the party’. As the PM gurgled and guggled, Rachael Maskell and Diane Abbott looked as if they had just won the meat-raffle during the work trip to the Prozac factory.
Don’t worry everyone, we’re going to have – you guessed it! – a review
Some MPs were actually prepared to name the large, grey, trunk-bearing mammal in the room and point out that the Prime Minister was almost certainly lying. To do so is considered un-parliamentary behaviour and so risks a chucking-out even if it is akin to looking up and commenting that what’s above you is a colour somewhere between Cyan and Magenta. Lee Anderson said the PM ‘couldn’t lie straight in bed’, which he was made to retract before being turfed out of the Commons.
Braver was Zarah Sultana, who repeated the claim that the PM was lying, to an incandescent Hoyle, who not only chucked her out but suspended her from the House, meaning five days’ banishment without pay. Quite the punishment for stating the obvious.
One wonders what she and Lee chatted about in the sin bin but then Starmer’s shamelessness has made some odd bedfellows. Corbynistas nodded along to Mrs Badenoch, the SNP cheered DUP questions, the Tories were in total thrall to Diane Abbott. Maybe the real friends were the ones we made along the way? It was like an unlikely Disney buddy film, all brought together by contempt for one man’s naked shamelessness. Sweet, eh?
There were, inevitably, a few Labour holdouts – the PLP’s very own Hiroo Onodas – ready to run with the embarrassing stock questions from the whips. Camborne and Redruth MP Perran Moon stood up and delivered a rambling non-question about Owen Paterson and how the Tories were the real enemy. ‘Don’t worry, it’s not relevant,’ shouted a visibly irritated Sir Lindsay Hoyle and waved on to the next questioner. He also did this to Janet Daby of Lewisham East, who’d somehow contorted a question about Mandelson into a monologue on Reform UK’s crypto-backers. It makes one wonder what’s in it for the dignity-phobes of the back benches; is humiliation in the Commons really worth whatever it is Sir Keir is dangling in front of them?
Once again, Starmer wriggled and huffed. Once again he cemented his reputation as a generationally dishonest politician. There will still be those who believe him, though an ever-decreasing number, and presumably those who do will have critical magic bean-related investment opportunities to attend to. I don’t think anyone expected the Prime Minister to answer any questions today. But after his performance the two biggest questions remain: how much longer can he survive, and most horrifyingly of all – who on earth will replace him?
Comments