Another week and another PMQs: Mr Burnham and Mrs Badenoch haven’t really had any major zingers yet, preferring a sort of boring pas de deux. One gets the sense they’re still sizing each other up. Mrs Badenoch decided to lead w2ith congratulations for the Prime Minister as the government finally approved the Jackdaw oil field after years of politically expedient dithering and judicial meddling. It was a surreal moment. The Tories cheered the announcement of a government policy, while the Labour benches were muted. Lucy Powell would have looked happier had she trodden in dog muck.
Enter Miatta Fahnbulleh, the Energy Secretary, who is sometimes referred to – in what I can only imagine is a cruel and immature joke – as ‘the brain behind the Burnham administration’
While the Leader of the Opposition had annoyed the more obviously cretinous members of the cabinet, the PM himself didn’t rise to the bait. Badenoch tends to deliver her lines in a sing-song primary school-teacher tone, calculated to irritate. It’s the voice you might use for potty training. ‘I have read the report’, she trilled. ‘I don’t think he has.’ She developed this deliberately patronising air under Starmer, to great effect, but Burnham is proving less easily goaded. The full clucking meltdown of Sir Keir has so far eluded her. Neither seems to have a sufficient grasp of the other’s weaknesses to deliver a truly knock-down blow.
Meanwhile the PM is developing a series of verbal tics; repeating the word ‘pragmatic’ over and over again (which he did in response to three different questions today) is one of them. ‘Pragmatic’ is, of course, Westminster speak for ‘utterly devoid of principles’, but we already knew that was the case after his months of barely concealed treachery. However, through his mix of folksy emotion and pretend ‘but let’s be serious now’ moments, he manages to mostly bat off Mrs Badenoch’s questions. That isn’t to say he doesn’t try to sneak the odd whopper in – this week he repeated the untruth that he was using savings from Digital ID to pay for a cut in VAT on energy, when, as Darren Jones let slip, there were no savings to be had since the scheme was unfunded.
Nevertheless, Mr Burnham fails to land much on Mrs Badenoch either. This week he repeated a lame Liz Truss jab which was only redeemed by the fact that Sir Ed Davey, the Postmaster’s Friend, tried to do exactly the same thing. One of the things that makes Burnham seem more palatable is the presence of Davey, who slimes in with a brace of senseless non-questions every single week. He certainly isn’t helping quell the accusations that he and Burnham have already done a deal about an early election.
The rest of PMQs was the usual drivel; questions that should have been an email from a local councillor, backbenchers watching their souls escape their bodies as they ask about something meaningless. There was one spicy question about Mr Burnham’s Man City associations from Tory backbencher Jerome Mayhew but the PM merely pouted and insisted he’d answered it last week.
Fortunately for us sketchwriters there is incompetence enough for thousands of governments as bad as this amid the lower echelons of the cabinet. Enter Miatta Fahnbulleh, the Energy Secretary, who is sometimes referred to – in what I can only imagine is a cruel and immature joke – as ‘the brain behind the Burnham administration’. It’s a bit like being lauded as chief stylist to Stig of the Dump.
Well, Old Einstein Fahnbulleh had a real shocker on Sky News this morning. News had leaked from cabinet that it was she who was trying to stymie Shabana Mahmood’s plans to make migrants stay and work for 15 years before they can qualify for indefinite leave to remain, and the full gamut of welfare entitlements. The presenter specifically pressed her on whether she agreed with this particular policy five times only for Fahnbulleh to bluster and prevaricate. By the end, poor Sophy Ridge had her head in her hands, begging Fahnbulleh to make some form of sense.
To make matters worse the Energy Secretary then decided that she couldn’t be bothered to come to the House herself to announce the Jackdaw decision. Sir Lindsay was apoplectic. The Speaker gave junior minister Michael Shanks a real hairdryer treatment for the leaking of the announcement beforehand, which makes one think that had Fahnbulleh herself been present he might have actually become airborne. ‘I’m sorry Sky News was so much more important,’ he bristled. This was doubly brutal as Fahnbulleh was probably wishing she’d never said yes to the ritual TV humiliation in the first place.
One of the things which eventually did for Sir Keir’s administration was the naked contempt he and the cabinet showed towards Parliament. We’re certainly not there yet but a few more performances like Ms Fahnbulleh’s and Labour will once again be doing the Tories’ job for them.
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