Once, the Liaison Committee was a must-watch in the House of Commons. But the Starmer super-majority means that the thrice-yearly gathering is much more of a snoozefest than it used to be. Two thirds of the 31 members are card-carrying Labour MPs, elected when the PM was at the (short-lived) height of his power in the heady days of summer 2024.
Yet there are a few wise old birds who are ready to give Sir Keir a semi-decent grilling. Today it was the turn of Alistair Carmichael, the longtime Liberal Shetlands survivor, who chairs the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Select Committee. Picking up the baton from Labour’s Cat Smith, he asked Starmer about why his changes to agricultural property relief were ‘targeted’ at family farmers. The PM – sounding like a Brezhnev-era apparatchik – insisted that the impact was the ‘necessary consequence of the decisions we have taken.’
Carmichael then duly reeled off the panels who have come out against the changes, noting that they are all Labour-dominated. ‘You don’t have to listen to me’, he said. ‘You don’t even have to listen to the farmers out there. You don’t have to listen to the president of the NFU. But what do you not listen to your own party colleagues?’ A grim-faced Starmer insisted: ‘I do listen to party colleagues all the time’. ‘And then do what you’re going to do anyway?’, retorted Carmichael.
Game, set and match to the Lib Dem.
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