It’s Groundhog Day, the theme of the film where Bill Murray is destined to repeat the same day over and over again. It was also a terrible day for Labour – of course that doesn’t narrow things down either – you could be reading this at any point over the next three years and it’ll still be true. Bill Murray woke up every day to ‘I Got You Babe’, we woke up to a remix of ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ and the immolation scene from Götterdämmerung.
Still, even by the standards set in the field of repeated shoddiness by the current government, this really was a bad day for Labour. Their erstwhile MP for North East Somerset was arrested for a second sex offence (he ‘vigorously’ denies the allegations against him), another doctor’s strike is on the way, and it’s become clear that the Lord Mandelson story has moved on from simple nonce-adjacency. As the Prime Minister is wont to say: ‘that’s the difference a Labour government makes.’
With his ministry increasingly resembling a fire at ‘Dunblobbin’, Mr Blobby’s abandoned horror house, it’s no surprise that Sir Keir chooses to spend most of his time on planes. He has of course recently returned from the Far East and was eager/had been forced to come and tell the House of Commons all about it.
It was a sort of ‘what I did on my holidays’ slot. Though, I suspect, if members of the House wanted a more accurate description of what Sir Keir had actually been up to, they should have contacted his Chinese handlers, or found the ‘play’ button on the definitely bugged doll which he was given as a gift.
He began with a standard issue piece of self-congratulation which was more North Korean than Chinese in its content. Sir Keir thinks he has restored Britain to global credibility as opposed to making it the G7 equivalent of Dopey. Apparently our bad relationship with China wasn’t to do with them spying, or arming Russia, or undermining us in the Caribbean and Indian Ocean or starting the pandemic or the Uighur Death camps or Hong Kong but because of the horrid old Tories. He listed all the other world leaders who had gone to Beijing while Conservative prime ministers stayed at home. ‘They went on their feet not on their knees’ came a remark from Tom Tugendhat, to much laughter.
Sir Keir was unhappy at having his dignity-ectomy referred to in this way. ‘Britain faces outwards once again!’ he trumpeted by way of a finale. ‘Britain bends over further than ever before’ might have been more accurate.
Mrs Badenoch was coruscating, spending five minutes listing the ways in which Sir Keir had given things away and come back with nothing. ‘We are not criticising him engaging with China, what we are criticising is his supine and short-term approach.’ This inevitably riled the PM.
After a rant about Greenland he informed the House, with the air of someone stealing a bonus point on University Challenge, that actually China has had an embassy in Britain since 1877, as if this somehow meant they couldn’t be a strategic threat now. By Sir Keir’s logic the fact that the first embassy from Russia was sent by Ivan the Terrible to Elizabeth I in 1557 means that all those defections and assassinations, indeed the entire Cold War, were just misunderstandings when set in the wider historical context. Sometimes you really have to wonder whether he knows how preposterous he sounds. Perhaps there’s some sort of Chinese scrambling device in his brain, or maybe he overdosed on the Lemsips this morning. Or maybe, scariest of all, he really believes it.
Danny Kruger nailed this tension in his question: ‘He talks a lot in abstract terms about ‘being in the room’ and ‘engaging’ – could he tell the house one concrete thing he did for either the Uighurs or national security?’ Sir Keir responded to this by, you guessed it, talking in abstract terms about being in the room. Concrete answer came there none.
There was, hilariously, a very brief question from Emily Thornberry about booze. But on the whole as the House tried to get any form of detail from him, the Prime Minister just got angrier and ruder; a question from Esther McVey got a tantrum. ‘I’m not taking any lectures from them’ he huffed, before claiming that, ‘We’re going about things in a mature and grown up way’
Talking of dubious questions about maturity, there was a ghost in the room: the Paedo’s Pal, Captain Underpants himself, the Lord Mandelson! Stephen Flynn tried to ask a question of the PM about whether his views had changed since he’d tried to deflect the entire issue onto the Andrew formerly known as Prince. Instead, he got a ticking off for not being sufficiently supportive of the Whisky industry.
In a porcine bit of cowardice that will surprise nobody who has ever observed him, the Prime Minister decided to go ‘wee wee wee’ all the way home pretty sharpish after his statements, leaving an underling to try and wriggle their way out of the awkward urgent question tabled about Mandy.
And who else would be sent to act as slitherer-in-chief than Darren Jones? The Chief Secretary/Fluffer to the Prime Minister oozes insincerity from every pore. He sat there, taking a blasting from Alex Burghart, with a curl of arrogant disdain on his lips. There were God-Pharaohs in Ancient Egypt who projected a less self-satisfied persona than the MP for Bristol North-West. ‘It’s time someone took responsibility’ Mr Burghart challenged. There was no sign that that person was going to be Darren Jones.
There wasn’t much help for him from his own party. Emily Thornberry – a long-time enemy of Mandy – purred ‘this isn’t a matter of whether he should be in the House of Lords, but a matter of whether the police should be involved.’ Stephen Flynn resumed his fury from earlier – ‘I cannot understand why half an hour the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom stood there and would not apologise!’ he yelled at Jones. Jones mumbled about how wonderful and clever and brave and quick-witted Sir Keir had been by sacking Mandy just as he was forced to by mounting public anger.
The boy stood on the burning deck came to mind. So too, again did Groundhog Day, not just because whether this really will prove to be Peter Mandelson’s final disgrace remains to be seen, but also because one can just picture Sir Keir waking up tomorrow with Darren Jones crooning those words in his ear which every consequence-phobic Prime Minister wants to hear: ‘I got you babe’.
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