Today’s Deputy Prime Minister’s Questions was a particularly low-rent affair. Andrew Griffith was the Tory sent out to question David Lammy while Keir Starmer is in China. The shadow business secretary didn’t do a particularly good job: perhaps he had assumed that Lammy would have another disastrous session like he did when a prisoner was accidentally released last autumn.
The Deputy Prime Minister was unflappable today though, and clearly enjoyed himself, while Griffith sounded like he was at a departmental questions session, not the set-piece political event of the week. Lammy ended up joking that ‘he’s not going to get this gig again’, and he was probably right.
The Deputy Prime Minister had plenty of jokes prepared, including one in response to an early question from a Labour backbencher about a rubbish dump. This allowed him to say:
Speaking of garbage, I note Reform’s spring cleaning of the party opposite is continuing this week. The leader of the opposition says the Conservative party is full of unwanted rubbish! The public worked that out long ago and got rid of them!
On Griffith droned about Labour strangling business
Griffith then opened his questions on business rates, asking whether Lammy could confirm that over 90 per cent of retail, hospitality and leisure businesses would get nothing from the Treasury’s U-turn yesterday. Lammy replied that ‘it is always a pleasure to hear from the co-author of the mini-Budget’, before merely running through what had been announced for pubs yesterday. Griffith got up to offer a random run though of his CV, saying:
He wants to talk about experience: I spent 25 years building businesses, creating jobs. He spent 25 years manufacturing grievance. And if the party opposite knew anything about business, they would know this is too little, too late, and our high streets are bleeding out and the Chancellor is handing out a box of sticking plasters. They can’t even U-turn properly.
Griffith didnt have the rhythm of someone asking questions at PMQs: in fairness, it is difficult even for a leader who is doing this every week to pick up that up. He also tripped himself up by calling the Speaker ‘deputy Speaker’ – which is also easily done but threw him further off balance.
Lammy was happy when he stood up again, mocking Griffith’s opposition to the minimum wage. Griffith responded well to that, in fairness, saying ‘you don’t make young people better off by putting them out of work’. He then joked about where next Labour MPs might be banned from: shops, restaurants and hair salons – which he quipped wouldn’t make much difference to him or Lammy. He then segued slightly awkwardly into accusing Labour of not having the courage to cut welfare and asked about young people’s unemployment.
Lammy was able to list the things the government says it is doing and accuse the Tories of having ‘nothing to say for the next generation’. Griffith deployed a decent but irrelevant pre-prepared joke at this point. He claimed that:
You can feel the Deputy Prime Minister’s frustration. The Prime Minister is away. The business secretary is away. And here he is left behind, Lammy, the designated survivor, having to defend the indefensible. It’s very clear he doesn’t know the answer. Let me tell him the cost will be up £3,600 a year. Under Labour, businesses can’t afford to hire.
He added that ambitious people couldn’t get on, ‘like Andy from Manchester, having his dreams crushed by Labour’.
Lammy was able to bulldoze on with his figures about jobs, and on Griffith droned about Labour strangling business. It was an achievement, given Griffith was right, that he sounded so unconvincing.
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