This parliament still has, potentially, three whole years to run, and yet it already feels zombified. Each week it goes through the motions, the same lame jokes, the same pointless questions, the same lingering sense of exhaustion and decay. It’s like the end of the French Third Republic but with fewer cigarettes and an even less impressive defence policy. They had the Maginot Line, we have the recycling of Dan Jarvis. Labour is stuck in a depressed, sexless marriage with itself and is betting everything on the deranged idea that a frisson with Andy Burnham at the end of this week will somehow spice things up again.
Attendance in the Commons was not good, with empty seats on both Labour and Tory benches. At the far end on the backest of back benches sat Wes Streeting. Claire Coutinho, the shadow education secretary, had lost whatever strange competition the Tories have to be the one who has to ask Lammy questions. She decided to lead on energy costs, and the government’s continued reliance on Russian oil and gas.
The shadow of an increasingly out of control Ed Miliband lingered over her questioning, like the love child of Jacob Marley and Beaker from the Muppets. Was it true, she asked, that Miliband was now so high on his own supply that he had refused to meet with the PM? Perhaps he is so keen on solar energy because he believes himself to be descended from a Sun God? Apollo with perma-sinusitis.
The Sage of Tottenham wasn’t even going to pretend to answer her question. ‘She should stop reading the papers’ he tutted. Presumably nobody in government reads the papers anymore. They certainly don’t seem to have any meaningful contact with the outside world. They are slowly morphing into a version of the Andaman Islands if they were run by the Fabian Society. The next step will inevitably be Sir Keir shooting arrows at Beth Rigby when she appears on Downing Street, lest her magic camera devices capture what’s left of his soul.
Coutinho soldiered on but it was the parliamentary equivalent of wading through treacle. She listed some of the positively Laputan ideas which the government had been pouring money into in lieu of defending the realm: from solar farms in the Congo to an experiment to dim the sun. ‘Why’, she asked, ‘don’t they just cut welfare and fund defence?’
The Sage of Tottenham wasn’t even going to pretend to answer her question
Reeves and Lammy stared at her with a slack-jawed incredulity, looking like exhibits at the Great Yarmouth House of Wax who’d got too close to a particularly warm hairdryer. It was as if she’d suggested getting sunbeams from cucumbers, which is presumably one of the other things Miliband is channeling billions towards.
Lammy ended this rather lacklustre exchange with the claim that ‘I’m proud to serve this prime minister’. You would have thought this obvious untruth alone would be enough to invalidate his previous answers.
The rest of the House was exactly as unimpressive as we’ve come to expect. The bottom crawlers remain out in force, presumably incapable, even during the slow death of the Starmer ministry, to subsist on any diet other than a constant stream of meaningless platitudes. Sarah Owen treated the House to a strangely furious speech about how Carol Vorderman was a national treasure and Reform hate women while John Whitby went on a weird rant about the climate and how wonderful Labour’s record on it was. Another asked a ‘question’ about the evils of social media, claiming that kids were subjected to things that were ‘often not free speech but manipulated speech’, which presumably actually means ‘speech I don’t agree with’. Lammy’s answers were predictable: unlocking potential. Youth hubs. Proud of that record. It’s an unchanging mantra of mediocrity.
Lammy waffled about legal migration figures, not what Pritchard had asked about
The calibre was so crushingly poor that one of the highlights was a Lib Dem MP offering to show Lammy his tattoo of Eastbourne pier. Lammy pulled a face. Later on, Tory backbencher Mark Pritchard endorsed Lammy for leader in the upcoming leadership contest. Dan Jarvis pulled a face.
Perhaps the worst moment of the whole sorry affair came in response to Pritchard’s follow up question about a small rural community in his Shropshire constituency which was facing the prospect of 121 illegal migrants being abruptly placed in it against its will, swelling the population by 35 per cent. Was this fair, he asked?
The obvious answer to this was ‘no’, but instead Lammy waffled about legal migration figures, not what Pritchard had asked about, and insisted that ‘most often’ these migrants would be deported. In reality, only 4 per cent of small boat arrivals have ever been removed from the UK. He finished by accusing Pritchard, and by extension his constituents, of Nimbyism. Simultaneously patronising and dishonest; no two adjectives better describe this zombie parliament.
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