Sir Keir Starmer is now approaching a whole week with his head in the sand. One can imagine the plaintive ‘meep, meep’ noise echoing from the Downing Street sandpit during the wee small hours. After being laughed at on Monday and then savaged on Tuesday, today brought the challenge of getting through PMQs while pretending that it was business as usual and – crucially – that the Mandelson business was still somebody else’s fault.
Of course, this necessitated waging a pretty rigorous war against the obvious. But if anyone is capable of a pig-headed refusal to look reality in the face then it’s Sir Keir. If the last few days have shown us anything, it’s that there are hermits living off shrubs and rainwater on the slopes of Mount Athos with a greater cognisance of the real world and better political instinct than Sir Keir has exhibited over the past 48 hours.
Still, once more unto the breach – or rather the portal to the 69th dimension in which Sir Keir still exists as a competent prime minister. Inevitably, Mrs Badenoch’s first question was about the events of yesterday. Sir Keir claimed that Sir Olly’s testimony ‘puts to bed all the allegations levelled at me’. Whatever the Prime Minister was watching yesterday it can’t have been the Foreign Affairs Committee. Did Lady Starmer put him in front of an episode of Balamory instead?
Sometimes he indulged in these flights of fancy, sometimes he answered completely different questions, sometimes he did his old trick of just not bothering to answer at all. Mrs Badenoch was as confused as the rest of us. ‘I don’t know what planet the Prime Minister is on’, she said before moving to perhaps the most perceptive statement that the House has seen this year: ‘This is a joke.’
Starmer kept trotting out his ‘due process’ defence. These two words, which could describe anything from a medical negligence enquiry to a challenge to a parking ticket, have become Starmer’s magic talisman. He repeats them as if they are a catch-all defence and protection against scrutiny. Of course they mean nothing. ‘Due process’ is the Prime Minister’s equivalent of stripping off, daubing himself in woad and chicken entrails and then dancing naked around the despatch box. Indeed, such a course of action, though mentally scarring, might well have proved more effective than the actual vetting that Lord Mandelson did (or maybe didn’t) undergo.
Realising that talking to the Prime Minister was akin to chatting with one of the simpering loons who populate Salieri’s asylum at the beginning of Amadeus, Mrs Badenoch tried to appeal to his MPs. ‘He promised them probity, he has given them cronyism.’ This elicited little response. They know it’s true, but the power of said cronyism means none of them dare say so. Instead, they sat there, faces wrinkled with misery like rows and rows of discarded jacket potatoes.
‘I cannot accuse the Prime Minister of deliberately misleading the House, but everyone can see what’s happened here’, Mrs Badenoch concluded. Everyone, it appears, apart from Sir Keir. In his reply he tried again to bring up the Iran war in an attempt to claim that Mrs Badenoch had poor judgement. Motes and beams come to mind.
Some Labour MPs appear to think that their constituents are even stupider than they are
Indeed, the whole point of the strangely muted PMQs seemed to be Starmer wanting to show that he was incapable of learning any lessons. There was a very telling question from the Tory backbenches which underlined this. Ben Obese-Jecty asked about another omnipresent government lackey – the Quisling of the Indian Ocean – Jonathan Powell. Now, you would have thought that the government learned the lesson of going into bat for Blair-era zombies – apparently not! ‘Jonathan Powell is doing an excellent job!’ shouted Starmer, as if Mr Obese-Jecty had impugned the honour of some defenceless Southern belle as opposed to pointing out that Starmer is surrounding himself with a group of shady Blairite ghouls.
Starmer did have some support in his relentless campaign against reality. An egg dressed as a cheap magician who is, apparently, a Labour MP, stood up and stated that his constituents were more interested in waiting lists than in the Mandelson scandal. These questions are fascinating as it suggests that some of these MPs think that the electorate are cave-dwelling troglodytes, incapable of thinking of two things at once. Indeed, most shockingly they appear to think that their constituents are even stupider than they are.
Quite how long this extended holiday from reality can continue is anyone’s guess. I suspect the local elections will be a jolt into reality – and possibly the bin – for Sir Keir. Until then, it’s back into the sandpit he goes!
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