Maybe it’s being heavily pregnant but certain phrases just immediately elicit a deep emotional reaction in me these days. One such phrase is “Louise Haigh, First Secretary of State”. Am I meant to laugh, or am I meant to cry? Perhaps we’re supposed to do a bit of both.
Anyway, today we saw part of the fruition of that statement as Haigh stood up to answer Deputy Prime Minister’s Questions while the Great Triviality was in the Caribbean.
On the subject of the Prime Minister, I suspect this will be the last time he allows his First Secretary of State to stand in for a while
The Tories – after a bizarre period of allowing a pot luck system to decide who deputises for Mrs Badenoch – have settled on Alex Burghart as their deputy leader proper. Here we have the contrasts and paradoxes that make up today’s House of Commons at their most stark. Mr Burghart holds a DPhil from Oxford in Anglo-Saxon history; Ms Haigh has a conviction for nicking a phone. And guess which one has direct power over your life? As the Wanderer-poet told us: “Fate is wholly inescapable”.
We began with a toadying non-question from Wirral West MP Matthew Patrick about Labour’s proposed EU mobility scheme. “Giving people opportunity is the very mission of our party”, he smarmed, to the delight of the whips. Labour MPs briefly discovered a communal backbone when they knifed Sir Keir – clearly some are happy to have it removed, vertebra by vertebra, as they make their obeisance to Our Andeh.
On the subject of the Prime Minister, I suspect this will be the last time he allows his First Secretary of State to stand in for a while. Haigh was exactly as bad as anyone could have expected: a tetchy, screeching delivery was married to a miserably poor grasp of the facts. It was like watching a hungry seagull try to lecture on metaphysics.
Despite her obvious lack of ability, Haigh still trotted out stock insults aimed at her opposite number. At one point she suggested that Alex Burghart shouldn’t read out his questions, before reading out her answers (and not answering his questions). In fact, I got the sense that Burghart was being gentlemanly in his reticence to go in for the kill: had Labour put up an open can of sardines in the bottom of a barrel, it would have been a less obvious target than Haigh. But if anything, his stoic demeanour seemed to rile her further.
Burghart’s questions were mostly about benefits. He highlighted the fact that the bill was higher now than it had been even during Covid. Again and again Haigh – who yelled like an unlikeable landlady – insisted that the bill was coming down without explaining in any way how it would do so. She finished by promising to ‘Cut welfare, but in a Labour way’. Cue laughter on the opposition benches.
Throughout the exchange, the actual Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, Lucy Powell, scowled across the despatch box. It must take something out of a person to know that you’re so dreadful at your job that Louise ‘Phones 4U’ Haigh is considered a better bet at presenting the government’s agenda than you are. Powell is obviously trying to make herself a big player in the Burnham cabinet despite her apparent sidelining: she pouted and glared from beneath her bouffant, like an evil version of the mother from Hairspray.
A couple of backbenchers asked Haigh about Emma Reynolds’s slip-up at the weekend, in which the Chief Secretary to the Treasury had told GB News that employers didn’t count as ‘working people’. This had gone down so badly that Reynolds was forced to issue a grovelling semi-apology at the despatch box on Tuesday – in the style of a ‘hostage to camera’ video.
Today Haigh offered a newer, even more mangled definition of working people – namely, those “who put in every day and don’t get what they deserve,” “rely on good public services” but also “don’t have savings”. Excluding anyone who has ever put a penny aside is actually even more bonkers than saying that employers are not working people. Presumably another clarification won’t be far behind. Increasingly, watching Labour in power is like reading Slaughterhouse-Five or Catch-22: a permanent exercise in non-linear absurdity.
Burghart had some quietly scathing moments: he congratulated Labour for “experimenting with planning”. These went so far over Haigh’s head that they might as well have been the Apollo mission. If this is to be the DPMQs set up for the next few years then we sketchwriters should hope that Mr Burnham goes on holiday every week.
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