Keir Starmer has been quite an irritable – and irritating at times – performer in the Commons as prime minister. His sessions with Kemi Badenoch in particular have been marked by pompous lectures about how she should be conducting Prime Minister’s Questions, along with lofty comments about the ‘spirit in which’ the opposition has been behaving. Starmer hasn’t seen anything wrong with this attitude because he made the fatal mistake early on of buying his own hype about what a committed and decent public servant he is, rather than being anxious about whether he was actually meeting his own standards. This means that he seems genuinely appalled by any question that suggests he is in fact not meeting those standards.
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However, the most irritating comments at his final Commons appearance didn’t come from the outgoing Prime Minister himself, but a Labour MP. Melanie Onn immediately followed Badenoch and said: ‘It is an emotional Prime Minister’s Question Time today, and I really welcome the tone that has been struck. I think we should hear more of this, more often.’
Onn is a smart and impressive MP with plenty of experience. And I know what she means: she was merely trying to praise Badenoch for a pretty gracious set of questions which allowed Starmer to tell the Chamber what he thought his legacy was – though of course the fact he felt he needed to spell it out rather than have the confidence everyone had noticed is telling. But the ‘I think we should hear more of this, more often’ is a symptom of an irritating affliction that all MPs are susceptible to of thinking that agreement in politics is a good thing.
Of course Badenoch was right to give Starmer a bit of room to say goodbye this week: if nothing else, there’s not much point in asking the man with days left of power what he’s going to do to fix all the remaining problems. And there is nothing wrong with dignified civility in politics. But too often we confuse being dignified with avoiding difficult questions. We see this confusion every time someone claims that they’re seeing ‘the House at its best’, which is almost always during a debate where scrutiny isn’t actually occurring, either because MPs have decided that a problem is just too important to check that the proposed solution is actually the right one, or even if it is right, if it’s well-designed, and are instead agreeing with each other for five hours, or because someone has died and most MPs have managed to say something nice about them. The latter is not ‘the House at its best’ either, it’s merely proof that like most of the public, MPs are able to behave themselves at a memorial service. And the former is very much not the House at its best, because one of the functions of an MP’s job is to make sure that both the principle and detail of a policy is right before it slaps the public in the face. Members are at least partially engaged in the principle, but very rarely in the detail. They often refuse to notice the glaring problems with a policy until it is in the wild. Look back at policies introduced with consensus across politics that ‘something must be done’ over the last few decades, and you’ll realise that the ‘House at its best’ can end up being politics at its worst.
Clamour has a function
One of the reasons MPs are so fixated on this ‘House at its best’ nonsense is that we as a society have become so useless at arguing well that we don’t recognise good debate and scrutiny. It is not uncivil to ask someone if they’re making a mistake and demand they explain what they are doing. This is quite different to the kind of bad faith, personal stuff that rightly gives politics a bad name, including the use of the word ‘traitor’ – or indeed some of the celebrations from ghoulish sorts that initially followed the death of Ann Widdecombe. Those behaviours are again examples of our inability to argue well. Widdecombe, as it happens, was fond of robust debate and didn’t mind taking a strong and unpopular position when she believed it was the right one, but her deep loyalty to figures such as Harvey Proctor showed that she understood the difference between disagreement and personal animosity.
It is only really at PMQs where scrutiny gets noisy, but even that clamour has a function: it tests the character of a prime minister as well as his or her daft policies, and forces them to defend those policies on their feet under pressure. That’s exactly what we should expect of our leaders, and at least they know that they’ll get one session at the very end of their career where MPs are vaguely nice to them.
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