When a fully greased Sir Keir Starmer is finally bundled, squealing, out of Downing Street, one wonders what he might turn his hand to by way of work to keep a roof over his head? I suspect his time as a lawyer doesn’t bear repetition and he’s hardly going to be asked to do after-dinner speaking. Perhaps he could mimic other PMs and turn to writing. I suspect, though, it will need to be children’s books that help him pay the bills.
Boys and girls across the country could be delighted by stories with titles such as The Mysterious Expenses Claim, The Majority that Vanished and The Mandy, the Paedo and Me.
Yes – having tried to wriggle out of answering questions on his failures by releasing the documents about Lord Mandelson’s vetting shortly after last week’s PMQs, we were back on the subject of why it was that Sir Keir had been so determined to appoint him, despite repeated warnings from more sensible people, and his attempts to mislead the House about it. This was the main topic of the leader of the opposition’s questions. It was not the topic of Sir Keir’s replies.
Today Sir Keir faced his fate with dignity. Nah, just kidding. He was like a cornered animal, lashing and wriggling as his failures were laid out in front of him. I have seen people drop a whole cream trifle with more grace.
Mrs Badenoch’s first question met with a squeal of indignation. ‘She should apologise for advocating an attack on Iran’. One might charitably think that Sir Keir was indulging in some sort of absurdist word association exercise. His answers were so unrelated to anything in the questions that at times it was like watching some sort of avant-garde improv routine. We were only lucky that he didn’t start not answering through the medium of interpretative dance.
After repeated bouts of verbal epilepsy, Sir Keir finally made a brief allusion to the issue by repeating that ‘the process was clear. It’s been looked at by the independent adviser’, twice. Cue groans, not all of them from the Conservative party.
This scandal has been a long time coming for Sir Keir, who, during the many failings of a certain Boris Johnson, appointed himself as a latter-day Matthew Hopkins on account of the strength of his moral compass. I don’t suppose Mr Johnson has the patience to enjoy a dish served at any temperature other than piping hot, but the similarities between Sir Keir’s death by a thousand nonces and his own moral collapse are not without an echo of Greek tragicomedy.
He turned on Nick Timothy, who had the audacity to point out that having the Adhan – the prayer which calls Muslims to ‘success’ and says there is no God but Allah and that Muhammed is his messenger – broadcast at high decibels over Trafalgar Square, as happened this week, might look a teeny bit domineering. Having failed to make everything about Iran, Sir Keir made this his next distraction, accusing Mr Timothy of not paying sufficient lip service to the myth of diversity being our strength.
‘If he was in my team, he’d be gone!’ bellowed the Prime Minister. Well given that what has actually seen members of his team ‘go’ are fraud, tax avoidance and, of course, falling on their swords to protect Sir Keir from allegations of promoting the Paedo’s Friend, it seems that that bar isn’t quite as much a mark of probity as Sir Keir thinks.
Sir Keir’s record of actually answering questions each week is probably about as good as – to pick an example out of the blue – Ghislaine Maxwell’s lawyer. Parliamentary protocol forbids him from simply oinking the words ‘no comment’, so he goes on these mad and maddening side-tracks instead. Today was his most shameless episode yet. No attempt to answer any form of question, just unrelated lashings-out.
Clearly, he’d given up even using words
Things grew so bad that Lindsay Hoyle got his excuses in: ‘Can I just say I’m not responsible for the answers’. He had to tell the House this twice, so febrile was the atmosphere. Tory backbenchers Sir Julian Lewis, Paul Holmes and Andrew Snowdon all complained, with varying degrees of anger, about Sir Keir’s scrutiny-phobic evasions, to no avail. The PM blinked, glowered, and turned a deeper shade of puce.
Sir Keir’s final ‘answer’ (please don’t sue me under the Trade Descriptions Act) was his most lamentable. ‘She talks about dshdooah’, he said before launching into a final rant about Iran, Greenland and Nick Timothy rolled into one. Clearly, he’d given up even using words, instead coming out with a noise both panicked and guttural. Goodness knows where this emission came from; perhaps it was some shamanistic invocation to make the questions go away, maybe he was trying to communicate with Lord Mandelson in his native parseltongue? Either way, it was like watching one of the three little pigs get exorcised. There were no shouts of ‘more!’ on the Labour benches.
Comments