Sir Keir Starmer was away this week. Nothing new there of course; indeed, it seems the thing which will change least when he finally leaves No 10 will be his presence in Parliament. So today we had what might well be David Lammy’s final outing as Deputy Prime Minister. The Tories had done their customary rummage down the back of the sofa for someone to face him and pulled out James Cleverly.
With attention diverted away from the party leaders, these are always good occasions for Members of the House of Commons to demonstrate just how crashingly unimpressive many of them are. Today’s offering was a veritable casserole of mediocrity.
Lammy and Cleverly were unimpressive themselves, clattering at each other in lumbering fight about early release of prisoners. Daisy Cooper of the Lib Dems added the square root of nothing with a predictably obsessive and petty question about Nigel Farage. But the real joy came from the questions by backbenchers.
Ellie Chowns, who terrifyingly is one of the better Green MPs, tried to get Lammy to commit to proportional representation. Lammy managed to turn this into a comment on the Greens’ racism problem. Chowns and fellow Green MP Sian Berry made faces at Lammy in response, like middle class versions of the hillbillies from Deliverance.
Lammy gave an equally unrelated answer to James McMurdock who asked a very measured and carefully phrased question about two tier policing. Even the mention of the phrase drew enraged gibbon like noises from Labour MPs. The Deputy Prime Minister however just ignored it and made his answer about Nigel Farage – leader of a party McMurdock hasn’t been a member of for over a year.
As is often the case however, the real cream of the crop came from Labour. Cat Eccles, the MP for Stourbridge who competes with Osmium as the densest known element, asked a rambling and moronic more of a comment than a question which appeared to mostly be about the Stourbridge station cat. It was so painful that she actually received a cheer from opposition MPs when she finally finished.
Competing with her for least impressive intervention was the MP for St Austell Noah Law, who despite asking a question specifically about Cornwall, had to keep checking his notes to remind himself of the name of the county he represents. ‘The answer is obvious’ he bellowed, before having to look at his notes to check what that obvious answer was.
Elsewhere, Labour MPs indulged in their customary Toad-off. Victor this week was Douglas McAllister of West Dunbartonshire. ‘This week marks the two-year anniversary of a Labour government’. McAllister left a pregnant pause here, clearly expecting great cheers. Instead, he got a few pathetic ‘hear, hears’. Around him Labour MPs instead stared mindlessly into the abyss. They looked like a gathering of mentally traumatised Vietnam war veterans rather than MPs of a government with a massive majority not even halfway through its first term. McAllister listed a series of desultory supposed achievements – mostly the establishment of various hubs – before being told to sit down by the Speaker. ‘I think even the Deputy Prime Minister can answer this’, Sir Lindsay said tellingly.
MPs occupy an incredible building, filled with reminders of the nation’s past and the dignities to which its Parliament achieved – in oratory, in governance and in liberties. Now it is inhabited by these people, a sort of gilded asylum for the terminally mediocre, the troglodytic inhabitants who scamper round the ruins of a superior civilisation. Let us just be thankful that – until recess in a couple of weeks – they are concentrated there and not allowed out amongst the general public.
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