Madeline Grant

In the Fifth Circle of Dante’s Inferno, the damned are cursed to bob on the surface of the Styx, scrapping and fighting with each other for eternity, constantly stuck just at the point when the waters threaten to submerge them forever. Artists have attempted to recreate this – from Botticelli to Doré – but none have come quite as close to depicting it as Sir Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch manage in the House of Commons each week. There is a particular way Starmer spits out the phrase ‘manifesto pledges’ that gives his face the appearance of two cheap sausages in a food processor We all know the cycle by now. The Tory leader asks about spending and the Prime Minister rants about the economic record of ‘the party opposite’.

Today’s Urgent Question in the House of Commons about the state of the economy was dominated by two people who weren’t there: Liz Truss and Rachel Reeves. One wouldn’t expect Truss to be present; after all she lost her seat last year and is presumably busy on some important project elsewhere. Perhaps working on her list of ‘people who destroyed me’ – always just missing the most important name on it. The problem is that Sir Keir is now even less popular than Truss was at her nadir Truss is constantly invoked by Labour and today was no different. This is presumably in a crude attempt at subliminal messaging to get the public to remember how much they hated the Tories. The problem is that Sir Keir is now even less popular than Truss was at her nadir.

‘When a Knight won his spurs in the stories of old, he was gentle and brave, he was gallant and bold.’ I wonder if Sir Keir Starmer ever sang the old hymn, podgy hands on crossed-legged knee when at primary school in the Stakhanovite front-lines of 1970s Surrey? Presumably not, given how ill-suited the epithets therein are to his demeanour. If there had been any doubt as to the nature of Sir Keir’s real character, today’s Prime Minister’s Questions laid them to rest. The PM droned on about how pleased and proud he was of Labour’s record on women MPs. Next to him, the Chancellor looked sadly at her feet It was always going to be a tricky session after yesterday's Welfare Bill Apocalypse.

That this government is bad at maths will not come as a surprise to many readers. Thus far, however, in its endless parade of resounding successes, this has been mostly confined to miscalculations on the economy. Now, though, government innumeracy seems to have spilled out into its Parliamentary arithmetic too. Despite having a landslide majority, Labour has managed to find itself, not quite a year into power, with a serious backbench rebellion on its hands. This is doubly impressive: not only is the government’s majority enormous, it is composed of an intake of infamously supine backbenchers, desperate for attention and promotion from No. 10. They make the 1997 Labour cohort look like The Few. To have provoked this lot into open rebellion is quite the achievement.

‘This government believes in equality and social justice,’ began Liz Kendall. Which government she was describing is anyone’s guess. I suspect that if you were to ask the general public what they thought the government believed in, ‘equality’ and ‘social justice’ wouldn’t even make the top 100 printable responses.  The government were facing a backbench rebellion so great that even the cabinet – who, as anyone who has ever seen them give an interview can attest, have an appetite for humiliation which appears to be almost sadomasochistic – were having second thoughts Kendall was at the House for the start of a monumental climb-down: think Hillary and Tenzing in reverse.

Sir Keir has returned from his worldwide statesmanship tour. Barely the edge of a photograph went ungurned in, not a bottom went unkissed, no platitude went ungarbled. Now – lucky us! – he was back in the House of Commons for a good long crow about his achievements. As always, there was an obsequious toad ready on the Labour backbenches The PM began with the usual Starmerite guff production. The man is a veritable Chinese Power Station of pompous pollution. This, however, was more smug than smog. It began with a round-up of how crucial he’d been in every negotiation and discussion. ‘We’re following in the footsteps of Attlee and Bevan,’ crowed Starmer. Well, up to a point Comrade Copper. I mean, his cabinet hated each other too.

Sir Keir Starmer was in the Hague. I know, I know, you’d have thought they would have done Blair first. Sorry to get your hopes up, but the Prime Minister was in fact there for the Nato summit. He was doubtless bringing to bear all the soft power which the government had bought by paying to give away the Chagos. Ha ha. You heard it here first, Keir Starmer: geopolitical anti-Viagra. The main thrust of Ange’s answers was: ‘Yeah but no but the Tories’ Anyway, all this meant that the deputy PM was in the hot seat again. The first question that Big Ange faced wasn’t a question at all but the by now standard self-respect-immolation by a backbench Labour MP, the ceaselessly embarrassing Mike Tapp.

The day started badly for David Lammy. Well – we don’t know that for sure – it’s feasible that first thing this morning he won a great victory over his toothpaste tube, however his appearance on the Today programme wasn’t exactly a triumph. Asked by Justin Webb whether the US action was legal he told him that ‘we weren’t involved’. That’s the spirit: answer the question you want, not the question you were asked.  The Sage of Tottenham continued to manifest his dream interview rather than the one that was actually going on. We had a rather fun segue into the periodic table and percentages of uranium enrichment. ‘Oh Justin’, said Lammy at one point, ‘we’ve always been clear’. As a rainy day in Dundee.

The portents this morning were grim. The Grim Leadreaper was doing her HR manager of Hades act, buzzing around with faux sincerity like a wasp that had discovered LGBT History Month. Jess Phillips took a great huff on her vape in the lobby before walking into the chamber. Perhaps it was sulphur flavour. Inside the House of Commons the obviously sham last-minute ‘switcher’ Jack Abbott from the bill committee, as spineless a backbench toady as you ever did see, was there being all chummy with the unparalleled toad Jake Richards. Were they bonding perhaps over their new-found enthusiasm for death? It was Brokeback Mountain meets The Zone of Interest. Voting began on amendments.

As you might have noticed from the crowds weeping in the streets and the appearance of sackcloth, ashes and rent, er, garments: Sir Keir Starmer wasn’t at Prime Minister’s Questions this afternoon. Instead we got Big Ange – who absolutely, definitely, doesn’t want the job for herself. She'd come dressed in a fetching double-breasted blazer and cream trouser combo which made her look like a judge at Henley or an old-school pub landlord. Or even, perhaps deliberately, Nigel Farage. Ange breezily mentioned Starmer’s absence in the way you might mention you’d trod on a slug while gardening Ange breezily mentioned Starmer’s absence in the way you might mention you’d trod on a slug while gardening.

Sir Keir Starmer was doing an interview with Beth Rigby in the lush mountain landscape of Canada. Hardly a man who evokes the sweeping grandeur of nature, seeing the Prime Minister surrounded by mountains and pines was odd. It looked a little like someone had mistakenly cast a chartered accountant in the Sound of Music. What percentage is his approval rating? Seventeen going on sixteen of course. Seeing the Prime Minister surrounded by mountains and pines was odd Rigby asked whether the Prime Minister had any idea what President Trump was doing about the Middle East that was so important that he had to leave the G7 early. ‘I actually sat next to the President at that meeting,’ came the non sequitur reply.

Yvette Cooper had come to the House of Commons to shut, as loudly and with as much gusto as she could manage, a stable door long after the horse had bolted. The government was finally doing what it had long derided as ‘a far-right bandwagon’ and agreed to a national inquiry into the Pakistani rape gangs which blighted small-town England for decades. On the bench next to her were Bridget Philistine – who branded Tory calls for an inquiry ‘political opportunism’, Big Ange, whose new rules on Islamophobia would probably have made any of the journalism which exposed the gangs illegal, and Lucy Powell – the tin-eared, suet-brained embodiment of Blob-think who claimed that mentioning the gangs was a ‘dog whistle’.

Today the Assisted Suicide Bill returned to the House of Commons. Amid its many flaws and complications, perhaps most important is that it marks a landmark change in the state’s attitude to the sick, the weak and the vulnerable.  Leading the charge for the Bill are many wealthy, privileged liberals in the Esther Rantzen mould who, as they reach the end of lifetimes of total autonomy, cannot countenance the idea that the all-too-human world of pain, inconvenience and constraint might apply to them.  The assisted suicide debate has only highlighted Farron’s distance from this thought-world This is a problem for one party in particular. Many Liberal Democrats in parliament and elsewhere view themselves as the true champions of the needy or overlooked.

Rachel Reeves looked a little surprised at the cheers from the Labour benches that greeted her as she stood to give the Commons details of the spending review. As well she might: there can’t be many places where her presence is met with such enthusiasm; the National Reserve of Mauritius perhaps? Or Reform HQ? I’m sure her continued presence in No. 11 raises some smiles there. ‘My driving purpose since I became chancellor has been to make working people in all parts of our country better off’, began Reeves. It was interesting to learn that she has a ‘driving purpose’. I had assumed that she just existed – like nitrogen or lichen – without any definite end goal.

I’m not totally sure where they keep Ed Miliband in between his Commons appearances. Perhaps some sort of deep freeze for the terminally media-unsavvy, in between Lammy and Lucy Powell. True, he is allowed to do the odd cringe-inducing publicity video, like the time he filmed his atonal strumming of a ukulele in front of a wind turbine. Presumably Sir Keir releases him from the grip of his iron trotters for these occasional acts of self-humiliation pour encourager les autres.  Yet here he was today in parliament – an increasingly rare example of a cabinet minister actually coming to the Commons to announce a major policy.

Rachel Reeves was visiting a gardening club for the retired. ‘Do you come here every week?’ she simpered at some pensioners. No, but plenty of people wish you did. The Chancellor of the Exchequer was here to announce a U-turn on winter fuel allowance and so chose this almost comically soft-ball context to do so. It was frankly miraculous that nobody mistook her for a badly-pruned conifer and tried to bed her in. Elsewhere, a man who gave off the aura that he really could bury you under a patio was giving a speech at Port Talbot. Nigel Farage was still all grins as he described the Chancellor’s humiliating climb-down, but there was a hint that, as the Psalmist puts it, some iron had entered into his soul. This was no more Mr Nice Nige.