Madeline Grant

PMQs last week was embarrassing: not a single answer to a single question. The bar then was low – yet still today was, if not just as bad, still incredibly unimpressive. Mrs Badenoch began by asking a very simple question about new drilling in the North Sea. Sir Keir claimed that this was not his responsibility, but the responsibility of the secretary of state, meaning – as many suspect – that Ed Miliband has more control over the levers of power than his boss.  ‘He’s the prime minister!’ bellowed Mrs Badenoch. Opposite her, Sir Keir put his head in his hands, thus ironically mimicking exactly how most people feel when they see him. The argument about North Sea oil and gas continued. Sir Keir insisted he couldn’t act due to the magic spells of legalism.

Rachel Reeves was in the House today, responding to the war in the Middle East. That as a statement alone has an air of innate tragicomic potential to it: like Igglepiggle responding to Spanish Flu.  Despite the gravity of the situation, it was more of what we’ve come to expect from Reeves. She did her standard park and bark in the Commons, delivering everything by means of a permanent earnest glottal stop. Like a monoglot tourist in a foreign bar, she makes the mistake of thinking that saying things loudly and slowly will somehow make them effective.

‘I don’t want to raise levels of public anxiety.’ Believe it or not, these words came out of the mouth of Sir Keir Starmer. If they were true, one would expect him to announce he was off to live as a hermit in the Hebrides, rather than continue to chair meetings of Cobra. Yes, in the midst of the continuing crisis in the Middle East, the Prime Minister was answering questions from the liaison committee, mostly made up by his own MPs. He has previously had tetchy sessions here, but today he was on the receiving end of some seriously soft-ball questions on foreign policy. MPs questioned him in such a pathetic and fawning manner that they made the woman who screams the news on North Korean TV look like Jeremy Paxman.

Last week, the body of an 18-day old baby girl was found in Westminster, in desperately sad circumstances. The baby’s mother has since been charged with her murder and stands accused of throwing her daughter out of a third-floor window. Five days later, and a few streets away, the House of Lords voted to approve the Crime and Policing Bill – including the controversial amendment, Clause 208. Proposed by the Labour MP Tonia Antoniazzi, Clause 208 would decriminalise self-administered abortions after the 24-week limit. The new legal position is that whatever a woman does to end her own pregnancy, at whatever stage, is no business of the criminal law. Should a mother decide to abort a full-term or late-term infant at home, the state will, essentially, be indifferent to that.

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.

Downing Street’s briefing room increasingly looks like a municipal crematorium. It is a depressing feast of cheap teak and black edges. Other countries announce major foreign policy decisions in front of reminders of their glorious past or signs of their present strength. President Macron recently gave a speech in front of a nuclear submarine. Sir Keir gave today’s looking like he was about to announce a non-denominationally specific period of quiet reflection whilst someone played a MIDI file of ‘Time to Say Goodbye’. The crematorium analogy of course invites a subsequent question: is he the undertaker or is he the corpse? One suspects a bit of both.

In the last 48 hours the government of Sir Keir Starmer has ended a link between the House of Lords and the Anglo-Saxon Witan by booting out the hereditary peers and beginning the process of removing the right to trial by jury which goes back to Magna Carta. He probably, genuinely, believes this to have been a good couple of days in the office. After this bout of constitutional vandalism, Sir Keir came to one thing he probably also wants to abolish but currently cannot: PMQs. Mrs Badenoch tried to ask him about fuel duty – Sir Keir, however, thought he had detected a change in Tory tone and policy on Iran and so decided to speak about that instead. The bottom line was that they were wrong and he – the great Nostradamus of foreign policy – was right.

‘I’d like to remind members of the need for good temper and moderation in the language they use in this chamber.’ Sir Lindsay Hoyle began PMQs with this rather pathetic appeal to respectful debate. Given the current relationship between the Prime Minister and the leader of the opposition, it was a bit like a sincere request made to rain that it stop being wet.  The situation in the Middle East inevitably preoccupied questions. Why, asked Mrs Badenoch, were the US allowed to defend British interests and personnel, but the RAF were not. The Prime Minister loves these moments.

‘Mr Speaker, this government has the right economic plan for this country.’ It’s never a good sign for a sombre economic statement when your opening line gets a hearty laugh.  Rachel Reeves stood up to give a Spring Statement on the economy which might just as well have been a hostage video. The Chancellor’s delivery is redolent of the stop-start of traffic near a recent road accident. If you play certain Black Sabbath records backwards you get a more convincing and comforting delivery than Rachel Reeves talking about the economy. Reeves kept on talking about how the world was ‘increasingly dangerous’ and ‘uncertain’.