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ANDY Burnham is turning into the “is there nothing else on?” Prime Minister.
By that I mean that he is increasingly coming across as someone playing the prime minister in a not-quite primetime TV show, written by people who have no interest in politics.
The kind of thing you might find yourself watching, not entirely by choice, only to ask: “Surely there must be something else on?”
It’s a bit like in Doctor Who when they have a character who is a politician and in the expository scene they have to show them talking about politics without touching on anything too controversial.
Generally, they don’t want to stake a claim to any contemporary political cause, for fear of dating the show too precisely or appearing biased, so the pronouncements of the politician character are usually quite vague and generally upbeat.
It’s also exemplified in the film Love Actually, when the UK Government is negotiating with the Americans. Words are exchanged to show that the characters are negotiating, but they don’t really mean anything, aren’t important to the story, and only serve to show that negotiation is happening. Cut to act two, scene three.
I like to imagine they ad lib these scenes, with the actors given the script instruction: “Political waffle equal to 30 seconds of screen time.”
That’s what it felt like watching PMQs today.
Burham is undoubtedly more at home in the Commons than his predecessor, Keir Starmer, who hated the place so much he chucked it at the first opportunity, having always given the impression of a man held at gunpoint when he was there. Can’t blame him, really.
Burnham is so much more convincing in the role that it results in this slightly uncanny effect that he isn’t really the Prime Minister at all, but is instead part of a performance art piece spoofing the emptiness of modern politics.
The characters say things that sound like politics but on closer inspection are meaningless nonsense. It had a sold-out run at the Fringe.
I wasn’t the only one to notice this. The only real big moment of Burnham’s PMQs debut came when Tan Singh Dhesi, the military-mad Labour chair of the Defence Committee, told the PM that “vibes alone” weren’t going to be enough to meet defence spending aims.
That had the Tory benches in raptures, underlining how little difference there is between the two major Westminster parties on this issue.
Earlier on, we were in real Abbott and Costello, Who’s on First? territory during the ding-dong between Burnham and Kemi Badenoch.
She asked: Did the Prime Minister knock back any spending commitment during his marathon question session the day before?
I said I’d get the welfare bill down, Burnham replied.
What will he cut, came the opposition leader’s response, to which the PM replied: I’ve cut tax!
Which one’s Labour and which one’s the Tory? Oh, I give up. There must be something else on.
The whole thing ground on for a good 40 minutes and it all amounted to so little that I got to wondering: What would happen if we just locked the door on this place? If we just kept them all in here, locked away from the rest of the world, forever?
Would they continue to just talk and talk and talk in circles? Would the rest of the country just continue to chug along quite the thing without any input from this lot?
It’s just a shame I couldn’t change the channel.
