Rishi Sunak needs a lot of things to keep his head above water at the moment, but let’s take one step at a time: for the duration of PMQs, he needed to not look rattled. He has three techniques that he rotates: smiling; dropping his Ts (to offset the tell, that all posh people get posher when they’re stressed); and ratcheting his cadence so that he gets faster and more joyful towards the end of a sentence, like a man selling you candyfloss at a very fun fair.
Unfortunately, he deploys all these at random, so he did a short peroration on the Post Office miscarriages of justice, grinning all the way through, and dropped the T in the middle of “important” but not at the end, creating the impression of a man who had forgotten what words meant and how to say them.
It wasn’t going great, in other words, even before Keir Starmer stood up, but it proceeded to get a lot worse. The opposition leader’s question was the only one in town, unless you count “Where is Kate Middleton?”
“Is the prime minister proud to be bankrolled by someone using racist and misogynist language, when he says the member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington makes you want to hate all black women?” It never gets any less horrible, what the Conservative donor Frank Hester said, whether voiced by a producer on Radio 4 or quoted by the leader of the opposition. But if Diane Abbott has to hear it, the least the rest of us can do is say how disgusting it is.
Not according to Rishi Sunak, however. “The alleged comments were wrong,” he said. “They were racist. He has rightly apologised for them, and that remorse should be accepted.” The sentence made no internal sense, since if Hester has rightly apologised, that makes the comments real, surely, rather than alleged?
Worse, though, none of this was even vaguely true. Frank Hester apologised for being “rude”, which gets nowhere close to what he was. He denied racism and sexism, which are dripping off the words he used, he only addressed it in the first place because he got busted (by us), and none of that adds up to “remorse”, which, even if it did, nobody would be under any obligation to accept, least of all when this panicky, donor-focused prime minister instructs them to. Mystifyingly, Sunak repeated this line multiple times.
Moving on, Sunak tried what has become a well-worn Tory strategy when things go wrong: if you can get mud over everyone, they’ll all end up indistinguishable, like Stigs of the Dump. He reminded Starmer that his very own deputy called Tories “scum”; that his very own shadow foreign secretary compared them to “Nazis”. Starmer’s response – “The difference is, he’s scared of his party. I’ve changed mine” – was breezy and Blairite.
OK, maybe a stickler would say, “Mate, Angela Rayner’s still there, she’s sitting right next to you!” and then he’d have to explain that he hadn’t changed her completely, he’d just taken her to one side and told her to stop saying “scum”. It’s an enduring riddle of Westminster custom, that the Conservatives can shovel millions of pounds of public money at a man who can talk about hating all black women because he hates one black woman, who he wants to shoot; and they can then accept £10m from him, and defend that decision, permanently debasing standards in public life, and yet it’s beyond the pale to call them “scum”. Would “scumbags” be OK? A little softer?
The second foot to fall was on that money-go-round, which Starmer tickled Gen X by framing in the Mrs Merton manner: after hundreds of millions of pounds’ worth of government contracts, what first attracted Frank Hester to the Tory party? Sunak hit back with a jumble of words about his opponent’s support for Jeremy Corbyn and legal defence of an antisemitic group in years gone by.
He looked troubled, and not, I think, because he’s ever followed this thought to its logical conclusion: that if anyone who shared a party with Corbyn is an illegitimate participant in politics, that’s the whole of the Labour party. What does he want them to do, go home? Rather, he had the haunted look of a man who’d just thrown down his last two fivers. They weren’t even very much, and now they were gone.
More questions were asked about Diane Abbott, but not by the MP herself, who was bobbing, but never called. Give Lindsay Hoyle a break: after the ceasefire vote shambles, maybe he was afeared that calling upon the most racially abused woman in parliament to speak on her own behalf would be the nail in the coffin for his reputation for fair-mindedness.
