One of the perils of being a PM is all the foreign junkets … the Nato meetings, the G7 get-togethers, the one-to-ones with Donald Trump. It’s part of the job of course, but it can present the incumbent with some awful dilemmas: which would you rather…attend a glamorous summit about international security at The Hague along with other world leaders, or try to sort out the gritty stuff about whether Personal Independence Payments should cover people who have difficulty pulling on their trousers? Tough, huh?
And it’s the remoteness of Sir Keir which has meant that quite a lot of the flak from disgruntled Labour backbenchers has instead been deflected onto Morgan McSweeney, his clever Irish sidekick. Now that Labour MPs have got over their excitement at decriminalising abortion by mothers up to birth and legalising state-funded suicide last week – issues that were arguably tangential to the country’s more pressing problems – they’re now up for defeating the Government’s own bid to cut the burgeoning welfare bill on Tuesday.
