Just when you thought it could not get any worse after last week … On the plus side, at least the prime minister managed to last 30 minutes without calling Keir Starmer “Sir Softy”. That currently ranks as the height of maturity for Rishi Sunak. The ability to act like a well-behaved 12-year-old. Give that man a pat on the head.
But make no mistake, this was yet another excruciatingly piss-poor prime minister’s questions. A national embarrassment. God knows what any outsider looking in might make of it. Perhaps it’s an extension of the government’s small boats plan to stop foreigners coming here.
Today we just had two leaders shouting slogans and trading insults. A race to the bottom ahead of next week’s local elections. Maybe they think this is what voters want. When all is fury, the soundbite is king. But it comes at a cost to the national psyche. It degrades us. Hollowing us out from the inside. Soon we will all be just empty shells, caring about nothing.
Starmer at least can argue that it’s an effective line of attack. Because he’s got all the best lines. After 13 years of Tory government, no one can think of anything working better now than it was in 2010. So the Labour leader has free rein to probe and mock. It would be just nice if he could do so with a bit more style. With the air of a man happy in his own skin. A leader who could rise above party politics.
As for Sunak, we were led to believe that Rish! was a break from the recent past. An escape from the follies of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. A serious man for serious times. The techbro who would put the hours in.
Only it rather seems there’s a great deal less to him than first appeared. That he’s just another Tory leader, scanning the horizon frantically for any available life raft. Who will dive head first into any dog-whistle culture war just to prolong his chances of survival. This is no persona cultivated just for Westminster. There is no Mr Nice Guy hiding within. The real Sunak has made himself known. When someone tells you who they are, it’s best to believe them.
There was no Dominic Raab in the chamber. The former deputy prime minister hasn’t been there since he was forced to quit for bullying. He’s out and about on Esher Common in night-vision goggles, searching for badger roadkill. Searching for a soul. He will have his vengeance. The betrayal will not go unpunished.
In his place was a grim-faced Oliver Dowden. Quite why he looked so pissed off was unclear. He should have been delighted. He’s already been promoted light-years beyond his talent. He, Chris Philp and Robert Jenrick all come from the same faulty gene pool: Tories with no real beliefs who have drifted effortlessly to the right wing of the party to secure promotion.
After Rish! had opened with a random trans rant, Starmer got to work. George Osborne had said the Tories had vandalised the economy. And if anyone should know about vandalising the economy, it would be Osborne. Did the prime minister agree?
Oddly enough, Sunak thought everything was going just fine. People had never been so well off. Taxes had never been lower. Inflation was near zero. It fooled no one. His own backbenchers shuffled nervously in their seats. Even they knew this was bollocks. More importantly, anyone who had the misfortune to be watching this would also know it was bollocks.
Starmer kept probing. Kept prodding. Everyone knew Sunak was out of touch. Clueless even about how to fill up a car with petrol. How to use a debit card. The kind of things he gets staff to do. Then there was his refusal to impose a windfall tax on oil companies or get rid of non-dom status.
“Oh,” said Rish! dismissively. “That non-dom thing”. Here was the real Sunak. Starmer had got under the prime minister’s skin. Non-dom status was just a tiresome ‘thing’ that opposition parties just kept going on about. No one in the real world really cared about it, surely? I mean, it had only saved his family hundreds of thousands of pounds. A drop in the ocean. Hardly worth having. Just a rounding error on a decimal point.
But no, he wouldn’t be getting rid of non-dom status any time soon. For one thing, the owner of the Daily Mail would make his life hell if he did. And he just wanted to repeat that Starmer was a loser. Yeah, so there. That was sticking it to him. Rish! tried to look confident. Competent. He managed neither. He just seemed weak. Amazed that for the first time in his life, things weren’t going all his way. Usually he got what he wanted. Now, not so much. But hey, at least the banking sector was flourishing. The food banking sector.
Things didn’t much improve when the SNP’s Stephen Flynn got his chance. Could the prime minister say how children in Sudan might get asylum in the UK? Sunak couldn’t. You couldn’t trust children anywhere these days. Most five-year-olds looked at least 20 years older. So they would just have to go somewhere else. He was all out of compassion. He’d done too much for the little people already. He was exhausted. Sudan’s children could just sod off.
Next up, we got Philp. If Chris has connecting synapses, he goes out of his way to conceal it. It’s hard to think of a less able minister. Philp, the policing minister, was here to say that there had never been so many officers. The numbers were a higher number than the other numbers that would have been lower numbers, he said. People had never been so safe. Which is why you could never find a police officer. Because you never needed one.
It was all desperate stuff. Yvette Cooper swiftly put him in his place. The Tories had only replaced the police they had sacked years before. And then they had only achieved their targets by massaging the figures and inviting crims to join up. Plus fraud and computer crime were off the scale and most rapists got off scot-free. Luckily, Philp was too dim to realise just how dim he had been made to look.
We ended with Jenrick. Truly, we were blessed to have Dowden, Philp and Jenrick on the same day. The three nonentities. Jenrick, the immigration minister, introduced the small boats debate. Foreigners were just taking the piss. Coming over here with a shopping list. They didn’t even share our values. Which made them lesser people. Non-people. Things.
It would be nice to think Jenrick might have felt just a tad ashamed. But he doesn’t have the self-awareness. He made Geoffrey Cox and Theresa May look like bleeding-heart liberals. Day three in the Unicorn Kingdom.
