The mouse had roared and found itself being hailed the hero of the hour
Sees a decent man skewer Corbyn with the speech of his political life
HARD, spanking applause greeted Hilary Benn’s speech near the end of last night’s debate. Labour MPs who supported military action clapped Mr Benn with the force of pent-up fury, the anger of parliamentarians who had been placed under intolerable pressure by the anti-war mob.
The applause, usually a Commons nono, came from Conservatives, too. They recognised not only one of the great Westminster speeches of our time but also the boiling- over of a decent, patient, thoughtful man. Hilary had snapped. Hilary had erupted.
Beside him Jeremy Corbyn scowled. The Labour leader surely comprehended that the Benn irritation had just become a major problem. Labour’s deputy leader, Tom Watson, did not look too happy, either.
Mr Benn, by a long shire mile, made the speech of a long day. As he sat back in his place, great emotion washed over him. He clenched his jaw and blinked repeatedly. The mouse had roared and it found itself being hailed as the hero of the hour – not for the warriors’ case, so much, as the battle against the Hard Left inside his own party.
He supported air strikes over Syria not because he was bellicose, nor because he was anti-Corbyn or because he accepted all the Government’s arguments. As he explained in the course of 15 remarkable minutes, in a speech delivered with whirling hands and dramatic variations of volume, he wanted the enemy destroyed for honourable Labour reasons.
The Islamist terrorists of Daesh (as everyone was now calling it) were Fascists. What good was a Labour party if it did not fight Fascism?
He mentioned these killers of innocents, these tyrants, alongside Hitler and Mussolini. He gave emotive, personalised accounts of their cruelty and their intolerance, to women, to museum curators, to gay people. They held our Western values and democracy ‘In Con Tempt’ – each syllable was hit hard, to emphasise his own disgust at their hatred for us. FROM its second or third minutes, Mr Benn’s oration was plainly the speech of his political life, an instant Commons classic, to be placed alongside great postwar moments such as the Howe and Cook resignation statements and the Thatcher ‘no, no, no’ speech.
Would his peacenik father Tony have approved? You know, I suspect he would, even though he might have voted the other way. It would be fair to say that until now Mr Benn has not grabbed the public imagination, though it was clear from his maiden speech in 1999, which I remember vividly, that he was a fine speaker. old Tony sat in front of him that day, tears streaming down his face. Yesterday Hilary again drew tears. As the applause faded, I saw a pro- bombing Labour veteran, Jim Dowd – who moments earlier had been sinking bevvies in the Strangers’ Bar – wipe tears from his cheeks.
Behind the Speaker’s Chair, Ed Miliband looked in the direction of Rosie Winterton, Labour Chief Whip, and raised his two eyebrows, as though to say ‘well, well, that has made life interesting for you’. Diane Abbott, perhaps Mr Corbyn’s closest ally, consulted her mobile telephone, perhaps to check social media comment. Mr Benn by now was playing a small, tremulous finger rhythm on his knee. The significance of his performance was sinking in, surely. For Labour moderates had found their champion. In fact, you could almost say that the respectable case for war had just been made.
Until that point, the debate had been long on talk, short on shine. The Prime Minister was discombobulated by complaints about his reported slur against ‘terrorist sympathisers’ in the anti- war camp. Mr Corbyn’s speech was heard without much respect.
A few MPs had spoken with verve – among them Labour’s Dame Margaret Beckett and Alan Johnson, and Tory ex-Army officers Tom Tugendhat (Tonbridge) and Johnny Mercer (Plymouth Moor View). The latter’s speaking style was so martial you almost expected him to address MPs as ‘you orrible little men’. BUT too much of the tone of the afternoon had been set – and stained – by SNP griping, embodied by the superior smirk on the face of Alex Salmond (Gordon). His colleague Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh (SNP, ochil & S Perthshire) had dollied herself up in pelmet-length skirt and designer high-heels with gold tips. Was this really a day for vanity? on the Labour front bench, Corbyn- supporting Nia Griffith, Shadow Secretary of State for Wales, drifted off to the land of Nod. Beside her, Shadow Health Secretary Heidi Alexander was eating something. Solicitor-General Robert Buckland arrived breathless, late, still dressed in court- clothes of high collar and ribbon white tie. When Tory non-bomber Julian Lewis rose to speak, Mr Cameron suddenly remembered an engagement elsewhere and left the Chamber for a few minutes.
What the debate needed was a moment of magic. Hilary Benn was to provide it and he must now surely be a strong bet to replace the plainly unsuited Corbyn.