Theresa sounded like the Queen Mum choking on a fishbone
THERESA May and Jeremy Corbyn went at each other pretty hard – looking like a retirement-age couple having a ding-dong about money.
The argument at yesterday’s Prime Minister’s Questions was essentially the same as when David Cameron beat Ed Miliband in 2015: borrow more now to suck-up politically to millions of public sector workers, or keep pay tight and reduce the debt burden for future generations.
Mr Corbyn, typical man, was in favour of a splurge. Mrs May said there was insufficient spare cash for him to go out and enjoy himself.
Ask your teenagers if they fancy paying for today’s adults to have an easier life and you may find that the youngsters suddenly turn less altruistic than the Socialist Worker-types claim.
The principles here are common-sensical enough that Kenneth Clarke (Con, Rushcliffe) said he was supporting Mrs May. A rare event.
Both Mrs May and Mr Corbyn have improved at the despatch box. The PM did hit a pothole when she choked at one point and her voice almost completely disappeared for a few seconds. She suddenly started whispering – the Queen Mum after swallowing a fishbone.
A gulp of water put her right and for the rest of the session she was pretty Thatch-erish: stern and basso.
Mr Corbyn (gosh he’s long-winded) opened with a line about the Cabinet ‘flipflopping and floundering’ on the pay cap. He never used to employ such TV-soundbite language. Maybe he has a new speechwriter. Mrs May, without quite telling Boris Johnson to take a special note of these words, replied that we ‘need to live within our means’.
SHE
is better on detail than her opponent. He had some statistic about the falling number of nurses. She said that was the total number of nurses who are registered in both the public and private sectors. The NHS was employing 13,000 more nurses than it did in 2010.
That sort of expansion would not be possible if Labour did its usual trick of knackering the economy, she said (in so many words).
Foreign Secretary Boris, who has stupidly been flirting with the idea of a spending splurge, was yesterday loyal enough to shout at the Labour benches.
He let them know that the continued debt problems were a result of the Blair and Brown years, and Labour leaving a record deficit when it quit office in 2010. ‘YOU!’ he kept chimp-grunting at Labour’s front bench, stabbing a porky forefinger at them. ‘YOU! YOU!’
Mrs May finished with a terrific wallop when she said Mr Corbyn might consider Labour to be a ‘government in waiting’ but it was really only ‘waiting to put up taxes, destroy jobs and bankrupt our country’.
Though Mr Corbyn has become more fluent, he had the worse of this argument – not least because the Tory benches gave Mrs May loud support. ‘More! More!’ they chimed. The Labour benches were a good deal quieter.
Mr Clarke spoke after PMQs during a Speaker Bercow-indulged Urgent Question on the public sector pay cap.
There was nothing particularly urgent about the matter but Bercow has entered a new, purple-tipped stage of his vanitymadness. He orates like a Just A Minute contestant and, secure in his seat, is causing as much hassle to ministers as he can.
Mr Clarke said that breaking the public sector pay cap would ‘be a political disaster and also possibly an economic disaster’. Liz Truss, the new Treasury chief secretary, was grateful for his support. She looked a bag of nerves.
Fashion footnote: One week since the Speaker said there was no need for male MPs to wear neckties provided they were in ‘businesslike attire’, several turned up with open collars, among them big Tommy Sheppard (SNP, Edinburgh E) who looked as if he was off to a booze-up.
Jared O’Mara (Lab, Sheffield Hallam) wore no shirt at all – just a pullover under his jacket – but that is because he has a disability which he says makes it hard for him to wear a shirt.