Short of breath, his face went from iris to violet to mulberry
WITH John Bercow, Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn making PMQs unwatchably verbose, the epistle today will start with a report from the Work and Pensions committee. It looks at civil servants’ ‘project assessment reviews’ of the Universal Credit system.
These are the same civil servants who – we are assured by former Whitehall poohbah Lord (Gus) O’Donnell – are such Solomons, such aces of impartiality, a credit to western civilisation.
MPs on that committee found that ‘the reviews are written in dense project management speak, a combination of the cryptic and the cliched’. Try this sentence for size: ‘The review team understand the recently agreed elaboration process was undertaken with a view to ensuring a safe-landing of delivery of the pathfinder and the October 2013 go live by drawing clear boundaries around the level of automation required in the earlier stages of implementation.’
Another review boasted that its staff ‘attended four developer stand ups, a scrum of scrums, a priority stand-up and a show and tell’. A show and tell!
Our daughters used to love those at kindergarten.
Another review noted that ‘the line through from the operational cost burners held by transformation planning group, through to epic level stories, story groups, stories and then through to the delivery of those stories is open and well documented’ but its compilers had ‘not fully matured its ability to accurately size incoming stories’.
‘Gas’ O’Donnells, the lot of them. The MPs dryly note that the reviews ‘are no loss to the canon of published prose’.
Blether works on the theory that if you bore people long enough, they will stop watching. Squeaker Bercow may regard that as his strategy for PMQs.
This once fiery, half- hour exchange of repartee, which helped highlight policy differences between parties, has become a 50-minute dronathon.
Frontbenchers, backbenchers, gnarled tuskers, dribbly newcomers: All are indulged by Bercow. For the rest of the week he acidly interrupts wafflers. But not at PMQs.
It is as if he wants to present a benevolent face to the watching populace. Squeaker B, indulgent uncle to a grateful nation! PMQ contributors are suitably grateful to Bercow for letting them rabbit on. Thus is he glued more tightly into the Chair.
Mrs May opened with, among other things, another plug for the Suffragettes centenary. Yawnsville. Mr Corbyn did likewise, at greater length. Back to Mrs May, who had another go, letting slip that her late godmother’s parents had known the Pankhursts.
So? One of my grandmothers was taught to skate, in Simla, by Kipling.
When the backbenchers finally got a canter, one of them was Dennis Skinner (Lab, Bolsover), 86 on Sunday. ‘I don’t celebrate things like that,’ he grunted, after Mr Bercow mentioned it. We then had a prolonged Skinner rant about health spending.
THelonger he went on, the more one feared health spending in the Bolsover area might face an emergency call. He was running short of breath and his face turned from periwinkle to iris to violet to mulberry.
Mrs May dealt with the old boy quite well. Let it be noted that no one drummed the benches with greater gusto in support of her yesterday than one Anna Soubry (Con, Broxtowe). Another thing: When Andrew Murrison (Con, SW Wilts) spoke up for the Royal Marines, Chancellor Philip Hammond nodded in apparent agreement.
The Tory benches were not full. Mrs May does not excite them. Rory Stewart, prisons minister, had gone to sit up in europhile corner, as had defence’s sporting Tobias ellwood. Danger signs?
But does any of that possible grumpiness really translate into a leadership challenge? Hard to see. Boris Johnson yesterday chatted amiably to both a jovial-looking Amber Rudd and a hangdog Hammond. Are Tories divisions exaggerated?
Labour is not without disunity. I have been passed a note from Labour chief whip Nick Brown to his troops. It firmly tells MPs not to go stirring trouble in others’ constituencies – something Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell and other Corbynites have allegedly done.