HENRY DEEDES Yee-haw! Sir Ed’s delight as Boris gives way at last
Sir Ed Davey’s face was a picture. A whirling, twirling swirl of yee-haw, whoopdee-doo delight. Golfers know the one: that pop-eyed look of pleasure that players pull, half shock/ half ecstasy, as their ball plops into the hole from long distance.
Like the novice hacker who’s just chipped in from a bunker, the acting Lib Dem leader could barely believe his luck.
Sir Ed’s rare cause for merriment occurred half way through an otherwise routine session of Prime Minister’s Questions. Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle called his name not long after the SNP’s ian Blackford had finished another long-winded diatribe on Scottish independence. Great act to follow, Blackford. When he sits down the whole chamber suddenly perks up again.
Davey, who had entered the chamber in a black face mask, demanded to know whether the Prime Minister would hold an independent inquiry into the Government’s handling of the virus.
it was less a demand than a request, really. He had been rebuffed on this issue a few weeks ago and his languid body language suggested he wasn’t expecting to get anywhere this time either. Slowly, he slumped back into his seat to await the inevitable Prime Ministerial palm off.
The PM rose. ignoring his interlocutor’s request for a quick yes or no answer, he muttered something about this not being the right moment to devote ‘huge amounts of official time’ to who did what. He added that there would be ‘time to learn the lessons of the pandemic in the future’. Davey’s forehead crinkled with frustration.
‘But,’ Boris continued, a noticeably trimmer waistline twisting toward to the Speaker’s chair. ‘Certainly we will have an independent inquiry into what happened.’
Here Sir Ed’s podgy frame jolted, his face transformed into a cocktail of emotions – one part surprise, three parts joy plus an added dash of confusion.
Eventually, he clasped his hands and emitted a heavy exhale. ‘Yassss!’ Finally, his dwindling party had got the Government to actually agree to something. Whisper it but it’s possible he’d not felt such a pang of excitement since his predecessor Jo Swinson lost her seat.
Aside from this little lentil- shaped moment of triumph, the most noticeable thing about PMQs was how formulaic the exchanges between Boris and the Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer have become.
The pattern, to those tuning in regularly, has become painstakingly familiar. Sir Keir spends much of the session accusing the PM of spouting ‘rhetorical nonsense’ while the PM attacks the Labour leader for ‘knocking the confidence of the country’. And if Boris can squeeze in a joke about Sir Keir’s legal career all the better.
Once again, Starmer had brought along a document which he knew full well Boris would have barely even glanced at. This one was a report setting out urgent measures needed to prepare for a possible second wave of coronavirus.
‘Has the Prime Minister actually read this report?’ Sir Keir asked waving it around, Perry Mason style.
‘Of course i’m aware of it,’ barked the PM crossly. Aware of it. Wonderful. Can you imagine someone in any other line of work using such an excuse?
‘Captain, have you read the report into what to do in the event of an emergency crash landing?’
‘Of course i’m aware of it.’
Where Boris has improved in these duels since his disastrous early outings is to swivel from giving a tame response to one of Sir Keir’s questions into a much stronger broadside about his opponent. Frustratingly for the Leader of the Opposition these are often the takeaway moments of the session.
Sir Keir’s final query yesterday concerned a visit he was making to victims of the pandemic. ‘Does he have anything to say to them?’ he asked the PM, hoping this might cut off any attempts at flippancy.
After a few sombre words, Boris was up and running again, attacking Starmer’s recent flip-flopping over schools.
‘He needs to make up his mind which brief he is going to take today,’ he yelled. ‘At the moment, it looks like he has got more briefs than Calvin Klein.’ A lame gag by Boris’s standards but still more memorable than anything his opponent had come up with.