No, the PM’s NOT hiding under a desk, said Penny
Down in the heaving Commons cockpit, the atmosphere pitched and swelled like that of a baying mob in a Roman amphitheatre.
opposition MPs were demanding the Prime Minister be brought forth to face their wrath. They sneered, they snarled, they ya booed agressively.
‘ whereizzshe? whereizzshe? whereizzshe?’ they unisoned followed by cries of ‘weak!’ ‘Disgraceful!’ and the obligatory ‘Shame!’
Sir Keir Starmer had tabled an urgent question on Kwasi Kwarteng’s sacking as chancellor and Liz Truss had ducked it. Gone frit. Done the chicken run.
In her stead, she had sent along Leader of the House Penny Mordaunt, a move which only succeeded in zapping her frazzled authority even further. If indeed such a thing were even possible.
For starters, Miss Mordaunt is a punchy performer at the dispatch box. She radiates a certain matronly authority. For an hour yesterday it looked as though she was the one now running the country.
She also made several remarks which the Prime Minister’s team would probably consider unhelpful.
Mordaunt informed the House that the PM had been detained ‘on urgent business’, an explanation met with ripe mockery.
‘no, she’s not hiding under the desk,’ she replied to a question from Stella Creasy (Lab, walthamstow). ‘no, I don’t think there has been a coup,’ she told Andrew Gwynne (Lab, Denton and Reddish).
Cue much merriment and the sound of exasperated Downing Street aides collectively slapping their foreheads. when they’re laughing at you like this, I fear the game is truly up.
Starmer accused Truss of being ‘scared of her own shadow’. ‘ The lady’s not for turning… UP!’ he said to a chorus of muffled laughs.
oh dear. once again, one of Sir Keir’s prized jokes had to be pronounced dead on arrival.
Labour MPs frothed and foamed with righteous indignation. ‘Reckless!’ shouted Chi onwurah (Lab, newcastle Upon Tyne C). ‘In office but not in power!’ was the verdict of Hilary Benn (Lab, Leed C). ‘The biggest humiliation this country has seen!’ said Angela Eagle (Lab, wallasey).
(Up in the Press gallery one hack whispered: ‘ worse than Angela’s own leadership bid?’ Too unkind, surely). A glum-looking Tory frontbench watched this extraordinary scene unfurl with tightly crossed arms, their faces deflated as fourday-old birthday balloons.
Deputy PM Therese Coffey wore an expression so fierce it could have curdled freshly uddered cream. on the backbenches, restless plotters such as Michael Gove expressed weary detachment and examined their phones. Rishi Sunak? Absent, your honour.
Repeated demands about Truss’s whereabouts came flooding in. Mordaunt let slip that she wasn’t there was ‘for a very good reason’. Tres mysterieuse. Speculation began to grow we might actually be getting a resignation speech. ‘Is she on the way to the Palace?’ inquired Stephanie Peacock (Lab, Barnsley East.) At that moment, backbench bigwig and chairman of the 1922 committee, Sir Graham Brady, swiftly departed the chamber. The executioner cometh?
THEnat 16.26 sharp, a bob of blonde hair suddenly appeared behind the Speaker’s chair. There was the PM – just in time to witness her latest Chancellor Jeremy Hunt brutally dismantle her economic plans piece by piece. A rowdy cheer went up. More in jest than anything else. Mr Hunt possesses a politeness almost unheard of in today’s tit-for-tat political arena. A young man seeking to impress his prospective in-laws over afternoon tea at the Ritz could not appear so permanently eager to please.
Yet not even his honeyed charms could sweeten his statement as he slowly took his axe to the recent mini-Budget.
one by one, we heard each of those tax cuts and giveaways ditched. not even if the PM had been forced to wear a sack of cloth and paraded barefoot around Parliament Square could she have faced a more humiliating ritual.
Shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves rose triumphantly. ‘no ideas, out of track and out of time!’ she yelled excitedly. Miss Truss just sat there, her political career circling the plughole, her dazed eyes gazing into the middle distance, the thinnest of smiles doing its best to disguise the personal hell she must have been going through inside.
Behind, Tory MPs gawped at her just as viewers of a wildlife programme will watch the demise of a starving hyena. Far kinder, surely, to simply put her out of her misery.