Up against Penny, Powell looked like a goat trotting into a minefield
AT THE risk of cultural appropriation, happy International Women’s Day. To mark this vital event, we will ignore fluffy little men and focus on what the ladies said in Parliament yesterday.
They spouted plenty of nonsense to fill a column.
Rachel Reeves, Shadow Chancellor, opened the day’s Budget debate. She had been to the cliché cupboard. ‘This is an omnishambles Budget,’ intoned Westminster’s very own Harold Steptoe. One of the few constitutional duties of an Opposition is to devise new political insults, but Ms Reeves was recycling one from a decade ago, when Ed Balls attacked
George Osborne’s ‘pasty tax’. What a dead, dull haddock she is. Eyes lifeless, mouth opening horizontally like a Thunderbirds puppet, Ms Reeves spoke of a ‘doom loop’, ‘Tory pickpocketing’ and ‘14 years of failure’. Labour would replace Jeremy Hunt’s plan with ‘ mission-based government’ and ‘iron discipline’.
Discipline, for Ms Reeves, comes in only one option and that is ‘iron’.
Her tongue presses words the way a biscuit factory stamps the logo on custard creams: mechanically, repetitively, without care for onlookers. After a short while, one custard cream blurs into another. Ms Reeves’s pronouncements become one synthetic mush. There is no novelty, no interest in language, no relish for ideas.
The morning had begun with Kemi Badenoch, Trade Secretary, at departmental questions. Good of her to look in. Though physically on the short side, she is tremendously de haut en bas. Opponents must feel like they’re being patronised by Ronnie Corbett.
Quizzed about trade talks with Canada, Ms Badenoch said talks had stalled owing to a row about ‘cheese access’. Lord Cameron had met his Canadian counterpart last week and ‘the cheese issue was discussed’, said Kemi severely.
‘And I raised cheese with the Canadians in Abu Dhabi last week.’ I bet she did. Stinkingly.
To the despatch box wobbled that uncertain craft known as Lucy Powell, Labour’s Shadow Commons Leader. Every week she goes up against Penny Mordaunt. It is like seeing a goat trot into a minefield.
Ms Powell is another terrible peddler of banalities. Every apology must be ‘grovelling’, every dossier ‘ dodgy’. Computers have spell- checking programs. Why has no one invented a similar device to remove hackneyed phrases from the Commons speeches of division-two duds?
As happens every week, the little goat trotted past the DANGER signs, neck-bell tinkling. And then, as always happens, there was a terrible kaboom and flecks of goat meat were thrown high in the air. Ms Mordaunt obliterated poor Ms Powell. The minister’s reply included references to Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny (whom Ms Powell does, admittedly, resemble) and her language ranged from the imperious to the demotic (‘the square root of diddly-squat’).
Ms Mordaunt worked herself into a vortex of righteousness before slamming on the brakes and ending with a snorted ‘further business will be announced in the usual way’. It was funny, interesting and horribly effective. Ms Powell just sat there blinking, sucking her front teeth, looking dim.
THINGS did not all go Ms Mordaunt’s way. She struggled to justify the Government settling a £15,000 defamation bill incurred by the Science Secretary, Michelle Donelan. Ministers should settle their own libel costs, said the Opposition. This argument may not be popular with all journalists.
Down at the Lords, the food, diet and obesity committee heard from experts on obesogenic environments – i.e. why is our country so fat? This committee is swollen, having 12 members, most as slender as they are superior. Champion finger-waggers.
The event was not without its oddness. One witness, Bee Wilson, became worked up about children needing to ‘ explore food in a noninvasive, non-judgmental way’. At one point she almost started crying. After talking about food noises and ‘the music of a lettuce leaf or a spinach leaf’, she whipped out a games sock and shoved a large onion up it. ‘You can feel it’s got a knobbly thing on the end,’ she explained. It was all becoming a little Frankie Howerd. I made my excuses and left.