Sir Keir tried some Mrs Merton sarcasm but all he could deliver was a derivative dud
NEAR Victoria railway station you will find a florist who sells pink roses, hydrangeas, lisianthus and phlox. Rishi Sunak should ditch his meetings for an hour and go down there to buy a large bouquet for Diane Abbott.
It might not solve the political problem of those idiotic remarks by Tory donor Frank Hester but it would at least be an act of kindness. That is always a start.
Ms Abbott (Independent, Hackney North and Stoke Newington) sat in the Commons at Prime Minister’s Questions looking sad.
Who could blame her? Mr Hester had been foul about her and it had become headline news.
The Commons was now yelling away, the two main Opposition leaders capitalising on the issue, while Mr Sunak failed to defend the indefensible.
When a woman has been racially violated, you shouldn’t game-plan your response or think up parliamentary retorts.
As all the partisan arguments whirlpooled around her name, Ms Abbott, 70, sat on the backbench near the late Jo Cox’s coat of arms.
She was flanked by two of her dwindling band of socialist friends, Zarah Sultana (Lab, Coventry South) and Apsana Begum (Lab, Poplar and Limehouse). She kept bobbing, hoping to catch the Speaker’s eye, but she was not called.
Her name was not on the order paper and Speakers usually stick to the list.
Sir Keir Starmer spat out his questions and tried some Mrs Merton sarcasm.
Even when his opponent is in an impossible position there is something stale about Sir Keir.
A derivative dud. Not for the first time he nicked one of Tony Blair’s lines about how he had changed his party.
Half the House met this claim with mirth. Stephen Flynn, who leads the Scots Nats’ MPs, is a crisper, deadlier proposition.
Mr Flynn, who does not bother with notes, snarled that the Hester comments about Ms Abbott were ‘racist, odious and downright bloody dangerous’.
Speaker Lindsay Hoyle almost protested about that ‘bloody’, for you are not meant to swear in the Commons.
He leaned forward, listening intently, but the clerks did not encourage an intervention.
In a second, anyway, Mr Flynn had resumed his seat, the veins of his bald head throbbing with impressive aggression. There is untold value in brevity. The Labour and Scots Nats attacks were half-successful.
They put a weary- sounding Sunak very much on the defensive and made us think Mr Hester a bad piece of business.
Where the attacks were less successful was in trying to depict the modern Tory party as racist.
Alongside the PM sat the Home Secretary, James Cleverly, whose mum came from Sierra Leone.
Mr Sunak reminded the
house that he himself is the country’s first Britishasian PM. Mind you, that is as far as he ever goes.
he never speaks of any abuse he himself experienced as a youth.
Given that he once worked as an indian restaurant waiter, i bet he copped a few drunken insults.
Maybe he doesn’t want to play the victim card. it might be politic to do so.
he did not handle the hester business brilliantly.
Politics becomes a dehumanising business. The main figures become lost in a cocoon of ‘ optics’, focus groups and strategems. They forget the human touch, such as a bunch of flowers.
Ms abbott was not alone in failing to catch the Speaker’s eye.
So did Rochdale’s George Galloway. Sir Edward Leigh (Con, Gainsborough), 73, bellowed a question about immigration and ran so short of breath, he nearly pegged it.
i preferred the unobtrusive silence of Sir Oliver heald (Con, n-E herts). Spherical Sir Oliver, 69, sits almost immobile during the worst Comm ons squalls.
all he does, while remaining utterly phlegmatic, is exercise his lips, pushing them up and down and inside out like a resting brass player.
The rest of the house is screaming like lunatics but Sir Oliver just parps away to himself, a tuba player preparing to perform Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight Of The Bumblebee.