Coasting Corbyn is becoming Eeyore, a caricature pessimist
WHERE has the mischief and cheering vituperation gone at Prime Minister’s Questions? It is a measure of how prosaic this now routinely overlong affair has become that at yesterday’s exchanges no one mentioned Jean-Claude Juncker’s delicious, self-inflating ‘state of the union’ address in Brussels.
Did you see Nigel Farage’s riposte to Juncker in the European Parliament? It was a corker. We could have done with that sort of fluent clarity and pungent directness at the Commons.
Instead, wristwatches were consulted, necks craned to the ceilings, doodling reached epidemic proportions and the Commons clerks wished they had not dispensed with their horsehair wigs, for they could have pulled them over their eyes and had a snooze. In the Chair, Speaker Bercow reclined with satisfaction as he extended the session until well past its supposed halfhour cut-off point. Bercow’s weird mania for getting in every MP on the day’s Order Paper is helping to kill PMQs. Perhaps that is his intention.
The two best cracks of the day came from that well known comedienne, er, Theresa May. When Madam Glumbucket is your top humorist, things really must be dull.
After referring to union leader Len McCluskey, she added, ‘Mahatma, as his friends call him’ (Mr McCluskey has compared himself to Gandhi and Mandela). And when the relentlessly bouncy Michael Fabricant (Con, Lichfield) asked a question, Mrs May noted that bachelor-boy Fabricant was soon to appear on a television show called Celebrity First Dates. She added: ‘I’m not sure if he is the celebrity or the first date.’ You maybe have to be familiar with Mr Fabricant and his ways to appreciate the comedy in that barb.
Jeremy Corbyn, coasting at present, put little obvious effort into his questions. He started by saying that care for the disabled was ‘a catastrophe’, but soon gave up that line of attack and spoke about pay rates in the public sector. Then he lurched to student debt – dangerous ground for him, given the U-turn he has made on his promise to help students. He ended with a gloomy litany about how dreadful Britain was. The way he told it, we were a Third-World sort of country with nothing to look forward to.
If he is not careful, old Jeremy will become a caricature pessimist, a Meldrew/Eeyore, the sort of bloke who looks at the skies on the morning of June 22 and says, with satisfaction: ‘The nights are drawing in.’
Little of this caused much difficulty for Mrs May. Nor did she have any trouble with the SNP’s Ian Blackford, who too easily rises to the bait and squawks his outrage at the Prime Minister’s replies. This only generates noise (of crossness on the SNP benches and amusement elsewhere) and we lose any drama the moment might have promised. The TV viewer is just left with an image of Mr Blackford furiously gobbling the air as he expresses his fury at Mrs May.
Anna Soubry (Con, Broxtowe), who is considered one of the Tories’ prime rebels on Europe, went out of her way to help Mrs May when Emma Lewell-Buck (Lab, South Shields) attacked her for not visiting the parents of two children who died in the Manchester bomb attack during the General Election campaign.
MRS Lewell-Buck said that these parents felt ‘ignored’ by the Prime Minister. Mrs May responded sensitively to this criticism, but Miss Soubry, from her distant seat, made clear that she thought the Labour MP was straying into improper territory. ‘Disgraceful!’ she muttered. It would surely be unfair to expect a Prime Minister to visit every single family bereaved by every single terror attack.
It is probably best if politicians neither boast about visiting the bereaved nor make discordant parliamentary points when someone has not been visited.
The clock’s hand moved. We passed 30 minutes, then 45 minutes. The Chamber was emptying fast, MPs no longer interested by a procession of queries, many of them no better than charity plugs. More is less, Mr Squeaker.