May tones it down for shadow-boxing with Burnham
In the House of Commons, Theresa May has a mercifully cooler persona than she presented, clad in forbidding black, in last week’s last week’s scarily hawkish Tory conference performance. Partly she achieved this by leaving most questions to her juniors, including police minister Mike Penning, now sporting a distractingly nautical beard. Penning sympathetically fielded a complaint from his fellow Tory Nigel Evans about Manchester police’s “totally inadequate” response to the abuse – “tantamount to hate crimes” – from demonstrators confronting Tory conference participants last week.
But it was left to the even more junior Karen Bradley to grapple with the thornier issues arising from efforts to stamp out “hate speech”. First, Tory Fiona Bruce sought reassurances that they would not inhibit “Christian ministers... preaching biblical principles from their pulpits”. Equally, however, another Tory, Kwasi Kwarteng warned the Government against “undermining not just Christianity, but people who preach other faiths.” Faced with the hideous complexities of who was and wasn’t allowed to attack such “other faiths”, Ms Bradley was understandably at sea, resorting to a platitudinous focus on “people who seek to use religious texts as an excuse to promote hatred and extremism”.
Mrs May’s first shootout with her new shadow, Andy Burnham – who raised the vigorous attack by a barrage of eminent lawyers on her asylum policy – was relatively predictable on both sides. One reason for Mrs May’s current equanimity may be because she is no longer opposed by Yvette Cooper, who asked from the back benches a telling question – in light of Mrs May’s call to discourage “dangerous journeys” by refugees – about a 17year-old Syrian boy whose parents were dead, whose brother lives here, and who was kidnapped and tortured on a journey that he was ordered to make to an embassy to apply for asylum.
Equally, having burnished her Eurosceptic credentials so energetically in Manchester last week, she may have been cheered by the earlier, somewhat shaky, launch of the “British Stronger in Europe” campaign by former M&S chairman Lord Rose in a fashionable East London hangout – an old brewery, but let’s not make the obvious joke.
The first problem was the name. For older voters the initials, the medical ones for mad cow disease, recall an unhappy episode in Britain’s European past.
So dynamic is the campaign frontman that Lord Rose had no time to take questions from reporters. Which was as well, since at one point he got carried away enough to suggest that being in the EU saved “every person £480m a day”. This seems a bit on the steep side even in the circles in which Lord Rose moves. But it was all OK because the event’s chairperson, TV presenter June Sarpong, grilled Rose’s fellow euorophile panellists instead. Was it “way too dangerous” to leave the EU, Ms Sarpong fearlessly asked Karren Brady. Amazingly, Baroness Brady – not to be confused with her struggling fellow Tory Ms Bradley – seemed to think it was.