The right politics

Debate must be more civilised

A SO-CALLED comedian’s cack-handed attempt to overshadow Theresa May’s party conference speech helped – ironically – to make one of the Prime Minister’s fundamental points about the conduct of politics in today’s Britain.

The Tory leader is right. There is a big problem when an MP from one party refuses to be friends with those of another, or when the BBC’s political editor Laura Kuenssberg has to hire bodyguards just to be able to do her job.

Has nothing been learned from the senseless murder, little more than 12 months ago, of Batley and Spen MP Jo Cox who was one of the few politicians to be brave enough to work with others because she believed that opponents had more in common than they cared to believe?

The conduct of this year’s election was certainly the most ugly in living memory and both the politicians concerned, and those meting out vitriolic abuse, have much to answer for. Equally the stain of anti-Semitism within Labour’s ranks continues to undermine the supposed sincerity of Jeremy Corbyn.

Yet Mrs May’s cannot laud the Tories as a paragons of virtue when she’s prepared to indulge Boris Johnson who is rapidly becoming a one-man diplomatic disaster as Foreign Secretary because of his propensity to cause offence – his latest comments about Libya and dead bodies being a case in point.

Perhaps Mrs May, and Mr Corbyn for that matter, would like to lead by example and ensure, on Parliament’s resumption next week, that Prime Minister’s Questions is not only more courteous, but more constructive than their more unedifying exchanges of late.