She had all the punch of a wee gran asking for sprouts...
LABOUR MPs are miserable, distrait, more interested in their mobile telephones or in talking to their neighbours than in following the arguments being made by their party’s frontbenchers. They despair of Corbyn leadership. One hears many of them are also increasingly fed up with Speaker Bercow, their one-time, fair-weather friend.
Yesterday the House creaked through the motions of another Monday: oral questions to the Secretary of State for Communities (Sajid Javid). Communities: the plural is a hangover from the crackpot theory of multiculturalism which chopped us into minorities.
Mr Javid is no longer the fancied nag he was before the EU referendum. A year or so ago it was possible to find people who thought he could become Tory leader. That was before Mr Javid reneged on his Euroscepticism and, after pressure from David Cameron and George Osborne, supported the Remain campaign in the EU referendum. A bottler. Now his oomph has gone and it is hard to see what he brings to the Cabinet but for his ethnic-minority background.
Yesterday his performance at the despatch box, along with that of his ministers, was unscintillating. Yet that did not account for the ennui on the Labour side.
What an array of glum puddings they looked. There was little zest in the way they stood to try to gain the Speaker’s eye. They spoke without fervour or force.
Last week brought the resignation of Tristram Hunt (Lab, Stoke C) to go and run the V&A; out of one museum (the Corbyn Labour party) into another. Mr Hunt was the second Labour MP to depart in a month, Copeland’s Jamie Reed having opted for life as a PR man for nuclear power. There is speculation other moderate Labour MPs may follow. How much longer will Chuka Umunna (Streatham), Stella Creasy (Walthamstow), John Woodcock (Barrow & Furness) and Gloria De Piero (Ashfield & Eastwood) want to plod through the Corbyn terrors? One even hears questions about that resilient old bird Angela Eagle (Wallasey). She is Labour to her entrails but she has allegedly been given a horrible time by some of Mr Corbyn’s Momentum friends. They were displeased that Miss Eagle agitated against his leadership in the summer.
With so many Centrist Labour MPs declining to serve in Mr Corbyn’s team, the Opposition frontbench contains some weak performers. One such is Kate Hollern, a Communities spokesman. Mrs Hollern, 61, formerly a shoe shop manageress, is the new MP for Blackburn. As such, she follows two formidable parliamentarians, Barbara Castle and Jack Straw. Good grief, what a chasm in talent between them and this tentative creature. Asking yesterday about bed-blocking in hospitals, she packed all the punch of a wee granny asking a greengrocer for a pound of sprouts.
HER performance was watched closely from the Labour backbenches by former Blair/Brown era ministers Ian Austin and Joan Ryan. The latter murmured something.
Mr Austin started to laugh uncontrollably. Mr Javid, answering various questions, was far from impressive – yet he got away with it because the Opposition frontbench was so feeble. A few Labour MPs flared briefly, candles guttering before the darkness. Wes Streeting (Ilford N) looked frustrated, a little boy whose school football team keeps missing goals. The likes of Kate Green, a rigid- spined Karen Buck, Diana Johnson, John Spellar, burly Toby Perkins, gulpy Robert Flello all watched with expressions suggesting sorrow. Steve McCabe (Selly Oak) barely lifted his eyes from his lap. Bridget Phillipson (Houghton & Sunderland S) glowered under a severe new haircut worthy of a bigboned flapper in a PG Wodehouse novel. Christina Rees (Neath), her voice the embodiment of south-Walian rain, cast a further pall of misery over proceedings by asking a couple of questions. The Rees larynx is enough to make you bring out your Black Plague dead.
For the likes of Michael Dugher, Natascha Engel, Rosie Winterton, Ben Bradshaw, Liz Kendall, Stephen Kinnock, Liam Byrne, Vernon Coaker, what is the point of staying in this sorry parliamentary Labour party?