What a corker! Corbyn finally does the business
JUST in time, Jeremy Corbyn did the business at PMQs. A milky Wednesday sun had risen over Westminster amid rumours (denied) that the Labour leader was contemplating resignation. Shadow Business Secretary Clive Lewis (young, muscular, snazzy) was plotting to do in his ageing patron. Labour frontbenchers were behaving like characters in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. And Diane Abbott was absent, possibly attending sickbay for another Vicks Vapo Rub. Or is hot toddy more her thing? Some say so.
By lunchtime much of the gossip had cooled after an unusually assured Corbyn produced a corker in the Chamber. He had come up with a leak about the Government doing favours for its chums in hard-pressed Surrey – the county where both the Chancellor, Philip Hammond, and Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, are MPs. As Mr Corbyn produced his humdinger, Mr Hunt turned scarlet and Mr Hammond discreetly ground his jaw.
Sajid Javid, the relevant Cabinet minister for this policy, stood nearby, all but whistling as he examined the ceiling. Wot, me, guv?
Mr Corbyn could have blurted out his scoop immediately. Instead he waited until his third allotted question, having used the first two to describe problems in the National Health Service and in social care. Mrs May may have been lured into a false sense of security.
Then Mr Corbyn – having established councils’ need for money – sprang the Surrey story on her. He had obtained telephone text messages allegedly sent by the Tory leader of Surrey council to ‘somebody called Nick’ high up in Whitehall.
THESE messages suggested that Surrey would be given more cash if its Tory councillors eased off the political pressure on ministers. It did sound distinctly whiffy. The council leader apparently sent his text message to the wrong person. You beauty!
What gumbies our politicos are. How can they run a county, or a country, if they can not even send a text message to the right Nick?
Mr Corbyn: ‘Was there a special deal for Surrey?’ Mrs May went into problem- deflection mode, declining to give a straight answer. Mr Corbyn repeated his query, with the twist, ‘Will such sweetheart deals be on offer to every council?’
Mrs May had no less difficulty answering the question a second time. Beside her Mr Hammond adopted the expression of a man who, in the middle of a Buckingham Palace banquet, realises that his gold front tooth has just fallen out.
Labour MPs being the disloyal swine that they are, Mr Corbyn received less support than he deserved from his own benches. Mr Lewis at least murmured a few hear-hears – more than some of the Blairite Remainers were doing.
Mrs May had the last word in the exchanges, as a Prime Minister always does, and she finished with some rhetorical stuff about how Labour’s policies would bankrupt Britain. This gained rather less cheering from her own side than she might have expected. A solid and rare win for Mr Corbyn, definitely.
elsewhere in PMQs we heard from Ronnie Campbell (Lab, Blyth Valley), who has been off recently owing to cancer. When Mr Campbell last spoke in the Commons he looked terribly frail and some of us wondered if we would see him again.
Yesterday he was back to something approaching his old robust self. He held open his jacket to show how slim he had become and told the House his life had been saved by an ace surgeon in Newcastle. And yet some parts of the NHS were not so good. He sought greater NHS spending and did so with quiet grace (‘Open your purse,’ he urged Mrs May gently). It was the most effective spending plea heard for years and that was because it was put without political aggression but with a sense of the mercy that successful medical care can bring.
As Question Time ended, Mrs May lingered a little longer than normal. With her were Mr Hammond and Mr Hunt. They were having a tight little conflab. Surrey? Or sorry?