Harman and friends clucked as their ruse turned to powder

ANOTHER cunning plan by Labour – and it backfired. BANG. Oily faces all round. Well, thank you, Stanley, that’s another fine mess you got us into.

Harriet Harman (Lab, Camberwell & Peckham) was responsible. She asked Speaker Bercow to permit an Urgent Question on the muchhyped resignation of Lord Kerslake as chairman of King’s College Hospital, London.

Her request was naturally granted, for Bercow worships Miss Harman as a drone bee reveres its hive’s queen.

But where were the Labour MPs to witness this great parliamentary event? When an Urgent Question is properly urgent, the Opposition benches can be rammed. Yesterday they were almost empty.

Perhaps I can explain. The day’s Order Paper had ordained that ‘up to eight hours’ would later have to be spent debating the EU (Withdrawal) Bill – day six. That Bill is the leviathan which is currently being chewed on by Parliament. Think boa constrictor trying to digest cow.

Although backbench MPs noisily demanded days of debate, not all of them worked out at the time how many hours they would have to put in – and at such a busy time of year. Politicians have evening Christmas drinks parties to attend. They can do their present- shopping on Oxford Street and thereabouts in the early evenings. But not if some Blairite keenie has gone and kept them back at school late.

Miss Harman’s Urgent Question meant that the parliamentary day was extended by the best part of an hour. Some of Harriet’s comrades were distinctly unimpressed by this. Uncharitable words were mut- tered. Then there was the way the debate went. Lord Kerslake is a former Civil Service chief who quit with much palaver on Monday. As he left his chairmanship, he made public denunciations of the Tories’ healthcare spending plans.

This caused a brief stir because Lord Kerslake is a crossbench peer and was described as a man of high, independent principle. Except, cough, he is not quite that, is he?

As I may have mentioned in yesterday’s Mail, he is currently doing some work for the Labour party. It was also later learned that he had been told at the end of last week that he might be fired, such was the mess he and his senior colleagues were making of the hospital’s finances.

This kept coming out yesterday. Lord Kerslake presided over what the regulators described as ‘a period of significant deterioration’ in the finances at King’s. Conservative MPs were quick to observe that you could not trust a Corbynist with public money.

The Health Minister given the task of answering Miss Harman’s question – and the 45 minutes or so of further exchanges from other MPs – was Philip Dunne. There are few ministers more gentlemanly. Mr Dunne is not one of life’s tub-thumpers or partisan agitators. He is a pukka sort of fellow who finds ad hominem attacks rather vulgar. That’s the sketchwriters’ job.

And yet, with encouragement from his own side, Mr Dunne did note that Lord Kerslake was paid some £65,000 a year for his part-time role at the hospital. Cheryl Gillan (Con, Chesham & Amersham) said Kerslake had seven other remunerated positions and four non-paying jobs. He’s even busier than George Osborne!

KATE Hoey (Lab, Vauxhall) wondered if perhaps he had been so consumed by his other jobs (ie working for Comrade Corbyn) he had taken his eye off the ball.

The longer the session lasted, the more it was hammered into the record that Lord Kerslake was an astonishingly useless chairman whose resignation was ‘politically-motivated’.

Miss Harman and her friends clucked a bit, shaking their heads as they saw their ruse turn to powder. They tried to argue that the Kerslake resignation showed that ‘you just can’t trust the Tories with the NHS’ (that from Eltham’s Clive Efford). Conservative MPs cried ‘weaponise!’, meaning that Labour was trying to make cheap political points out of the NHS.

Ben Bradshaw (Lab, Exeter) went off on one about Brexit. Poor Ben. Brexit has quite unkeeled him.