Forget about Brexit – MPs asked Mrs May some easy-peasies on jazz and whisky
CONSERVATIVE backbenchers again gave Theresa May little gyp at PMQs. No rudeness. No violent threats. Not even a display of lips curling like Bosnian slippers. Whatever you might read elsewhere, this has been the case for months. Tory MPs dislike her capitulations to Brussels but they are remarkably courteous to her in public.
David Cameron was often subjected to acid criticism from his own benches. Ditto Gordon Brown, sneered at by Blairites, and Tony Blair, hated by Brownites. Johnny Major was mocked by all sides, oh yes. Margaret Thatcher inspired loathing on the Left, resentment from the Heseltine Centre.
I was not writing parliamentary sketches in James Callaghan’s day, so will not venture an opinion about how he fared at PMQs but I bet the Chamber was rarely as stultified then as it is by Mrs May.
The only Tory MP to ask her about Brexit yesterday was gentlemanly Jacob Rees-Mogg (NE Somerset). He justifiably mentioned a worrying news report.
Was it true, he asked, that after we have left the EU we may still have to look to the European Court of Justice as a final arbiter? ‘Will she authoritatively deny it?’ asked Mr Rees-Mogg.
In as much as Mrs May possesses an authoritative manner, she did proceed to do just that. Any report along the lines recounted by Mr Rees-Mogg was ‘wrong’, she said.
Indeed, even while Mr ReesMogg was asking his question, both Mrs May and her deputy, David Lidington, pulled faces of pretty genuine-looking puzzlement. Another scare story, it seems. And that, as far as Brexit was concerned, was that.
Jeremy Corbyn, Leader of the Opposition, tilted at her over a variety of issues – spending cuts, police numbers, care of the elderly and more – but with little obvious success. One of the few Tory MPs to bawl abuse at Mr Corbyn was Margot James, who is a minister but who was sitting on the backbenches to take up empty space there. ‘Wrong!’ she shrieked at Mr Corbyn.
The fact she was audible to my cloth ears may tell you how little hubbub there was. At a properly noise PMQs, individual remarks merge into one.
Sir David Amess (Con, Southend W) had opened the session by asking Mrs May something about jazz music. Alex Chalk ( Con, Cheltenham) put a thoughtful point about the rising complexity of school pupils and subsequent schooling problems.
Richard Graham ( Con, Gloucester) produced a faultlessly helpful contribution about the economy. Paul Masterton (Con, E Renfrewshire) lobbied against higher tax on whisky. Snorting Brexiteer David TC Davies (Monmouth) foghorned a worthy point about transsexuals.
JUSTINE Greening (Con, Putney) was worried about people’s credit histories. Good topic. My own credit history has been besmirched because some bank called Vanquis, of which I had not previously heard, wrongly accused me of owing it loot. Turned out the idiots were after someone who happened to have the same name as me but lived in a completely different part of the world. I can only sympathise with people called John Smith.
Anyway, you perhaps catch the drift. Mrs May was thrown a succession of easy-peasies by her own MPs. It was as if they were purposefully avoiding the biggest matter of our times. Why? Because they think the voters are weary of Brexit? Maybe. Because there is no point wasting breath trying to persuade Mrs May to alter her mind? That, too, perhaps. Or sheer tedium at the ordeal the weekly PMQs has become?
The Chamber yesterday was so placid that it called to mind those lines from Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner – ‘day after day, day after day, we stuck, nor breath nor motion; as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean’.
By the time Speaker Bercow ended proceedings at 12.45pm, many MPs had fled the scene. Mrs May, who electrifies no one but who may be less of a victim of plots than her Whips want us to believe, had numbed the Commons into stupefaction.