Things went a bit flub-a-dub... Keir tried to make a joke about Rishi and his oblong brain blew a gasket
SIr Keir caught a crab. It can happen to the best oarsmen. One moment they are gliding along, pulling with confidence, feeling the water run beneath their bows and thinking life can’t improve. The next? A clunk, splosh, they lose their stroke and look prize Charlies.
It happened in Prime Minister’s Questions while Labour’s leader was trying to mock rishi Sunak for being, er, a gormless liability.
Sir Keir mentioned some computer foul-up at Conservative Party HQ and launched into a leaden gag about the PM being ‘the only tech bro who can’t send an email’. Had he managed to say the words clearly, they might have raised a feathering of laughter. Instead he fluffed the line and that resulted in a roar of merriment from his opponents. A few Labour MPs also laughed. The term that threw him was ‘tech bro’. It is plainly not an expression natural to the nasal knight, who at 61 is the same age as your sketchwriter and almost equally ungroovy.
Chaps our vintage, even those with the second name rodney, do not say ‘tech bro’ unless they have had it inserted into their scripts by young aides. Team Starmer often tries to make the old dobbin say demotic things. It seldom works. Soon they’ll have him wearing a baseball cap back-to-front.
Sir Keir was reading his zingers from a folder and had just done one of his fake, Denis Norden chuckles when he reached the ‘tech bro’ joke. Something in his oblong brain blew a gasket. The tongue would not cooperate. Things went flub-a- dub. ‘Tech bow, er, er, bruvver,’ he honked. Shades of seeing ed Miliband eating a bacon sandwich.
One moment Sir Keir was upright, reading his script. The next he was sinking to his left, as if a wing-strut had just snapped. He had to grab hold of the despatch box to stop himself falling further. The whole thing was a terrible mess.
Amid mockery from the Tories, Sir Keir valiantly tried to finish the sentence but it was inaudible. Angela rayner and rachel reeves, either side of him, did not quite manage to keep smiles off their faces. Mr Sunak, for his part, gave a dry chuckle and said: ‘He just showed spectacularly why he’s not fit to lead this country into the future.’
Sir Keir did not find this remotely amusing. A gordon Brown sense-of-humour failure.
THere were further scowls when Mr Sunak followed it up with a jibe that if Sir Keir had been around for the industrial revolution he would no doubt have referred to the railways entrepreneur James Watt as ‘a steam bro’. A rt Hon member sitting near Sir Keir on the opposition side later disclosed that the Labour leader’s hands were shaking terribly afterwards. It is possible he is gnawed from within by weevils about his abilities. Sir Keir might not be a player you’d want on your team in a penalty shoot-out.
The other news was that no one defected from the Tory benches to the Labour side. In the minutes before PMQs, Labour MPs kept going ‘ooooohhh!’ – like football fans jeering a visiting keeper’s goal kicks – when backbench Tories walked into the chamber.
For the first time in three weeks, however, no one crossed the floor. It’s a miracle! Of Labour’s two new recruits Natalie elphicke (Dover) and Dan Poulter (Central Suffolk & North Ipswich) I saw no sign.
It was also noticeable that the last two people to take their places were the Tory and Labour chief whips. That felt to me like a ‘we run this place’ statement. Labour’s whips were reportedly less than delighted about the elphicke defection, which was masterminded by Sir Keir’s chief of staff, Sue gray.
electricity levels in the chamber were low. The government benches were not full. But as election underdog rishi Sunak left the chamber a Tory MP shouted ‘well done, boss’. As Sir Keir plodded out, none of his own MPs spoke to him.