Zinger to the rescue: dull session marred by Starmer’s doleful delivery
MPs fell over themselves to profess an interest in football as they wished Rangers good luck in Seville. Sir Keir Starmer tried to feign excitement but, with his enthusiasm on its usual par with that of a doleful undertaker, he inevitably made this tale of a plucky underdog sound catatonically dull. “It’s quite an extraordinary story actually, for that football club…” he maundered. (Well, go on then – but no further detail was forthcoming.)
The top dogs’ exchanges were bloodless at first. Weirdly, the PM and Leader of the Opposition seemed to have swapped their usual lines of attack. Weeks of tabloid coverage had apparently succeeded in getting Sir Keir to stop banging on about Partygate. Instead, he accused the Prime Minister of sitting on the fence and “vacillating” – when once it was Boris who’d yell “they vacillate, we vaccinate!” across the dispatch box, to rousing cheers from the Tory backbenches. But odder even than seeing the artiste formerly known as Captain Hindsight promote his rival to Admiral of the Fleet, was Johnson’s response to questions about reconsidering the windfall tax.
The PM, scruffier than usual today, his hair a fuzzy mop evoking a blond Dennis the Menace, seemed intent on a malevolent wind-up. He began with a non-sequitur about Keir Starmer’s recent inability to say whether women could have penises – “He couldn’t make up his mind on that Mr Speaker, heaven help us” – then pivoted to something altogether more outlandish.
“Nothing could be more transparent than their LUST for raising taxes!”, hooted the PM, jabbing a finger at the opposition benches. It takes a certain amount of brass neck to declare “Labour put up taxes,” when your own party has been shamelessly doing the same on your watch. “This Government is not in principle in favour of higher taxation,” he continued. Starmer might have struggled to define what a woman was but here it felt as if the Prime Minister was outing himself as a trans taxcutter, self-identifying as a fiscal conservative while, in the real world, hiking taxes to levels not seen since Clement Attlee was in charge.
As he tried to draw the PM on the cost-of-living, the Leader of the Opposition produced his carefully scripted bons mots with a formulaic delivery that complemented his preachy tone of voice. “He stood there and said ‘we will do more’,” he began, pointing at the PM. “A month has passed and still … nothing!” (“Nothing!” echoed a Greek chorus of Labour MPS, dutifully enough, but with all the enthusiasm of Year 5’s outing to the local box factory). He tried marshalling members of the great and the good who supported a windfall tax – on the one side, the chairman of John Lewis, Lord Hague, Lord Browne, the chairman of BP. “On the other side”, snarled Starmer “the member for North East Somerset, when he’s not sticking notes on people’s desks like some overgrown prefect”. Labour (and many Tories) dissolved into giggles. Rees-mogg, to his credit, laughed too.
It was a zinger that rescued what had been a fairly mediocre session. Starmer had snookered him. The Tory trans tax-cutter had nowhere to hide.