Boring and repetitive, PMQs is not the answer
To be fair to Theresa May, at least the NHS won’t need to be stockpiling sedatives in the event of no-deal Brexit now that the nation has this week’s edition of Prime Minister’s Questions on tape.
In the public galleries above, a 10-year-old boy sat with his face pressed against the railings in a state of semi-consciousness. The decent thing to do would have been to alert the Labour benches of his presence. The unknown yet imminent threat of his precipitant drool dangling above them like a severed electricity cable might have injected some drama into proceedings.
To say it was like Groundhog Day would be an insult to a fine film which anyone would rather watch on
loop for the rest of their lives than have to listen to another session of PMQs ever again. To call it a waste of time would be an insult to anyone with an active interest in honourable pursuits like re-enacting civil war battles, assembling model aircraft, manually rewinding cassette tapes or watching paint dry.
There is a man called Michael Carmichael who lives in a small town in Indiana who, every day since the 1960s, has applied at least one new coat of paint to a baseball, so that it now weighs almost two tonnes. Not only a Guinness World Record but a far more valuable contribution to humanity than Jeremy Corbyn’s weekly questioning of Theresa May across the despatch box at Wednesday lunchtime.
To be honest, according to the most credible estimates, there are around 100 trillion words on the internet, and unless you’ve already polished off the lot I frankly wouldn’t bother with these ones any further than you already have done. The country stands on the brink of utterly ballsing up the most important thing it has done in decades. You will find precious few people, Leave or Remain, who would disagree with that highly uncontroversial statement.
But Jeremy Corbyn doesn’t want to know, not on this occasion anyway. Theresa May keeps promising she’s ended austerity when she palpably hasn’t. And universal credit is a mess. Both these things are true. But she is also, if rumours are to be believed, on the verge of being slung out by her own MPs and utterly incapable of delivering any kind of Brexit deal that will be acceptable to either the European Union or the House of Commons. What that will mean is that the dire warnings she once issued, about “getting this negotiation wrong will mean that the high paid jobs you want for your children just won’t happen,” will come true, and fast.
Brexit might be boring. Austerity might be important. Universal credit might be a disaster. But if Jeremy Corbyn wants to fix any of those problems he will have to get into government first. And to do that, he will have to start at least trying to make Theresa May feel uncomfortable.