No More Bromance - PMQs 6th November 2024

Emily Maitlis loved last week’s PMQs: ‘Just imagine if PMQs was like this every week. Conciliatory. Helpful. By [sic] partisan. Passionate and compassionate.’

Your correspondent was thinking more on the lines of ‘get a room.’ It may have suited Sir Keir to face Walter the Softy but cross-party collusion has often been the bane of good politics, whether re Brexit or destructive Covid lockdowns. The Commons and especially PMQs should be a bear garden.

La Maitlis herself was not all sweetness and light this morning as Trump became President-Elect: she had to be told off on Channel 4 for swearing about him. Remember the tears of the righteous in 2016? Wait for Rachel Maddow’s reactions on MSNBC (there’s something about her to Make America Grate Again) and all the other tremendously well-paid Care Bears.

Yet the US may now have avoided the ramp to nuclear war and a transformation (by mass illegal migration and fast-track citizenship in a handful of swing States) into a permanent one-party government. The garbage can - and just did.

Over here, we face ‘four more years’ of radical incompetence, unless it gets so bad that the IMF returns, and then we shall all be sorry. Meantime Team Tory has a new captain and the initial signs are that she is a good bowler; the question is whether her side will ever bat again.

The PM opened by congratulating Donald Trump first and then ‘my fourth Tory leader in four and a half years’; Mrs Badenoch thanked him for his ‘almost warm’ welcome and promised to take a different approach by being ‘a more constructive Opposition’ than the last one. Tighten the shin pads! Did the PM and Foreign Secretary take the opportunity of their last meeting with DJT to apologise for Lammy’s derogatory remarks and ‘scatological references’ - some of which she quoted - about him? If not, would Starmer do so now on his colleague’s behalf? Sir Keir swished the air, saying the House was united on national security and Ukraine which was ‘far more important than party politics.’

Kemi noted he had not distanced himself from the Foreign Secretary’s remarks, and expected Trump ‘will soon be calling to thank him for sending all of those north London Labour activists to campaign for his opponent.’ Since most of the Cabinet had signed a motion to ban Trump from addressing Parliament, would the Prime Minister ‘show that he and his Government can be more than student politicians’ by asking Mr Speaker to extend the invitation instead? Starmer replied that Badenoch was ‘giving a masterclass on student politics’ but again he failed to answer the question; which Kemi noted, saying ‘he just reads the lines the officials have prepared for him.’

Perhaps it is a matter of having too much body armour (those 400 Labour myrmidons) but Sir Keir has a habit of chesting away deliveries rather than attempting to score. Again and again he counters with semi-irrelevant boilerplate blether: ‘economy, security, conflict’; ‘fixing the foundations’; ‘stability’; ‘black hole’; the last lot’s ‘mess’; ‘schools, hospitals, homes.’ He is becoming a ‘doubleplusgood duckspeaker’, a Shogun of slogan.

That, or he hurls the ball back. Mary Glindon (Lab) quoted Kemi as saying the outrage about Covid-time Downing Street partying was ‘overblown’ and Starmer shared his honourable friend’s disapproval - without adverting to ‘Beergate’ or his own role in promoting lockdowns. Sir Keir also sided with Torcuil Crichton (Scottish Labour) in challenging the SNP to use its powers and the additional funding now in place to improve public services in Scotland.

There were some easy underhand tosses: the need to support children’s special needs and youngsters’ mental health, the benefits of the minimum wage increase, fighting misogyny in Ireland and the economic abuse of women’s credit, developing infrastructure, cleaning rivers and so on.

And there were hands across the aisle as George Freeman (Con., Mid Norfolk) urged the use of pension funds to invest in innovative businesses; welcomed by the PM as already being addressed by Labour’s British Growth Partnership.

An issue on which we might wish for less consensus was raised by Ed Davey: the House’s unity on Ukraine. This may be a hot one when Trump pushes for peace there.

On a currently contentious matter, at last we got some clarification on the impact of taxation on small family farms: ‘the vast, vast majority of farms will not be affected’ - a shame this could not have been established earlier - followed, of course, by boilerplate about the NHS, schools and homes.

Coming back to the Leader of the Opposition: Badenoch’s inquisitorial approach is promising, but she needs to spend more time in the nets to practise shots under Starmer’s Stonewall Jackson defence.

A slightly edited version of this appeared first on Wolves of Westminster