Come together

The Labour benches of the House of Commons were a sea of white roses, worn by MPs in memory of their colleague Jo Cox, murdered 10 years ago. It took a moment to realise that the two teenagers sat with their father in the gallery watching proceedings were her children. It was a quietly moving sight.

The slogan Cox’s family took up after her death was that we have “more in common” as a nation than divides us. It was always an unusual sentiment for a politician. The standard approach of the trade is to try to establish splits: between parties, within parties, and among voters. And it’s an idea that’s been tested pretty hard over the decade, that indeed quite a few people are busy testing even as you read this.

But let’s try to find some things we can, as a nation, agree on. 

• There are places in Britain that are north of Manchester, Andy. The single most irritating thing about Andy Burnham’s Professional Northerner shtick is that it’s predicated on the idea that Manchester, a flourishing city 160 miles from London, is somehow an utterly alien culture that no one south of Birmingham can comprehend. On Wednesday he even released a video of himself reading the poem “Anthem of the North”. Tony Blair was brought up in Durham and went to school in Edinburgh — both places that would view Manchester as “The South”. Gordon Brown was from Fife, even northier. Neither of them did this. 
• The Conservatives are the one thing Labour doesn’t have to worry about. With Keir Starmer absent at the G7 summit, we got Deputy Prime Minister’s Questions, an unexciting affair. Claire Coutinho spoke for the Conservatives, a decision a cynic would accuse Kemi Badenoch of taking in an effort to remind her party that things could be worse. It would not have occurred to me last Thursday, watching the Defence Secretary resign, that this week would be anything other than a walkover for the Tories, but when Coutinho finally got round to asking about that small matter, she had lost the interest even of her own side. 
• Partisan media hurts the people it’s trying to help. The one moment of excitement was when David Lammy, in for the prime minister, attacked Tory MP Matt Vickers over a TV appearance the previous day. Vickers had gone on Talk TV, best thought of as the provisional wing of GB News, and laughed along as host Jeremy Kyle told a series of jokes about the Russian-inspired conspiracy theory that the arson attacks on the prime minister’s homes were carried out by spurned Ukrainian rent boys. It wasn’t a great look. The British right is understandably delighted to have TV channels that nakedly support it, but as they search for viewers, these stations are moving ever further from the mainstream, and they may take parties with them. (A Conservative spokesman said later that Vickers had simply wanted to be “polite”. It’s not clear who to.)
• This isn’t really working, Keir. Not that Starmer was having a much nicer time in France, as he ploughed through a series of TV interviews about when he is going to resign, which is probably not how he imagined things would be going two years into his time in office. Asked about Burnham, he replied: “Andy’s a great asset. I want him to have a big role in government.” At last, a legacy project the prime minister might be able to pull off.
• Neither is this, Kemi. The Tory leader is on a high at the moment, giving triumphant interviews, but it’s really not clear why. With a government in deep trouble, Britain’s supposedly main opposition party is on course to lose its deposit in this week’s by-election. She was attacked this week for an interview with The Spectator in which she compared Bridget Phillipson to the Gestapo for imposing VAT on private schools, a line that suggested the Tory leader isn’t quite across the detail of why people think the Nazis were bad. But the worse quote was probably this one, about her admiration for Game of Thrones: “I identify with Daenerys Targaryen before she went mad. She just kept building an army. Then eventually she rode the dragon and burned the city to the ground.”

OK, not an entirely unifying note on which to end things, but at least, after Daenerys went mad, the people of Westeros realised that they too had more in common than that which divided them.