Comedy weapons programme
This week’s PMQs featured a heroic backbencher and the controlled detonation of a Labour-designed joke so dreary it may yet violate several international conventions.
The day began with an example of the sad decline of the modern political comeback. Donald Trump, hearing a heckle from a worker on a factory visit, delivered a quote for the ages: “Fuck you.” Truly, he is Cicero rolled into Demosthenes.
Over here in Britain, we are similarly blessed. Wednesday means Prime Minister’s Questions, featuring our own Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy reborn: Kemi Badenoch and Keir Starmer. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry! One of those, anyway.
Before the main course, we heard from Tory MP Lincoln Jopp MC, the Hero of Freetown. Due to some freak of chance or secret intervention from a fun-loving clerk, Jopp keeps getting called for PMQs. When he delivered the question that formally opens the session, asking the prime minister to list his engagements for the day, his colleagues gleefully shouted: “More!” Jopp hasn’t been in parliament two years, and has already become a much-loved fixture in our constitution. It won’t be long before he is pointed out to parties of visiting schoolchildren.
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After last week’s session, spent agreeing with Starmer on foreign policy, Badenoch had her guns trained on the government’s many, many U-turns. She quoted Wes Streeting’s advice to his colleagues. “Try to get it right first…” she began, and then stopped, having tripped over her own tongue. Even she laughed at that. She tried again, but was drowned out by laughter. “Try to get it right,” she said firmly, for the third time, “first time.”
Even if the delivery was fluffed, it was a fair point, and if there was a good reply available, the prime minister didn’t opt for it. He said that Badenoch had reversed her own party’s positions on many issues. But that was not all. Perhaps aware that he would be attacked on his many changes of course, he had come armed with a Mark One Joke, specially constructed for him at a Labour Party Experimental Humour Research Establishment in Aldermaston. It was winched into place by a team of boffins in white coats, who then retreated to a concrete bunker and observed the results through smoked glass.
Here it is: “Don’t get me started on consistency: the Tories had five prime ministers, six chancellors, eight home secretaries and 16 housing ministers. They had more positions in 14 years than…” — readers of a delicate disposition should shut their eyes now — “…the Kama Sutra!”
The detonation of the Mark One Joke was an awesome sight. Everything within a thousand yards was flattened instantly. MPs stared in awed horror at its devastating majesty. Up in the gallery, grown men wept. Watching from miles away, the Joke’s designer quoted an ancient Sanskrit text: “I am become Stinker, the Destroyer of Humour.”
This is not the first recorded use of the Joke Mark One in the House of Commons. It’s not even the first recorded use in this Parliament. Six months ago Lucy Powell trialled it on a Thursday morning, the equivalent of a test detonation on a South Pacific island.
But Badenoch was still standing. Still asking about u-turns, in fact. The prime minister was left with no choice but to deploy a second device, the Mark Two Quip. He had, he explained, just been to Croydon to talk to workers about employment rights. “While we were at Ikea,” he began, “they showed me their new prototype: the Ikea Shadow Cabinet.” As we saw him beginning to assemble the supporting framework for this new horror, we began running for cover. There was no chance of reaching the minimum safe distance. Our one hope was to find something that might offer protection: a tin bath, perhaps, or an aluminium fridge. On Starmer went. “The trouble is that nobody wants to buy it, it is mainly constructed of old dead wood, and every time you lose a nut it defects to Reform.”
There are jokes that land so gently that it takes the recipient several moments to realise they have been mortally wounded. There are barbs which seem plucked from the air although they must have involved hours of careful preparation. These are not the jokes the prime minister deploys. He has the kind of lightness of touch that destroys everything except the fillings in your teeth. If the United Nations really cared about humanity, it would already have banned humour from Keir Starmer.
Badenoch was undeterred. She reeled off a series of rude anonymous quotes about the prime minister, some of which may not have been from Streeting. She led her side in chats of “u-turn!” It would be a mistake to imagine that her performance was a triumph. At one point she somewhat hubristically claimed her job was safe — “I’m alright!” — a prediction that may not survive into the summer. But at least she didn’t attempt any jokes.
Starmer had only one comeback left to him. “We stand here with a majority Labour government,” he said. “She sits there with her party that lost two thirds of its MPs at the last election, and she is losing more every week.” Or, to put it another way, “I won the election, SO THERE!” It was better than simply yelling obscenities, but not by much.
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