Laughing to hide the tears

As Keir Starmer rose to begin Prime Minister’s Questions, an alarm sounded through the House of Commons: “WARNING! PRIME MINISTERIAL JOKE IS APPROACHING.” A clerk in a high-vis vest ran along the front bench putting out orange cones. Up in the gallery, we donned hard hats and secured loose items.

“Mr Speaker,” Starmer began, as around him Labour MPs tightened their seatbelts, held hands and offered silent prayers.  “It would be remiss of me not to comment on one of Manchester’s great heroes moving on after almost a decade.” This joke had been cast in iron in Britain’s last remaining foundry, and shipped down the M1 on a low loader at speeds never exceeding 25 mph. A team of Downing Street wheezemasters in dayglo vests were now signalling as a crane lowered it into position. “WARNING! PRIME MINISTERIAL JOKE IS APPROACHING.”

The Labour leader took a breath. “So, let me congratulate Pep Guardiola on all his success at Manchester City.” Boom! As the dust cleared, we looked about to check everyone was OK. The prime minister delivers jokes with the subtle elegance of a hippo dancing Swan Lake.  

More materially, he’d also brought along an announcement of tax bungs. To no-one’s surprise at all, the regularly promised and equally regularly postponed increase in fuel duty has been pushed back again. The Conservatives were delighted, claiming it as a U-turn. Whether any of us will notice the slightest difference as we spend £100 filling our cars remains to be seen.

There followed a grumpy exchange on whether the government was easing its sanctions on Russian oil (Kemi Badenoch’s claim) or tightening them (Starmer’s version). The Tory leader tried to link this to her belief that the North Sea is overflowing with oil which could power all our cars for free, but which Ed Miliband, out of sheer bloody-mindedness, is refusing to unleash.

“Can the prime minister explain,” she asked, “why oil from Russia is acceptable, but oil from Aberdeen is not?” Starmer replied that in fact new sanctions were being introduced, but that they were being phased in. “Being patronising is not a substitute for understanding policy,” the Tory leader fired back, a line so magnificently un-self-aware that Labour MPs all cheered it and called for more. 

The most noteworthy thing about all this is not that that the Conservatives chose to take the worst-faith interpretation of the government’s actions, but that a lot of people on the Labour side of the argument suspected they might be right. Starmer’s government has lost the benefit of the doubt from its own supporters, even on an issue where the prime minister’s position has been unwavering for four years. It is another sign that things are fatal. Starmer’s power to persuade, never his long suit, has evaporated. Later, Chris Bryant would do a much better job of explaining the situation.

Later still, we would get the resignation speech of Wes Streeting, who quit last week as Health Secretary in protest at the prime minister’s leadership. If you had expected he would expand on that in the Commons, you were in for a disappointment. His long speech was so warm about the government and all its achievements that a Cabinet minister could have delivered it at Labour conference without causing a stir.

It contained just two criticisms, both delivered pretty mildly: Labour was losing the fight against nationalism, and the government was “treading water”. These are what political journalists would usually call “coded attacks”, but Streeting has quit the government and called for the prime minister to go. It wasn’t clear why he felt he needed to run his speech through an Enigma machine. Perhaps his campaign slogan will be “Change you can’t believe in.”

Back at PMQs, we heard from the new Green MP, Hannah Spencer. She had horrifying news: “Some MPs drink before voting,” she announced. “That really shocked me! We vote on huge things like the climate crisis, disabled people’s rights, housing and child poverty.” In truth, the days of astonishing levels of parliamentary drunkenness are largely behind us, but it’s a sign of touching innocence that Spencer believes voting is like operating heavy machinery. The awful reality of parliament is that most of the time, most MPs have only the haziest idea of what they’re voting on, charging down to the lobbies to go whichever way the whips tell them. 

Starmer ignored her question, and we soon learned why, as the siren sounded and the orange cones came out. The Number 10 jokesmiths had prepared another quip for him. “WARNING! PRIME MINISTERIAL JOKE IS APPROACHING.” It was swung into place as he began his long preamble. “The Greens think that their leader walks on water,” he said, and members of the Cabinet jumped into slit trenches and put smoked-glass lenses over their eyes. “It turns out that he just lives on water and does not pay his council tax!” BOOM! In the gallery, a colleague began to rise, and I put my hand on their shoulder. One should always wait for the sirens to sound the All Clear.