The final Prime Minister’s Questions of 2022 opened with a damning attack on Britain’s crumbling infrastructure. As is increasingly common these days, it came from a Conservative, John Stevenson, who wanted to know why trains have essentially given up trying to reach his constituency of Carlisle. It’s starting to look as though the party will fight the next election with the slogan “Life’s Rubbish Under The Tories: Vote Conservative”.

The prime minister has yet to find his voice

Hanging over the session was the news that people had drowned in the English Channel on Wednesday morning while trying to get from France to Britain. No one had much they could usefully say about it. Sunak having set out his plan yesterday, the Conservatives have, for a week or so, shifted back to telling themselves that the matter is in hand. Labour suspect that it’s not, but aren’t really sure what they would do differently.

A few Tories have decided that, if only Britain left the European Court of Human Rights and we were able to wrestle some asylum seekers onto a plane to Rwanda, crossings would stop overnight. This is an analysis that feels lacking whether you think that the people in the boats are desperate refugees or young men willing to take a risk for a better life.

Keir Starmer instead asked about the nurses’ strike. Here again he is in agreement with Sunak. Both men think it’s a bad thing, and each man says the other could stop it with a single meeting. It was hardly an edifying exchange: Starmer argued that Sunak could avert the strike simply by agreeing to talk to the nurses about pay, but he must know they want action as well as words. Sunak meanwhile claimed Starmer was protecting his “paymasters”, but he’s surely aware that the nurses aren’t affiliated to Labour.

The prime minister has yet to find his voice for these occasions. He claimed at one point that if Starmer were in charge, Britain would still be in lockdown. Boris Johnson struggled to make that sound convincing six months ago. Sunak simply can’t hit those notes.

The thing is that Starmer doesn’t need a detailed plan to fix the strikes, because he’s not in government. The Winter of Discontent wasn’t bad for Labour because the party was too close to the unions. It was bad for Labour because it was in government, and rubbish was rotting in the streets on its watch. When people can’t get to work, or see a doctor, they’re going to blame the party in power.

You can’t imagine a crowd chanting “Oh Keir Starmer”

It’s not as if the government can’t find money for some things. Kirsty Blackman raised the question of why the taxpayer is continuing to pay Johnson’s legal bills as he defends himself against the suggestion that he misled Parliament when he said there hadn’t been any lockdown parties in Downing Street. Apparently there’s an important constitutional point here, in case future prime ministers want to say things that everyone knows are untrue. It’s Britain’s cost-of-fibbing crisis.

As the session drew to a close, Angela Eagle rose with a festive question. “This year, the Tory party has given us five Education Secretaries, four Chancellors, three Prime Ministers, two leadership coups, and the partridge has had to sell the pear tree to pay the gas bill,” she said, to laughter. Wasn’t it time, she asked, for a general election? Labour MPs cheered. It’s been a long time since they’ve actually wanted an election to happen, but now they mean it.

As the year closes, Starmer’s dominance over Labour has now reached the point where the left’s main criticism is that people don’t chant his name. Some have suggested that this reflects a preference for feel-good defeat over the compromise-laden business of winning power, but the Labour Party has a long tradition of singing its leaders names.

The Beatles famously sang “Harold Wilson” to the tune of “All My Loving” on the Ed Sullivan show. And who can forget the newsreels of crowds outside the Albert Hall in 1945 chanting the then Labour leader’s name to the tune of “We’ll Meet Again”?

Cle-ment Attlee
We know he
Will soon be
Implementing Mr Beveridge’s lovely plans

Cle-ment Attlee
Wants GPs
Without fees
So he’s going to stuff the doctors’ mouths with gold

And he will nationalise
Industry’s lofty heights
Coal and steel and rail too
They’ll go on about that
In eighty years time
And ignore his atom bomb…

It’s perfectly true that you can’t imagine a crowd chanting “Oh Keir Starmer”, if only because it doesn’t scan. Perhaps the party could look at alternatives. “Last night Keir Starmer saved my life”? “I wanna live like Keir Starmer/I wanna do whatever Keir Starmer does”? Or perhaps a seasonal one: “Well here he is/Keir Starmer/Everybody’s having fun”?