There were gaps on the government benches as Rishi Sunak walked in for Prime Minister’s Questions. It wasn’t a boycott of the sort that Boris Johnson occasionally experienced, when Conservative MPs deliberately stayed away in protest at whatever completely unsurprising thing he’d just done. It was more like some of them had just decided they couldn’t be bothered. The effect was of a usually packed commuter train on a muggy Friday morning when there’s a test match on the telly later.

Neither of the party leaders had really shown up, either. Keir Starmer asked about housebuilding. Sunak replied that, like everything else, it’s going terribly well. He had the numbers to prove it, or to prove something, anyway. Of course, it’s unclear what “success” on building looks like to the Conservatives. Is it building lots of houses, as the prime minister implied, or stopping any being built at all, as his backbenchers demand? 

The Conservatives have at least settled on their attack line on Starmer

The Conservatives have at least settled on their attack line on Starmer. Sunak even delivered it quite well, claiming that the entire Labour frontbench opposed his building plans when it came to their own constituencies. “They do not have to worry too much,” he went on, “because he has never actually kept a promise he has made.” His MPs woke up at that point and cheered. 

In Sunak’s mind, this is a clear contrast with his own record of words kept and promises delivered. Well, perhaps. His big problem is that the thing he’s popular for, splashing the cash during Covid, is something he is deeply uneasy about and wanted to stop. Instinctively, Sunak is the embodiment of what is known around Westminster as “Treasury Brain”: the view that if you build a hospital, you’ll just end up having to pay for a bunch of doctors to staff it. 

“We are sticking to the course of bringing inflation down,” he told Labour’s Alison McGovern. “That requires making difficult and tough decisions; it requires prioritising; it requires being able to say no when people come asking you to borrow more money.” This is a tricky thing to be saying, of course, when you’re a year away from an election and 20 points behind in the polls.

And indeed when everything is falling apart. After PMQs had finished, we got an Urgent Question about Thames Water, rumoured to be in financial trouble — a story that has got out, presumably, as a result of a leak — despite running a monopoly and not repairing anything. It was answered by Rebecca Pow, the Water Minister. 

“Water,” she began, “is what makes life possible on our planet. It is essential for our health and wellbeing, as well as for our economy, including the production of food and clean energy.” There has in recent months been a spate of speeches written by artificial intelligence. Pow’s seemed to have been copied from a primary school science project. 

She didn’t mention Thames Water at all

The minister spoke for several minutes, explaining that water and sewage are also areas in which everything is, whatever you might have thought, Actually Going Fine. She didn’t mention Thames Water at all. Apparently it’s not her responsibility. The regulator, Ofwat, looks after all that stuff. Pow presumably fills the days making a really big collage about the uses of water for her office wall.

Are things really going as well as all that? Robert Goodwill, a Tory MP, jumped up to suggest we should be storing rainwater so that we can use it to flush the loo. It’s not pushing your possessions through a post-apocalyptic landscape in a shopping trolley, I know, but it’s not great, is it? 

Labour’s Jon Cryer pointed out that Thames Water supplies a quarter of the population. Did the government have a plan to keep it going? Pow replied that this was Ofwat’s problem. It was becoming clear why she had been appointed minister for water: you could see right through her. And, if opposition MPs were to be believed, she was full of crap. 

Perhaps that’s unfair, but there was definitely a sense that Pow was not waving but drowning. If Thames Water does need rescuing, ministers won’t be able to wash their hands of the issue. Or possibly at all. 

Richard Fuller, a Conservative, pointed out that in a lot of important areas, oversight had been handed over to regulators, and Parliament wasn’t equipped to watch over them. What we need, clearly, is a regulator of regulators. OFREG, perhaps, or OFOF. Or if Ofwat is overwhelmed, we could split it up, giving the sewage functions to a new body, PISSOF.