Prime Minister’s Questions may have seen ostensible agreement between Kemi Badenoch and Sir Keir Starmer about the latest duff judicial finding, but you would not have known it from Labour MPs’ crazed braying.
Once again we saw the short, earnest form of Mrs Badenoch flinging herself against a wall of industrial noise.
Every week she does this, licking her teeth, shaking her braids. Every week they scream at her as if she were some Jezebel. The hatred is unhinged.
Those who watch on television may be able to hear the Leader of the Opposition but in the chamber itself many of her words are lost.
Most weeks she might as well be shouting into a gale. She opens her mouth but the words vanish amid whistling gusts.
For a party that insists Mrs Badenoch is useless, Labour seems queerly agitated about her.
As she approached the despatch box there was a bellow of ‘resign!’ from the direction of Jim McMahon, a minister standing behind the Speaker’s chair. Having imparted his witticism, he fled the chamber.
In theatre-reviewing days, I saw endless productions of King Lear. PMQs can resemble the scene on the heath.
Conservative party leader Kemi Badenoch speaking at the Prime Minister’s Questions in the House of Commons on Wednesday
Ms Badenoch repeatedly clashed with Sir Keir Starmer over immigration during Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday
The actor is delivering the lines – ‘you cataracts and hurricanoes, spout till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!’ – yet they are sacrificed to the din.
Backstage assistants, who in the parliamentary context we tend to call ‘backbenchers’, set up a racket with thunder-rolls and rainsticks and wind drums and rolling cannonballs.
Occasionally, a stagehand throws a pail of water from the wings to produce ‘rain’.
Lear continues to roar and the audience gets the gist of it, even if the king soon resembles a bloke who has fallen into a swimming pool.
All that matters is the noise and a sense of tempestuous tumult.
It is hard not to feel sympathy, even admiration, for Mrs Badenoch. She keeps a spry look on her face. She does not – though she may feel like doing so – sob or snap in despair. She ploughs on.
The sheer weight of parliamentarians arrayed opposite her, 400 Labour MPs compared to the mere 120 Tories behind her, make it an uneven contest.
And yet PMQs is not without interest. We see with each week a ripening of prime ministerial hubris.
The Starmer government may have made a dreadful start. Ed Miliband and the Attorney General are creating dicey headlines daily.
The economy has been whacked by Rachel Reeves’ Budget, the Foreign Office has gone native, the farms tax has fired up the tractor boys and Donald Trump is sowing confusion.
Yet Sir Keir looks immensely pleased with life. He is revelling in his position. The nasal knight now thinks he is a tough guy.
Mr Starmer speaking during Prime Minister’s Questions in the House of Commons
Mrs Badenoch asked overly long questions about the Gazan family that was accepted into Britain under a scheme for Ukrainians.
Sir Keir pshawed and tssked. He threw his ‘what a moron she is’ face, lounged on the despatch box, and scoffed at Mrs Badenoch for not being brilliant like him.
She persisted with her questions. He avoided them, crowing adenoidaly: ‘This is becoming tedious!’
The odd thing is that she now sounds more lawyerly than him and he comes across as a broad-brush bluffer.
Labour MPs howled and yowled their delight. A young lawyer, Alex Barros-Curtis (Cardiff West), sat next to Glasgow South’s Gordon McKee, aged 12, and they giggled and gesticulated at Mrs Badenoch. Mr Barros-Curtis affected amazement at the Tory leader’s questions, slapping his forehead with cartoon astonishment.
Then came a moment when Sir Keir was complaining that the Opposition had voted ‘against’ certain government Bills (a hardly freakish thing for oppositions to do). Each time he said ‘against’ his stooges chanted the word. Cringe-making.
But it was evidence of regimented ardour to please the whips. Preet Kaur Gill (Lab, Edgbaston), an intelligent former frontbencher who has mysteriously not been given a ministerial job, obliged her leader with some blatant grovelling.
Dan Norris (Lab, NE Somerset) nodded so hard, his neck must have been agony afterwards.
The deputy chief whip, Mark Tami, was seen with one paw heavily bandaged. Note to whips: when testing thumbscrews, do not insert own hand.
