That hardly ever happens. A major climbdown was announced in the house of commons at PMQs. Sir Keir Starmer used a scripted question to reveal a massive U-turn on winter fuel payments and he timed his bombshell to give the opposition leader, Kemi Badenoch, very little chance to improvise a reply. Sir Keir’s gamble worked. To deaden the effect of his surrender he used the dullest phrases that his un-lyrical brain can contrive. He said he hoped that ‘more pensioners are eligible for winter fuel payments. And we will look at that as part of a fiscal event.’ In English he meant he won’t freeze granny to death next December.
Kemi appeared to react fast. ‘It was extraordinary listening to that last answer,’ she began. And she seemed ready to attack Sir Keir for surrendering to his mutinous backbenchers. But no. In fact she was reciting a rehearsed attack about inflation, which has risen sharply. Why inflation? Hardly a headline-grabbing issue at any time. Today she fluffed her chance to make Sir Keir squirm. It took her several minutes to realise that the government had done a handbrake turn. She began to improvise. And she did quite well. She accused Sir Keir of betraying his army of zombie MPs. Most had voted against their consciences and agreed to cut off Granny’s fuel supply.
‘How can any of them ever trust him again?’ she said. ‘His MPs hate this,’ she added, pointing to the ranks of Labour members behind him. ‘He can’t see them but they all look sick.’
This caused uproar. She made the most of it by conducting a straw poll.
‘Hands up who wanted the winter fuel cuts? Hands up,’ she scoffed. Labour MPs stared at their shoes or picked at their fingernails. ‘Not one. Not one of them.’
A decent moment for her. Elsewhere she accused Sir Keir of ‘whining’ and of ‘shafting the country.’ Graceless language wins no votes. Kemi probably knows that, of course. Perhaps she’s given up already. She got very little support from her backbenchers. A forgettable mouthpiece, Neil Hudson, attempted a minor theatrical prank by pretending that Sir Keir was a judge hearing the case against his own government.
‘Cutting winter fuel payments, damaging business with a jobs tax, decimating farming,’ said Hudson. Finally, a punch-line. ‘Throw these damaging policies out of this court.’
Hopeless. No pressure on the PM at all. Reform’s Lee Anderson attacked Sir Keir’s stance as the deporter-in-chief who claims to have sent 24,000 unwanted migrants home. Anderson claimed that most were overstayers with expired visas and that Sir Keir was using this figure to hoodwink ‘gullible’ backbenchers.
‘How many of those are failed asylum-seekers who came on small boats or on the back of lorries?’ asked Anderson.
Kemi appeared to react fast, but no, she was reciting a rehearsed attack about inflation
Sir Keir dodged the question. He was more honest with Jim Allister who revealed that Northern Ireland is still governed by Brussels.
‘British steel can be sold to the US tariff-free. But if it’s sold into Northern Ireland it’s subject to EU tariffs,’ said Allister.
Sir Keir explained that this anomaly lay at the heart of his recent EU summit. ‘We want to get to that place where we can trade without those barriers in the UK.’
On other words, he wants to rejoin the EU.
Tory backbencher, Paul Holmes, made an unwittingly significant intervention. Rather than asking a question he amused his colleagues with a bit of banter about a child named Teddy. ‘He’s an eco-warrior on a mission to save world.’
Holmes explained that Teddy likes to scavenge plastic from waste dumps. ‘No matter how small you are,’ quipped Holmes, ‘you are never too little to make a big difference.’
How the Tories laughed. They won’t laugh when their party vanishes. They really have given up.
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