QUENTIN LETTS: A coverage that might wreck so many cities was delivered with a nurse’s method… sympathetic however agency
Westminster was scandalised. A Tory frontbencher, Kevin Hollinrake, did something unforgivable: he spoke the obvious and said something about immigration that millions will consider entirely uncontroversial.
He did it in the Commons, furthermore, in daylight hours. Flagrant abuse of the facilities.
The transgression drew cries of ‘shame!’ and ‘outrageous!’ from Labour MPs, some of whom clutched their throats and gasped, as if they had hit a fish-bone in a quenelle.
One little new chap, Adam Jogee, drew himself to his full 5ft something and accused Mr Hollinrake of ‘gutter politics’.
‘It was beneath him’ to voice such an opinion, averred Mr Jogee, whose Newcastle-under-Lyme seat is one of the more chi-chi arrondissements of Stoke-on-Trent.
Matthew Pennycook, minister for housing, shook his head and likewise concluded it was ‘beneath’ Mr Hollinrake. The latter, it has to be said, seemed impervious to the social ponger he had just dropped.
You will wonder what this atrocity can have been.
I will tell you but before doing so must urge you to shield the eyes of any youngsters or goldfish lest they be irretrievably damaged. This is a family newspaper. We would not want to upset the delicate aesthetes of Ipso!
Kevin Hollinrake, did something unforgivable: he spoke the obvious and said something about immigration that millions will consider entirely uncontroversial.
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner during a visit to a construction site in Cambridge
It happened during a Commons statement labelled ‘Building the homes we need’.
A more truthful title might have been ‘forcing county councils to swallow national house-building edicts’. Local politicians will no longer have much power to stop big developments.
The Secretary of State behind the policy is Angela Rayner but she did not attend the Commons.
Handlers had arranged for her to do a photocall in a once-rural part of Cambridgeshire that was now being made to resemble much of the rest of southern England: ie, boxy houses, Trumpton pavements and mini roundabouts.
On her sortie she was accompanied by K. Starmer, Prime Minister, who had a microphone shoved under his nose and started stammering. He said ‘er’ three times before he could mention the words ‘green belt’.
In the Commons, robbed of Mrs Rayner’s souffle repartee, we had to make do with Mr Pennycook, a clerical personality of tall and angular bearing. He has an oblong, sloping face that any half-competent modern architect would use as a working model for one of those new skyscrapers in the City of London.
Mr Pennycook lacks Mrs Rayner’s brash panache. That is the very point of him. Every farceur needs a straight man and Mr Pennycook is Angela’s foil. Where she ignites class war, Pennycook soothes.
Where Mrs Rayner is a broadbrush debater – she finds policy detail slippery, like an avocado stone – Mr Pennycook is fluent in Whitehallese. I happened to spot him yesterday at 6.30am; even at that hour he was surrounded by officials and paperwork.
Matthew Pennycook, minister for housing, pictured in the House of Commons on Thursday
In a level voice only slightly mottled by glottal-stops he spoke of ‘target envelopes’, ‘golden rules’, ‘brownfield passports’, ‘housing pipelines’ and ‘building out at pace’.
Yes, ‘building out’. Several of them coughed up this new horror.
The policy could wreck hundreds of English towns and villages yet he delivered it with a dental nurse’s manner, sympathetic but firm. The government was ‘privileging pragmatism over purity’, he purred. ‘Progress’ was used as a transitive, ‘ask’ as a noun. If there’s any of that dental gas going free, may I please have a lungful?
Enter Mr Hollinrake. He calmly deplored Labour’s ‘war on rural England’ and its ‘bulldozing of democratic accountability’.
He also politely noted that Mr Pennycook was a steaming hypocrite. Now so hot for housing developments, the minister had recently protested against new houses in his own constituency. Mr Pennycook loftily said he would ‘not respond’ to this accusation.
After talking of our ‘green and pleasant land’ Mr Hollinrake said that ‘the majority’ of the government’s new homes would ‘be required for people coming into this country rather than for British citizens’.
Cue shock, dry-retching, wailing and gnashing of teeth from Labour. They plainly regarded him as an unhinged racist.
Merely for mentioning an undeniable rise in the population.
