QUENTIN LETTS at PMQs: Sir Keir turned peevish with Kemi, his proper eyebrow capturing skywards like a leaping salmon
Rock god Roger Daltrey and friends were in an upstairs gallery for PMQs and were told off by the Speaker after a breach of protocol.
Mr Daltrey and a bald chap next to him had clapped when the Scots Nats’ Stephen Flynn took the mickey out of Sir Keir Starmer. Clapping is a no-no in the Commons and Speaker Hoyle is a stickler for these things.
Given Mr Daltrey’s youthful antics with The Who, the misbehaviour could have been a lot worse. He could have ripped off his shirt and started smashing the parliamentary furniture. No one seemed to know who the bald chap was.
Maybe it was his tax adviser. Rock stars are always accompanied by their accountants. Aren’t we all these days?
PMQs was lively. The political tide is racing, the sea’s swell is rising and Labour’s new matelots are starting to look a little aquamarine around the gills as the tumblers slide across the bar and the chandeliers shake.
Unease forming in their bellies for the first time, some Labour newbies are responding by screaming ever more loudly in support of their skipper.
Jonathan Slinger (Lab, Rugby), an assiduous suck-up, bellowed support for the PM from a seat just behind the chief whip, Sir Alan Campbell. Thigh-slapper Sir Alan looked even more morose than normal.
He must have termites in his underpants to be in a state of such permanent melancholy. Commons leader Lucy Powell sat there catching flies in her lower lip.
Sir Keir Starmer became peevish with Kemi Badenoch. At one point his right eyebrow took on a life of its own, shooting skywards like a leaping salmon. Is the pressure starting to bite?
It was only Kemi Badenoch’s third PMQs outing and Sir Keir has not yet worked out how to deal with her. He is still at the belittling, ‘she’s clueless’ stage
It is never entirely clear how much she follows the details of PMQs.Not everyone shared Mr Slinger’s conviction that the Government was notching up a succession of magnificent revolutionary triumphs.
Rachel Reeves, hair back to pitch-black after that red experiment, was a portrait of paralysed glumness. Her mood was not improved when Sir Keir declined to repeat his Chancellor’s no-more-tax-rises comment to the CBI on Monday.
Rachel Hopkins (Lab, Luton S and S Beds) sounded tearful about a Vauxhall van factory closing in her town. Vauxhall is blaming the electric-vehicle targets so eagerly evangelised by Ed Miliband.
Sir Keir attributed those policies to the Conservatives – specifically Kemi Badenoch – but everyone knows Labour was keener on them than the Tories and that Sir Keir’s people ripped into Rishi Sunak after he diluted them.
But that was then and this is now. As prime minister you are exposed. You have to ‘take responsibility’ (a favourite Starmer saying).
It becomes noticeable if you are always in retreat, always behind the curve. All his gluey insistence about ‘14 years of Tory misrule’, all his preachy dullness and all that plodding nasality are now nakedly apparent.
Sir Keir became peevish with Kemi Badenoch. At one point his right eyebrow took on a life of its own, shooting skywards like a leaping salmon. Is the pressure starting to bite?
It was only Mrs B’s third PMQs outing and Sir Keir has not yet worked out how to deal with her. He is still at the belittling, ‘she’s clueless’ stage.
After Mrs Badenoch asked what he was going to do about that electric-cars policy he could only respond with a jibe about political strategy. The Tories were ‘going backwards!’ he jeered.
Rock god Roger Daltrey and friends were in an upstairs gallery for PMQs and were told off by the Speaker after a breach of protocol
Rachel Reeves hair was back to pitch-black after that red experiment
‘They don’t know what they’re doing.’ One of the older rules of politics: accuse your opponents of your own faults. Mrs Badenoch, who is cool under fire, essayed some second-hand biscuit puns as she reported criticisms of the government by the boss of McVitie’s.
A more successful dig came when she listed various Treasury errors and said ‘isn’t it great that the Chancellor is an expert at customer complaints?’.
This was a reference to the troublesome matter of Ms Reeves’s much-embellished curriculum vitae.
She was in customer relations between stints as an astronaut and a Swiss guard at the Vatican.
Talking of which, Angela Rayner (or ‘the Ginger Nut’, as Mrs Badenoch called her) was absent. We later learnt that she was in Rome, visiting the Pope.An encounter of spiritual minds that deserved to be captured by Giotto himself.
