With the world in Trumpian turmoil, an economy self-combusting and rats as big as centaurs cantering through Birmingham, the aces of the Commons liaison committee had 90 minutes to interrogate the PM.
The burning question for a Scots Labour MP: why don’t we have a secretary of state for outer space? That had Sir Keir Starmer blinking a bit. He confessed no one had previously suggested it. His brain slowly considered any advantages.
Perhaps this could be a job transfer for gibbering android Ed Miliband, provided oblong space helmets were a thing. The cabinet’s very own cyborg, ‘Scary Bridget’ Phillipson, could be sent to Planet Mongo to give Ming the Merciless a taste of his own medicine. On the Moon, could the Clangers decipher the dribblings of Commons leader Lucy Powell? Few down here have a clue what the toothy pudding is on about.
The Commons liaison committee has seldom been much cop. Tony Blair was the first PM to submit to these interrogations. They did become interesting when MPs ganged up on Boris Johnson. Liz Truss never merited a session. Blair, Brown, Cameron, May (particularly gluey) and Sunak survived without incident. Sir Keir ditto. As ever these supposedly top-grade MPs fell prey to windbaggery and a format that prevents jaunty, open debate.
There are 31 members of the committee. Only 13 turned up and of these only one was a nominal Rightie. That was Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (Con, N Cotswolds), genial but blunt as a butter knife. Why were none of the committee’s other seven Tories allocated questions? Layla Moran (Lib Dem, Oxford W & Abingdon) threw down a few hostile deliveries, on social care. Ms Moran has a nicely air of fraying fury to her. The rest of the MPs, all Labour, were passive. A couple plainly disagreed with Sir Keir’s cuts to welfare and foreign aid but they lacked the zing to make their objections count.
Sir Keir Starmer was a ‘nasal knight exchanging bland civilities’ at a Parliamentary Liaison Hearing on Tuesday April 8
Liaison committee hearings are built up as great events. The biggest of Portcullis House’s rooms is always used. A special usher – that tall chap with the white tie – attends. The public seats yesterday were filled by saps who had possibly been told ‘this session’s going to be mustard, just you wait’. Before long these visitors were slack-jawed statues, paralysed by boredom.
Sir Keir was preceded by bodyguards who entered with beefy gaits and bulging jackets. Two Downing Street officials tip-toed in and took seats. The Herbert directly behind the PM was a bearded youth with a poetically sad expression.
‘It’s a ridiculously long room,’ bawled the committee’s chairman, Dame Meg Hillier, from the far end of a U-shaped table. She may not even have been sitting in the Westminster constituency. More like Uxbridge. Sir Keir raised a scouting palm to his eyebrows and scanned the horizon. Espying a dame-shaped, bluey-green blob in the distance, the PM yodelled ‘there you are!’
And so the agony began: an aeon of burblings, nasal knight exchanging bland civilities with gummy grandees who had written screeds of questions. Sir Keir said these were ‘obviously very chullenging times’. Chullenge. That is how he pronounced it, time and again.
Other refrains: ‘We have been very clear…all options are on the table…I want to be really clear on that…nothing is off the table…we have to be absolutely clear.’ The bearded official behind Sir Keir plunged only deeper into melancholy.
‘Let me unpack that,’ droned Sir Keir as he waded into another bog of waffle. Sarah Champion (Lab, Rotherham) flared for a few brief seconds on Israel, then fizzled into nothing. ‘I was an international lawyer,’ replied Sir Keir, pulverising the room into apathy. At least he didn’t say ‘I’ve got your back’, the Americanism used earlier in the Commons by Rachel Reeves.
Right at the end he confirmed that he would give the vote to 16-year-olds and that he wanted schools – not unsinister, this – to give pupils ‘more political education’. With politicians like this, will any 16-year-old be remotely interested?