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It’s come to something when the most striking sign of activity on the Conservative frontbench at prime minister’s questions is Chris Philp’s manspreading. Not a pretty sight, I grant you, but stick with me. Maybe the Philpster suffers from chafing. Maybe he’s just very insecure and territorial.
Either way, his thighs are getting wider apart by the day. Too much farther and he will dislocate his hips. God knows what his shadow cabinet colleagues make of it. By now they must be drawing lots to keep their distance.
All of this rather leaves Kemi Badenoch in no man’s land. She is the rapidly disappearing leader of the opposition. Almost invisible. It’s all somewhat confusing because KemiKaze has a reputation for being combative. Only all the fight appears to have gone out of her. She can’t even be bothered to take herself on. She just sits, slumps, like a sullen teenager. The model of passive aggression.
You could be forgiven for thinking that she was on the verge of giving up on herself. That she had achieved what she wanted in becoming Tory leader, but now she’s in the job has found it’s not as much fun as she thought. Too difficult. Too much trouble. No glory.
She has even embarked on a programme of self-sabotage. Three times now she has made what she called “keynote speeches” – on defence, borders and net zero – on days when she would have known that everything she said would largely go unnoticed because of other news events. It’s almost as if she wants to fail.
Nor is there any sense of direction to the Tories under her leadership, other than to make a vague pitch to Reform voters. She remains blissfully unconcerned about those seats she lost to the Lib Dems.
Her only policies – other than ditching net zero commitments – appear to be to have no policies. No wonder so many of her MPs are actively trying to find a way of replacing her. Scheming to get Honest Bob Jenrick in situ instead. That desperate. Perhaps all they need to do is just ask Kemi. They may be pushing at an open door.
Not that Keir Starmer is complaining. He might be making a name for himself on the global stage, but things aren’t going so well on the domestic front. So it helps that he doesn’t have much to worry about in terms of the Tories keeping him busy. He’s got enough trouble on his own backbenches over his planned benefit cuts.
It’s fair to say there wasn’t much warmth coming from his own MPs on Wednesday. The best you could call it was a depressed acceptance. Silence. Not even the toadiest toady could bring themselves to welcome the cuts. No one was putting their head above the parapet to welcome Starmer’s new moral universe. Even the Labour frontbench faces looked unusually glum. This wasn’t what most of them had come into politics to do.
Fail. Fail again. Fail better. Kemi has taken Samuel Beckett’s words to heart. In her first few PMQs she failed badly. Scattergun rambling questions that went nowhere. A month or so in she was still failing, choosing her topics from whatever mad conspiracy theory had happened to grab her attention.
Now she has learned to fail better. Failing about as well as anyone could reasonably expect of her. Keeping things short. Choosing questions that were more or less sensible. Though unfortunately not ones that were necessarily to her advantage.
Better, yes. But still failing. She began with wondering why we were having an emergency budget next week when Rachel Reeves had described last October’s as a once-in-a-lifetime event. Starmer didn’t demur. He could have pointed out that it was normal to have a spring statement.
And so it went on. KemiKaze has yet to realise that the economy is not safe ground for her. Labour might not exactly be turning things around as they had hoped, but no one is yet in the mood to forget that it was the Tories who were responsible for the damage.
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So every time Kemi opens her mouth, Starmer more or less ignores her. Looks at her with contempt as he repeats his “£22bn black hole” and “Liz Truss” mantras. By the end, Kemi looked defeated. Couldn’t wait for her allotted six questions to be complete so she could slump back in her seat for another week. That’s if she could manage to squeeze in next to the Philpster.
The real danger came first from the SDLP’s Colum Eastwood, who was incandescent about the welfare cuts, citing one disabled constituent who was going to get her benefits cut. What was the point of getting rid of the Tories, he asked, if Labour were going to do this?
Starmer doesn’t do shame. Doesn’t do guilt. Everything is squared away in his legal brain. Guilty. Or not guilty. And Keir tends to find himself not guilty. In time, Eastwood’s constituent would come to realise she had been done a favour.
Then there was Diane Abbott. Could we call a spade a spade, she asked? Stop talking about the benefits cuts as a moral crusade? This was all about helping the Treasury to balance its books.
Again, Starmer didn’t skip a beat. He had reconfigured the world to suit his own conscience. It was a total coincidence that the cuts would raise £5bn. What really mattered was that morality was being restored. People would rise from their sickbeds and work.
Thank God, then for Lee Anderson, providing some light relief in what had been a largely forgettable half-hour. Lee insisted he was the one person to ask a sensible question, only to immediately identify himself as a quarter-wit by wondering how much cooler the world would be if we met our net zero commitments.
Fair to say that climate science isn’t his specialist subject. Assuming he has one. But he had one admirer. Kemi couldn’t help but wish she had asked that question herself.
