6 hours ago
7
An afternoon with Keir Starmer isn’t necessarily many people’s idea of fun. A period of time when every minute feels like five.
Sadly, for the select committee chairs who make up the liaison super-committee, they didn’t have the option of saying no. This was one of their unavoidable tri-annual encounters with the prime minister. Still, at least they all had the Xmas recess to look forward to at the end of the week. They would need a long lie down.
To be fair, Keir also gives the impression he would rather not spend the afternoon with himself. He’s a man who has no trouble putting himself to sleep with his tortured use of English. Mind you, he isn’t the first prime minister to have worked out that boring the committee to death is the best strategy. And it helps that he’s a natural.
The goal for such occasions is damage limitation. To end the session having committed no news whatsoever. Leaving everyone wondering why they had bothered. Democracy at its most pointlessly performative.
“Order, order,” Meg Hillier began. Having allowed Starmer to make a brief statement on the Bondi terror attack, she announced that the first half of the session would be devoted to standards in public life. Keir immediately perked up. This wasn’t going to be a problem. He is a man who likes to think of himself as Mr Rules: there is nothing he likes better than talking through procedural matters.
First up was Conservative MP Alberto Costa. The pedant’s pedant. A man to make Keir seem spontaneous. He began with one of the prime minister’s tweets about the new bus fare cap. Had he broken the ministerial code? Paragraph 6, clause 3. You could feel what little energy there was being sucked out of the room. Starmer patiently tried to explain that the Tory price cap had ended a year ago and that his was a new one. As if anyone really cared that much. In the world of X, this wasn’t a major offence.
Costa then moved on to ministers briefing government policy to the media before announcing it in parliament. Something every government has done for decades and which provokes faux outrage from the speaker and the opposition. Something people like to moan about but no one can be bothered to change.
You couldn’t help feeling that Costa was a man whose life goal is to always miss the point. To ask the wrong questions at the wrong time. Imagine having 10 minutes to ask the prime minister whatever you want and you choose to waste everyone’s time with such dreary, trivial questions. There may well be questions of propriety to be asked. Freebies, Angela Rayner, Louise Haigh for a start. But these weren’t them.
Labour’s Cat Smith went next. Had No 10 been briefing against cabinet ministers, she asked. For the first time, Starmer showed a flicker of life. No one had been more appalled by the briefings than him. He had set up an inquiry and would take action on wherever the evidence led. Just so long as it didn’t lead back to him. In any case, he knew it wasn’t him who had authorised the briefings because Keir had already asked Keir that question and Keir had assured him he had nothing to do with it. Case closed.
“That’s odd,” said Hillier. Because Rachel Reeves had said much the same to the Treasury select committee the previous week. She had been furious that her decision not to raise income tax had been leaked by someone to the FT. Rachel had known it was definitely not her, because if it had been it would have been a briefing not a leak. Briefings were leaks that were authorised by her. A leak was a leak that someone else had done without her permission. These are fine distinctions at the top of government.
Costa was not quite finished. Even though we all hoped he was. What about all the Labour leadership briefings? Starmer was fairly clear Wes Streeting and Andy Burnham were quite capable of leaking their ambitions to friendly hacks in the media without any help from No 10. Apart from the leaks that had come from No 10 in the mistaken belief that they might be beneficial to the prime minister.
We then slid into an aimless discussion about the House of Lords. Though no one could quite bring themselves to suggest it was an idea well past its sell-by date. That it was packed with a bunch of superannuated politicians, party donors and third-rate loud mouth careerists. Mainly because you suspect that most of the people in the room have one eye on a peerage. Their reward for failure. Tory Simon Hoare did say he was worried about the “good chaps” principle of preferment. You couldn’t avoid the irony. Simon owes his career to being a good chap.
Having wasted half the session on matters of little importance, Hillier moved on to Labour’s “plan for government” AKA Starmer’s five missions. This proved to be problematic. Because no one – not even Keir – can quite remember what they are. Each one dies first on the tongue and then on the memory.
“How do you think things are going?” various committee members asked. Keir was alone in thinking they were all going really well. He couldn’t quite believe he hadn’t been given more credit. Though he was surprised that some things were taking longer than expected. No one else was.
Smith and Alistair Carmichael tried to nail Starmer on the inheritance tax for farmers. Was he aware that it was now financially prudent for some farmers to die before the new rules came into effect in April? Keir nodded. Of course he was. He had given farmers more than a year to make their arrangements and they should just hurry up and die if they were so obsessed with passing on their farms to their children.
This farm tax wasn’t targeting farmers. Farmers were just collateral damage in a tax aimed at farmers. It was just a bog standard change in the tax regime. “If you don’t listen to me, then listen to your colleagues,” Carmichael seethed. Keir ignored him.
The rest of the session was a race to the bottom. Brief nods to the resident doctors’ strike, energy prices and the Swiss railway system. Tory Geoffrey Clifton-Brown – “Killer” to his friends after being thrown out of the Tory party conference in 2019 after an altercation – wasn’t even sure why he was there. And nobody bothered to enlighten him. Right at the end, Tan Dhesi was invited to ask about Ukraine. But he had lost the will to live. Starmer had to get to Berlin and we had all suffered enough.
