QUENTIN LETTS: PMQs became a pious contest to see who could sound the most sepulchral
Westminster beetled its brow with anguish. At PMQs, Rishi Sunak lowered his voice to a murmur and urged calm. Foreign Secretary James Cleverly later told MPs that whatever they said would be heard across the Middle East.
‘The Hon Member makes an incredibly important point,’ asserted Mr Cleverly ten or 20 times. Not just ‘important’, please, but ‘incredibly important’.
For an hour and a half, Mr Cleverly took backbenchers’ questions about the violence in Gaza. Everyone went along with this pretence that what was said in the Commons was of global significance. No one popped the delusion by saying ‘come off it, we’re distant onlookers in all this’.
MP after MP rose on their hind legs to declare that the people of Israel and Gaza were in their thoughts and prayers. Eventually, Dame Eleanor Laing, Deputy Speaker, could bear no more.
Biting hard on the urge to scream, she said: ‘It is not for every member to express their grief and empathy. That has been done! Let us take it for granted that we’re all broken-hearted.’ Dame Eleanor will never become Speaker if she tells blunt truths like that.
For an hour and a half, James Cleverly (pictured centre) took backbenchers’ questions about the violence in Gaza. Everyone went along with this pretence that what was said in the Commons was of global significance
For a quarter of an hour, Rishi Sunak (pictured) and Sir Keir Starmer pushed ponderous platitudes across the Commons table at one another
Keir Starmer (pictured) and Mr Sunak are both too clever to imagine that whatever they said would make much difference to what Hamas and Israel fire at one another
MP after MP rose on their hind legs to declare that the people of Israel and Gaza were in their thoughts and prayers
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Performative statesmanship might be too harsh for what went on in the Commons but there was an unspoken fruitlessness to it all. For a quarter of an hour, Mr Sunak and Sir Keir Starmer pushed ponderous platitudes across the Commons table at one another.
They are both too clever to imagine that whatever they said would make much difference to what Hamas and Israel fire at one another. They presumably just felt it was expected of them.
Shortly before PMQs there was at least a flurry of novelty as East Kilbride’s Lisa Cameron, who has just quit the Scots Nats, took her seat on the Conservative benches. She was escorted to her new place by Lady May (Con, Maidenhead).
What a treat for the defector: to sit next to irrepressible raconteur Theresa. Douglas Ross, leader of Scots Tories and occasional football referee, inserted himself on Ms Cameron’s other side. Ms Cameron’s lucky day was complete.
During all this, the Tory benches went nuts with cheers and the SNP benches looked hard at their toecaps. Speaker Hoyle had a sense of humour failure about the Conservatives’ merriment. ‘Disrespectful,’ he bawled, adding that Lady May should have waited until a quieter moment. ‘Oooooh,’ went several voices, mocking the Speaker’s bateyness.
Then we were into the pious glue of the exchanges between the Prime Minister and leader of the opposition. It became a competition to see who could sound the more sepulchral. Sir Keir’s task was further complicated by his need to keep Labour’s sizeable pro-Palestinian faction on board. There are times when Sir Keir’s miraculous abilities as a fence-sitter come in handy and this was one of them.
MP Stewart McDonald speaking during Prime Minister’s Questions in the House of Commons
A broadly pro-Israel question was followed, fastidiously, by a broadly pro-Palestinian question. No unicycling circus chimpanzee could have pulled it off with a surer sense of balance.
Sir Keir also avoided the error of his foreign affairs spokesman David Lammy, who twice managed to refer to the Al-Ahli hospital as ‘the Al-Ahli mosque’. What a prize gumby old Lammy is sometimes. One of Mensa’s finest.
As for Mr Sunak, his voice became so rutted in ‘sombre’ mode that he proved unable to wrench himself out of it when asked about domestic matters such as the dualling of the A180 road in Lincolnshire transport, as raised by Martin Vickers (Con, Cleethorpes). Mr Vickers is so unremittingly local, I bet even the fluff in his tummy button says ‘made on Humberside’.
Then Hartlepool’s Jill Mortimer made an extraordinarily vivid plea for something to be done about intimidating young asylum-seekers in her constituency, where a 70-year-old man was killed on Sunday.
Mrs Mortimer, a normally equable figure, was quite properly reflecting the intensity of feeling in her town. ‘Enough is enough!’ she thundered. A powerful moment. But Labour MPs just jeered her for speaking up for her electors.
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