Starmer's comic turn will end in tears of a clown
Representatives of the British Overseas Territories were in Parliament for Questions to the Prime Minister on Wednesday. Once this would have been a statement of great imperial pride, the colonies come to see the mother parliament in action; now it's probably the case that they've been summoned to learn which of them is next to be raffled off to a nearby banana republic.
First we came to the MP for Blackpool North and Fleetwood, Lorraine Beavers, who appears to go to the same barber as Jedward. She opened proceedings with a meandering question about landfill sites.
So it began; the same tedious, buck-passing, bottom-crawling, read-out-from-an-iPad questions from the Labour back benches that we get every week. Our very own coiffured Stig of the Dump, the Bin King himself, Sir Oinky stood up to answer.
For some unfathomable reason, the Prime Minister seemed to be in a jokey mood. For those of us forced to watch, this was not a good thing.
'I love the fact that whenever anyone says '14 years of Conservative government' they all go, 'Oh no.' That's how the country feels', he smarmed. Nearby, Lucy Powell howled with laughter as if she were in the presence of a latter-day Ustinov. She looked like a painting from Goya's black period as she did so.
The Leader of the Opposition bore some of the brunt of Oinky's comedic turn. 'She must be the only trade minister who doesn't like trade deals,' he said, to a great whoop of laughter from the goons assembled behind him. The joke, sadly, is on the country as once again Kemi Badenoch failed to skewer the Prime Minister.
Oinky's acolytes prepared for further self-abasement. Rachel Taylor asked a humiliating non-question about how wonderful the PM was at trade deals. This was somehow turned into an attack on Reform, by a link so tenuous that Nigel Farage threw up his hands and laughed.
There was even some dark humour in the form of a 'more comment than question' from the appalling Jake Richards, who is Pinky to Kim Leadbeater's Brain on the Assisted Suicide Bill. Richards, a man so dripping with arrogance that he makes Oinky look like Francis of Assisi, wanged on about all the marvellous work he did in – get this – suicide prevention.
Not everyone was in on Oinky's bumper fun day. Liz Savile Roberts of Plaid Cymru asked the PM, in light of his volte-face on immigration, whether 'any of his beliefs survived a week in Downing Street'. The implication was that it wasn't just his sense of humour which Oinky had had surgically removed but his spine as well.
'Yes, the belief that she talks rubbish,' spat Oinky. Cue howls from the Labour benches as if this was an aphorism worthy of Noel Coward rather than a cack-handed reworking of a 'your mum'-style response from the playground.
Rachel Reeves – who again, presumably has the sense of humour of a paving slab – was literally convulsing with laughter at this. Both hands slapping her knees, head lurching forward, it was like something from a ghost train.
One person, however, wasn't laughing at all. On Oinky's other side sat Big Ange, her face like the grave. She allowed her eyes to look over to him very briefly, and they dripped contempt. I suspect there will be tears of the clown before long.
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