The last Prime Minister’s Questions before Christmas was conducted in a spirit of goodwill. Not quite a truce, but certainly an easing of hostilities. Keir Starmer opened by offering every MP the compliments of the season. “And a little festive advice to those in Reform: if mysterious men from the East appear bearing gifts, this time report it to the police.”
We looked over at Britain’s insurgent party, who have decided to treat barbs about the conviction of their Welsh leader for taking Russian bribes as highly amusing. Richard Tice bounced up and down in his seat like a schoolboy who’s heard the tuck shop is offering half-price gobstoppers. Where was Nigel Farage? He had decided to sit up in the gallery. He claimed on Twitter that this was a protest at the “rigged” session, but a more likely explanation is that he dislikes the taunts that come his way. Farage seems to have only two moods: triumphalism and petulance. If he does make it to Number 10, he’s going to struggle with the slings and arrows aimed at every occupant.
Before the session started, we’d had warm-up from Tory MP Lincoln Jopp, the hero of Freetown and sketchwriters’ sweetheart. He began his question in characteristic style: “Last night in Strangers’ Bar, I bumped into a very influential Labour backbencher.” Many of us get our best information in the pub, but it takes a man with Jopp’s self-confidence to admit it in the House of Commons.
Kemi Badenoch quoted Starmer’s words from his appearance in front of MPs on Monday back at him: “He says that nothing happens when he pulls the levers. Does he blame himself or the levers?” The prime minister was ready for that, listing all the things the government had done this week. “I could go on for a very long time,” he said. Other assessments of his staying power are available to anyone willing to stand a round in Strangers’ Bar.
And not just of the Labour leadership. Starmer’s team had armed him with several attack lines. He quoted shadow transport secretary Ric Holden, a man famous for his loyalty to his constituency of North West Durham Basildon, who was apparently overheard describing the shadow cabinet as “full of non-entities”. Sometimes in these moments an MP will claim to have been misquoted. Holden, however, blushed, his face and bald head rapidly going through more shades of pink than are known even to Farrow & Ball before finally settling on a colour that appears in the paint catalogues as “Hen Night Rampant”.
The prime minister tends to deliver jokes with the care and precision of an Amazon driver on Christmas Eve
The Conservative leader had brought along her own joke book. Why wasn’t Starmer going to ban doctors from striking? “He doesn’t have the baubles!”
But Starmer, thanks to the format — or, if you’re Farage, the “rigging” — of the session, is allowed the final word. The prime minister tends to deliver jokes with the care and precision of an Amazon driver on Christmas Eve, and I cannot be fairer to his oratory than to reprint in full the report from Hansard: “Mr Speaker, we have ‘The Muppet Christmas Carol’ here. The defections are happening so fast that at Christmas, the Leader of the Opposition is going to be left ‘Home Alone’. And the honourable member for Runcorn is clearly dreaming of a ‘White Christmas’.” A footnoted version of this gagfest is available on request from the Labour press office.
Conservative MP Andrew Snowden attempted to channel Dickens as he described the awful scenes taking place across the country. Unfortunately, the second one he chose was “children hugging each other as their independent school closes.” This was greeted, I’m sorry to say, by a huge long laugh which completely drowned out the rest of the question, so we’ll never know what other woes he went on to describe: hedge fund managers tearfully selling their spare Lamborghini to meet the fees at Eton, perhaps, or oligarchs down to their last yacht following the employers’ National Insurance rise. There are a lot of things you can use to shame Labour MPs, but the closure of private schools will never be one of them.
If you want to know how to deliver a joke, or an attack, or both, you have to go to Stephen Flynn, the leader of the SNP, who does wit with the lethal effectiveness of a set of brass knuckles on Aberdeen Harbour at 1am. “It is indeed the season of goodwill,” he began, with such menace that wiser Labour MPs began to look for the nearest exit, before listing all the terrible failures and betrayals that he wasn’t going to ask Starmer about. “I simply want to wish him a happy Christmas. How does he intend to spend his final one in Downing Street?”
As it turns out, that “peace to all men” stuff has its limits.
