The Speaker explodes, Badenoch discovers self-determination and Trump can’t remember which island he wants.
As Keir Starmer rose to address the Greenland Question, the House of Commons fell silent. A moment earlier, there had been deafening chuntering, but once Kemi Badenoch asked about this week’s presidential madness, MPs realised it was time to be serious — even if only briefly.
“Well, Mr Speaker,” the prime minister began, a little nervously. He said, once again, that America could not have Greenland. “I will not yield,” he closed. “Britain will not yield.” It was like an am-dram production of Darkest Hour.
Having managed “All behind you, Keir” for one question, the Conservative leader sprung her cunning trap. “Does he agree that just as those in Greenland should decide their own future, so should the Chagossians?”
Starmer replied with a complicated explanation that Donald Trump’s sudden denunciation of the Chagos deal was a move to put pressure on Britain over Greenland. Certainly the timing of the president’s volte-face is suspect. By pleading Trump in support over Chagos, he went on, Badenoch was abandoning her position on Greenland. Starmer is sometimes accused of appeasing Trump, but it you listen carefully, he now speaks of the US president in the way one descries a dangerous enemy.
The Tories protested that the two issues were separate. A simpler criticism of their position is that they’ve been in power for 31 of the last 50 years, and never in that time have they shown the slightest belief that the Chagossians should have a say in their future. Does Badenoch believe this now? The implication is that she does, but I would caution any Chagossians reading this not to try and take her words to the bank.
Even pretending for a moment that Badenoch’s sudden conversion to the cause of Chagossianself-determination was sincere — bear with me — it is astonishingly ill-timed. If Britain is unable to defend Greenland, how would Badenoch propose to guarantee the independence of an archipelago in the Pacific? When the US, or China, or Mauritius, announces that Diego Garcia is crucial to their national security and seizes it, would prime minister Badenoch send a task force to liberate it?
It was a noisy session on all sides, at least until the Speaker, Lindsay Hoyle, blew his top. His target was Shadow Transport Secretary Ric Holden, the devoted MP for North West DurhamBasildon and one of parliament’s more enthusiastic hecklers. Holden usually sits in the gangway that runs up the middle of the opposition benches, out of the Speaker’s eyeline, but this time he was behind Badenoch. Hoyle told him to shut up “or you will be getting the express train out of here”. Holden flushed a delightful sunset pink. Starmer took the opportunity to have a dig, suggesting that the Tory would be the next MP to join Reform, an idea that Lee Anderson, Reform Chief (And Only) Whip, treated with mock horror. “Reform is supporting our recycling moves,” the prime minister said, winding up to a joke that had clearly been prepared earlier, “because soon it will be a party entirely made up of…”
But we would never find out what Reform would be made up of, because at this point the Speaker exploded. Had Holden carried on heckling? Whatever the reason, he was ordered from the chamber. Labour MPs waved to him as he left.
If Starmer failed to quite land his point on Greenland to Badenoch, he managed it a moment later when Lib Dem leader Ed Davey, a man with his finger on the pulse of Britain’s liberals, demanded that the prime minister imitate the actions of Mark Carney, and confront Trump.
The prime minister replied in an unusual fit of eloquence. “The relationship with the US matters,” he began. “While he is trying to get soundbites, we must not forget that a war is raging in Europe. It is in its fourth year. The Russians are raining bombs down on Ukrainian civilians day and night.” He had more. “It is foolhardy to think that we should rip up our relationship with the US and abandon Ukraine and so many of the other things that are important to our defence, security and intelligence.”
This is as clear a statement as the prime minister has made on why he is taking the approach he’s taking. He should say it more, and at greater length, and expand on what it means for what the future is going to look like for British people.
Later we would hear from the President, explaining that all he wanted was “a piece of ice, cold and poorly located”. There’s something mesmeric about Trump’s mumbling, rambling stream-of-consciousness speeches, bouncing from subject to subject like a ball in a pinball machine, occasionally hitting a hot-button subject and lighting up the entire board as he remembers how much he hates windmills, or what an amazing state the US economy is in, or some misunderstood fact from a CIA briefing or the back of a cereal packet.
We learned that during the Second World War, America had defended Greenland, seeing off “the Germans, the Japanese, the Italians too”, that the First World War (1914-18) had been ended by the Spanish Flu of 1919. Without America, “right now you’d all be speaking German,” he told his audience in Switzerland. He said he wasn’t planning to use force to take Greenland, but seemed to refer to it as “Iceland”. It would be a fitting next step in humanity’s dumbest century if World War 3 was to be started by a man who couldn’t remember which country he was invading.
