Waiting in the wings as he prepared to face Angela Rayner, Mel Stride looked nervous. Keir Starmer was abroad again, and so the shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer (there’s no shame if you didn’t know) was the latest member of Kemi Badenoch’s front bench to be served up at Deputy Prime Minister’s Questions. As he prepared for his gladiatorial tussle with Angela Rayner, he fiddled with his phone and shifted from foot to foot. Colleagues patted his back as they went past. His demeanour was less “what we do in life echoes in eternity” and more morituri te salutant.
The Conservative leader’s decision to offer the slot to a different member of her front bench every week has advantages: it keeps things fresh and allows them to ask about their areas of expertise. There are other, more base benefits. It’s elementary Machiavelli to secure a shaky leadership by making potential challengers fight each other. Although if we’re being honest, the current shadow cabinet isn’t so much Game of Thrones as Guess Who?
The session opened with a question from Mike Tapp, the Labour MP for Dover. Loyal Labour questions at this session are either “Aren’t we great?” or “Weren’t they awful?” The trick is to dress this up a bit. Tapp had a nice line about the Tory frontbench posting “wannabe superhero videos, shamelessly pointing at the problems they created”, a reminder of the existence of Robert Jenrick, whose social media strategy is certainly aimed at undermining one of Britain’s party leaders.
Unfortunately, Tapp overdid things somewhat, listing the many ways in which the Conservatives were awful, to the increasing impatience of the Speaker, before finally reaching his question: “Does the Deputy Prime Minister agree that they should hang their heads in shame?”
At this point Lindsay Hoyle had had enough, and ruled the question out of order. Tapp will stalk parliament for the rest of his days, sadly ignorant of Rayner’s view of whether the Conservatives should hang their heads in shame. He may go to his grave with the question unanswered. This is his tragedy, and we all share it.
Stride opened with a joke: he and Rayner had something in common — they both hated Rachel Reeves’s tax policies. He followed that by asking about the Labour troubles on welfare. Down the bench from Rayner, Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall looked shattered, utterly drained, like someone who … well, like someone who got a post in Cabinet then found out it was her job to implement a policy that her entire party hated.
“It is nice to face the latest wannabe,” Rayner began. She listed all the nice bits of the government’s welfare reform plan, and ignored the bit that has MPs up in arms.
“On the Conservative side of the House, we are absolutely clear,” Stride replied, although they aren’t. Badenoch announced on Tuesday that the Tories would support the government only if it passed a series of tests it will never pass. The smart thing to do would be to link arms with Starmer and praise the disability payment cuts to the skies. This would maximise the Labour rebellion, splitting the prime minister off from his MPs and creating all sorts of long-term problems. It would also deal with the criticism that the Tories say they want spending cuts but have yet to see one they can vote for.
Indeed, that was Rayner’s reply: Stride had been in charge of welfare when the bill shot up. She had plenty of answers written out for her, but she was best when she worked without her script. “He’s got an absolute nerve!” she said at one point. As for Stride, he looked pretty pleased with how things had gone.
Though his performance was nothing to that of his fellow Conservative, Andrew Snowden, who bellowed a long question that listed the failures of every member of the Cabinet. It was greeted with cries of “more”, some of them probably even sincere. “Maybe he wants a go next week!” Rayner joked. Badenoch, she added, had said “she was going to get better week on week. She already has in the last two weeks by not turning up!”
Over at The Hague, where he was attending the NATO summit, the prime minister was asked about the growing welfare rebellion. “Noises off,” he said, dismissively. If the hope was to give the impression of unconcern, the effect was to seem cloth-eared. These are the kind of noises off you get when the theatre roof falls in.
Still, it’s all grist for the arena. Are you not entertained?
