Angela Rayner was ashen-faced. She looked like someone who’d just learned they’d left their back door open and the dog had escaped and caused a twelve-car pile-up. She walked into the House of Commons with her parliamentary aide Harpreet Uppal, who installed herself directly behind the Labour deputy leader as an emotional support MP. As Rayner took her seat on the frontbench, her colleague Lucy Powell gave her a hug. When politicians are in trouble, it helps them to have friends.
How much trouble Rayner is in was the subject of debate in the corridors of Westminster all afternoon. Half an hour before prime minister’s questions began she revealed that she had underpaid stamp duty when she bought a flat in Brighton. The details were complicated, involving her divorce and a trust to provide for her disabled son, and the inquiry that has now been ordered will turn on exactly what she told her lawyers and what they told her.
What is certain is that Keir Starmer doesn’t want to lose her. Whatever the tensions in their relationship, a Labour Party deputy leadership election would be a nightmare for him, with candidates competing to best articulate members’ frustrations with the government. So, when the prime minister arrived in the chamber, it wasn’t a surprise that he gave Rayner a supportive pat on the shoulder.
The main effect of watching the US democratic process is to make you feel more warmly about the British one
On the other side of the chamber, one change since the summer is that Conservative MPs have now taken to wearing union jack pins on their lapels. Quiet patriotism is out, conspicuous loyalty is in.
Kemi Badenoch rose to ask her first question. She generally struggles to respond to news that has broken on the morning of PMQs. Here she slipped a line about Rayner into a previously planned question about interest rates: “She has admitted that she underpaid tax, so why is she still in office?”
Generally when Badenoch asks two questions, Starmer picks the one he’d rather answer, but this time he took on both. He opened with a spirited defence of Rayner. “She has gone over and above in setting out the details,” he said, adding that he was “very proud” to sit alongside her.
Badenoch was having none of that. “If he had a backbone, he would sack her!” she declared. Starmer fired back that the Tory leader’s claims “are about as credible as her place at Stanford University”. Labour MPs, somewhat implausibly, greeted this as though it were Oscar Wilde putting down an insubordinate theatre critic. “MORRRRE!” they cried. Badenoch, Starmer said, was “talking down the country”. She was ready for that: “He is dragging down the country.”
If Labour’s laughter at the prime minister’s jokes had a distinctly canned quality, they were at least prompted to genuine hilarity by the Tory leader. “We aren’t the ones referring ourselves to ethics advisers!” she declared, and the government benches fell about. “That is among the reasons they got booted out of office last year,” Starmer observed.
It had been another low-wattage exchange between the two leaders, partly because the man who has been the actual leader of the opposition for the last six weeks wasn’t there. Nigel Farage, for it was he, had flown to Washington to tell the Americans how awful Britain is.
He popped up on our screens a little later, giving evidence to the House of Representative Judiciary Committee, also sporting a lapel pin to demonstrate his loyalty. This one said: “GB News”.
The main effect of watching the US democratic process is to make you feel more warmly about the British one. Where a parliamentary committee hearing focuses on hearing from witnesses, America’s congressmen know that their own opinions are far more interesting than anything anyone else has to say. Farage, often sidelined in the Commons, might have imagined that he would get more attention in this forum. Instead, he sat and listened to Republicans and Democrats bellowing out prepared speeches attacking each other.
They were all so awful that it seems invidious to pick one out. The Republican chairman, Jim Jordan, seemed mainly to be angry that the US government had said Covid vaccines worked. “Today’s misinformation is tomorrow’s truth,” he said, in what could have been a mission statement for the Trump administration. Hank Johnson, a Democrat, seemed convinced that Farage was in cahoots with Elon Musk, which makes him nine months out of date. The Reform leader dismissed that with ease.
Farage took the role of the bluff Englishman. “You can say what you like, I don’t care!” declared one of the thinnest-skinned politicians I’ve ever met, a man whose party was that very day busy emailing journalists it didn’t like to tell them they couldn’t come to its conference.
Jamie Raskin, another Democrat, was better-informed than his colleague. He opened by enjoyably describing the witness as “a Putin-loving free speech imposter and Trump sycophant.” Then he turned to Reform’s decision to ban critical reporters from its conference.
“I am the most open person,” Farage began, hands in the air. “Undoubtedly you’re the most handsome man in the world,” Raskin interrupted, and asked why reporters had been told they couldn’t come to this week’s Reform conference.
“I can’t think,” Farage said, all injured innocence, “if I go back 25 years, I can’t think of banning anybody.” Maybe all the beer has affected his memory, because those of us who’ve covered him can certainly think of examples before this week. “Maybe somebody else did,” the Reform leader conceded.
Rayner is blaming her lawyers, and Farage is blaming his staff. You can choose for yourself whom you believe.
