Prime Minister’s Question Time is well-recognised as pure performance which often veers into pure pantomime. There is little for the wider public to respect about the event, every member of every party plays their prescribed part in the chamber, and few demonstrate a smidgen of integrity during the hour’s show they jointly put on. The exchange between Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition is a scripted sparring, after which both cabinet and shadow cabinet are expected to declare their leading actor the Oscar winner. It is an untrustworthy, cynical, posturing display of the very worst that politics has to offer.
Last Wednesday, into this weekly televised cess pit, stepped Rachel Reeves. As Labour’s Chancellor, she has fronted some of the most astonishingly cruel policy decisions the country has seen for some time. Cutting winter fuel allowance, ignoring the injustice of pension provision for some older women, maintaining the rape clause, and slashing benefits for the disabled amongst them.
The only ones taken more by surprise by Labour’s increasing disdain for the poor than Labour MPs themselves, are the Tory ones. This is their standard policy artillery; take from the poor and then take some more, until your party grassroots are sufficiently pacified and your MPs have a convenient alibi for the cruelty of measures taken.
Rachel Reeves has fronted an austerity policy, for such it is, wildly condemned by vast swathes of the left, and she has been smashed in the face for doing so by many of her own MPs. Badenoch has scrambled for footing in the wake of such a Labour moral shift and her only available choice as Tory leader was to vow to do the same, but harder and faster.
Reeves is not the first woman, or man, to have cried in the Commons, and I’m sure she won’t be the last
Labour however could not hold their course in the face of a backbench rebellion. A humiliating climb down on benefit slashing for the most vulnerable was their only choice if they wanted to pass any sort of bill on welfare at all. Of course, Reeves has borne the brunt of that genuflection to the back benchers. Starmer, as Badenoch said in PMQs, has used Reeves as a “human shield for his incompetence”.
On the day after this defeat — because though the bill passed, all knew it was a defeat for Labour — Reeves was expected to appear in the house at PMQs beside the Prime Minister. She could have chosen not to appear, as many have suggested, but she would have been hacked to pieces for it, by the markets, the media and the Tories.
Rachel Reeves chose to appear, and she did not break down in tears on Wednesdays during PMQ, as has been widely described, mimicked and ridiculed. She had obvious eye bags from crying previously, who knows how long before or for what private reason, and a couple of tears rolled down her face involuntarily. She did, as Kemi Badenoch pointed out rather needlessly, look absolutely miserable.
This is of course an extraordinary show of genuine emotion, for whatever reason, in an arena where only robotically performed actions are permitted. The unwritten acceptable behaviours are raucous forced laughter, loud grumbling and booing, stomping, rattling, nodding, pointing and of course shouting unacceptable insults you hope the Speaker won’t catch.
Crying is not on the list, so on Wednesday there had, it seemed, been a glitch in the matrix, with Reeves appearing to malfunction hideously. One minute she was able to maintain a forced smile behind Starmer, nodding and pointing, face fixed firmly on her shadow counterpart. The next her eyes glazed, she licked her lips uncomfortably, and a few tears rolled down her face. This was actually fairly brief, and she soon pressed her own reset button, resuming nodding and pointing as per the PMQ factory setting.
The eye bags she sported were huge and noticeable and at least one of her front bench colleagues should have been able to spot them and ask after her ability to attend the chamber of horrors. Nandy and Rayner though, are suspiciously effective robots for Kier, and may only have had eyes for their leading man. The arrogant fool himself was possibly too busy hairspraying his quiff and barking orders at the mirror to notice his leading fall woman, was indeed falling, into misery.
So, Reeves sat on the front bench dissolving into her own sadness before the nation’s eyes. I say, “the nation”, though I think few who are contributing online, to the tidal wave of venom crashing towards Reeves, have ever watched PMQs and are reacting instead to a single image of a middle aged-woman, with puffy eye bags and a glum mouth.
There was precious little sympathy for Reeves anywhere, and though Liz Kendall MP is the one proposing the welfare bill, commenters refashioned and repurposed Reeves as a particularly evil Scrooge who had been rightly visited by punitive Parliamentary ghosts for her determined miserliness.
The blood swirled in the water and the sharks assembled to tear her apart. This is the way of political life and only the emotionally robust present themselves to it. Few leave the House of Commons in the same state they entered it, and some leave in pieces.
Online comments to those expressing some sympathy for her very obvious moment of despair have been shocking. I am no fan of Reeves, or the current Labour government, I am well aware of the immense harm her economic choices have inflicted on the most vulnerable, but I saw a human being in personal pain and was able to split that from the political part of her that is available for public flaying in times of great mistake. Make no mistake, this is a time of great mistake for Labour, but who knows what is happening in Reeves’ personal life and as the tax paying electorate we do not purchase the right to her private life. Perhaps she is grieving or ill? We may never know, but we could accept that there is a difference between the political and the personal life of our politicians and as long as they have not behaved in a criminal way, or one that would affect their ability to perform public duty, then what are a few personal tears here and there.
Many have pointed to the reaction of the markets, but they quickly stabilised and they frequently have idiotic reactions to nonsensical things anyway, like a set of easily startled racehorses who run off down the track and must be caught and blinkered.
It emerged over the course of Wednesday afternoon, that amongst the many people genuinely seeing her misery as appropriate punishment for the way the poor and infirm have been treated by her decisions, there was alongside this an expression of vicious anger which was laced with the very worst misogyny because she is a female chancellor.
A criticism of Reeves as politically incompetent is fair, but a tweet saying women should be kept in the kitchen as they are unsuited to public and political life is misogyny and many comments were far worse than that, and far more personal.
To focus on a woman’s tears and say they have no place in the House of Commons is strange. Reeves is not the first woman, or man, to have cried there and I’m sure she won’t be the last. Many online have said that, because a couple of tears fell down Reeves’ cheeks, that women are not suited to political positions because they are “too emotional” but some male MPs have been accused of rape, serious sexual assault or child abuse. If we were to suggest that extreme levels of male violence meant men, as a blanket rule, were unsuitable for public office, then that would be met with outrage. It is ok for women to cry, it does not make them weak politicians it makes them human. It is not ok for men to rape children, that doesn’t make them weak politicians, it makes them vile criminals.
I wouldn’t want emotionally cold robots operating in Parliament, otherwise government could be just as effectively administered by an AI programme. I do think politicians need to be emotionally robust, and most of the time. In the rare instances where their private life makes emotional demands upon them which overtake their political role, I think it is ok if they struggle to master those emotions, as long as master them they do. Reeves did.
Her lip had trembled, her tears fell, and then she snapped back into role, though the only role, at that time, that she had to perform was nodding in the noisy circus. Starmer himself put his head in his hands then scrambled through his papers as he was wrong-footed by Badenoch, but no one uttered a word of this or suggested he was unfit to be Prime Minister. (They should have, because he isn’t and hasn’t been since he decided some women have a penis. I’d rather have a chancellor who cried a bit, than a Prime Minister who doesn’t know which sex has a cervix).
If PMQs is suddenly a place where MPs must have themselves under self-control, at all times, then perhaps the entire raft of poor behaviour we see there should be examined. If the markets aren’t rattled by a speaker reprimanding hysterically shouting MPs like a comical headteacher in assembly, then they shouldn’t be rattled by a chancellor with personal life events briefly overwhelming her, as they do all of us at times.
I think Reeves is doing a dreadful job as chancellor, not because she cried, not because she’s a woman, but because she is the financial branch of a toppling Labour tree which lost sight of the roots which would secure it.
