The best joke at PMQs was told by the first Labour backbencher to speak, Olivia Bailey (Reading West and Mid Berkshire): “Can I welcome the swift and decisive action the Government is taking to secure our borders…”
How the Conservatives laughed. The Labour Whips really ought to supply their troops with ammunition which does not blow up in their faces.
Kemi Badenoch, who was on next, did not ask about immigration, but about Sir Keir Starmer’s appointment as Transport Secretary of “a convicted fraudster”, Louise Haigh: “What was he thinking?”
Starmer declined to reveal what he was thinking. At PMQs he tries to hide how wounded he feels at having his probity doubted. He said Haigh was “right when further information came forward to resign”, and compared this favourably with the behaviour of the Conservative Government over the last 14 years, a period of history by which he is obsessed.
Badenoch, who was enjoying herself, wondered what the “further information” was. He retorted, “I’m not going to disclose private information,” an odd defence when one considers that this information led to the resignation of a Minister of the Crown.
“This country needs conviction politicians,” Badenoch said, “not politicians with convictions,” and smiled with pleasure as her benches enjoyed the joke.
But Starmer, rather surprisingly, retorted with a joke of his own: “I gently remind her that two of her predecessors had convictions for breaking the Covid rules.”
He in turn could not resist smiling at his joke, as did his neighbours, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves. It’s wonderful what comfort a joke can bring, but one felt that for Reeves, whose face in repose looks strained, the respite might be temporary.
Gregory Stafford (Con, Farnham and Bordon) said Anne Puckeridge, a World War Two veteran who now lives in Canada, was sitting in the Gallery: there she indeed was, a white-haired lady with two medals pinned to her jacket.
Would the Prime Minister meet her, two days before her hundredth birthday, to discuss her campaign to have old age pensions, currently frozen at the level when the pensioner left the UK, unfrozen.
No birthday greetings from Starmer. Nor did he offer so much as a meeting with a junior minister in the relevant department. He simply observed, in a stony tone, that “our position is in fact a continuation of the position under the last Government”.
How heartening to discover that the last Government did after all do something right.