Scrutiny was lost in chumminess. Sir Keir Starmer had left for the Commonwealth meeting in Samoa, so the House instead found itself presented with Angela Rayner, the Deputy Prime Minister.
What larks! She offered a giggly double act with Oliver Dowden, her Tory opposite number. This made a change from Starmer’s evasive earnestness. The House instead gave way to evasive frivolity.
Dowden opened with a good question: “What is the Deputy Prime Minister’s definition of working people?”
Rayner twitted him for having pushed through a July general election and declined to offer any definition more precise than “people that the Tory Party has failed for the last 14 years”.
She referred at frequent intervals to the Government’s dreadful inheritance from its predecessor, but did so in the light-hearted manner that of one who therefore feels no responsibility for anything that is going wrong.
Nor in this pre-Budget week could she offer anything in the way of remedies for our national malaise. That will be for Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who was sitting beside her, and did not smile quite so broadly.
Dowden wondered whether Rayner regards five million small business owners as working people, but one could tell from his smiling face that he did not expect to cause her the slightest embarrassment, and before long he abandoned any attempt to do so, and invited her to join him in sending best wishes to the King.
“I will miss our exchanges,” Rayner responded, wreathed in smiles. “The King does a tremendous job.”
Good that the monarch should act, in these troubled times, as a focus of national unity, but one hopes his ministers do not suppose they have discharged their duties by playing PMQs as a rom com.
“Given today’s spirit of cross-party working,” Stephen Flynn said for the Scots Nat, “will the Deputy Prime Minister join me in applauding the brave Labour staff members who’ve travelled across the Atlantic to campaign against Donald Trump?”
“I’m loving this love-in,” Rayner replied, smiling more broadly than ever, and remarked that people in all parties go and campaign, doing what they want “in their own time with their own money”.
In a week’s time, perhaps the Budget will bring a return to accountability.
