His first steps. The new Prime Minister’s first outing at PMQs. His proud supporters urging him on, longing for him to succeed, willing him from one point to another without bumping his head, crashing into the furniture, falling into the fire. Admirers held their collective breath as Sir Keir left one point, looked around for another, failed to find anything and bravely set out anyway in that drunken waddle that toddlers use to get around.
In answer to Calum Miller’s Question 1 on Thames Water’s committing 2,600 hours of sewage crimes the PM toddled out with, “I thank him for raising this important issue in relation to [checks notes] . . . water.”
Yes, this prime ministerial thing can’t be as easy as it looked when Rishi was doing it.
The Tory leader – self-deprecating, relaxed, amused – showed us how it can be done, pirouetting from one topic to another with a dancer’s ease. Rishi was so conciliatory, so helpful it was a while before we realised how expertly he was baiting the PM.
He asked six quick questions referring to – long range Black Sea weapons; Germany’s willingness to gift Ukraine missiles; the legal basis for deploying oligarch assets in the war; the Tempest fighter jet program; NATO membership for Ukraine and diplomatic negotiations with Saudi Arabia – and with relentless consensuality offered Keir support at every turn.
By this display of co-operation, Keir was deprived of the only reliable piece of furniture he had to hold onto (“Fourteen years of Tory failure!”) and staggered around from empty clause to banality to vacuous sentences wihich stopped without ending. Often, he found himself saying he was in “whole-hearted agreement” with the Conservative leader. He was even charmed into agreeing he would send British troops into battle without consulting Parliament.
How dismayed his new Labour MPs must be by these exchanges will only become clear in time. They are not wholly enchanted with their leader even now, as Pete Wishart pointed out. That which was unthinkable last week had come to pass. A King’s Speech rebellion and the six-month suspension of Labour’s seven lefty lodestars. Add to that brutality to friends, this cringing agreement with and gratitude to the ancient enemy – that must grate on backbench nerves. Rishi, frankly, has never been more effective.
Perhaps the PM will find his feet. Or maybe the whirlwind of events will make that impossible. Does the old prosecutor have the suppleness, the quickness of spirit, the lively, Blairite ability to pivot away from losing propositions?
The “tough decisions” he is shaping up to make are based on an already exploded claim – that the crisis was “more severe than we thought when we went through the books” (the famously open books).
Additionally, he is still saying that renewable electricity will mean cheaper bills. He is still saying that he is going to smash the criminal boat gangs. And still saying he will work with communities to build 1.5 million houses.
At what point will Keir realise that renewables are expensive, that the gangs are unbeatable and that the fracking protesters are quietly waking up to a whole new project of civil disobedience and anti-development resistance?
If he hasn’t promptly become a convincing prime minister, what are the chances he’ll evolve into a leader that can win a civil war?
