Good Heavens, it was Sir Keir Starmer! The Prime Minister swaggered into the Commons at 11.30am. First time for over a fortnight. He was lucky a clerk didn’t ask to check his security pass.
The Speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, signalled subtle displeasure at Sir Keir’s neglect of the House. He said MPs would be given more leeway in their questions, to allow them to catch up with the absentee.
I hear that on Monday night Sir Lindsay summoned the Cabinet Secretary to his study to tear him off a strip over Sir Keir’s scurvy attitude to parliamentary scrutiny. Kemi Badenoch could have said ‘Welcome back, stranger, you didn’t miss much – just a mutiny among your MPs, a poll saying you’re now as popular as the clap and a plot by Angela Rayner to depose you’.
Instead the Conservative leader, who is not excessively endowed in the humour department, came over all jabbery. She shouted that Sir Keir had ‘evaded Prime Minister’s question time for two weeks’ and was now ‘irrelevant’.
Aiee, that was ill-judged. You do not have to be Kemi-sceptic to see that even our nasal plodder of a PM is more relevant than she at present. Mrs Badenoch paid for her rant. Sir Keir was able to gloat, no fewer than seven times, that his opponent was ‘unserious’. Did she truly mean he should not attend G7 and Nato summits?
