Parliament always has an otherworldly feel; it’s a world of gothic crenelations, of specialised language, of deliberate artifice. But something even less real has crept in recently. A deliberate indulgence by the governing class of mawkishness and sentimentality, just as the reality of the country they’re supposed to be governing turns grimmer and more violent. The two – the rise of violence and the dominance of mawkishness – are not unrelated.
Scarcely a week goes by without a minister hailing a victim or relative in the viewing gallery – sometimes for manifestly self-interested reasons
We are entering day two of the fallout from Kemi Badenoch accusing Bridget Phillipson of being a ‘spiteful class warrior’ at PMQs. Phillipson, who likes to claim she has a thick skin, spent the intervening period appearing on TV and radio saying how nasty and unfair the epithet was, and marshalling Labour MPs to put out outraged tweets communicating much the same sentiment. Proportion went out the window. Murdered MPs were invoked. Anything rather than discuss Phillipson’s dire record on education. We are becoming used to pompous lectures about civility in politics, often from people who elsewhere throw around terms like ‘far-right’ and ‘racist’ with joyous abandon.
