Sir Keir Starmer was away this week. Nothing new there of course; indeed, it seems the thing which will change least when he finally leaves No 10 will be his presence in Parliament. So today we had what might well be David Lammy’s final outing as Deputy Prime Minister. The Tories had done their customary rummage down the back of the sofa for someone to face him and pulled out James Cleverly.
With attention diverted away from the party leaders, these are always good occasions for Members of the House of Commons to demonstrate just how crashingly unimpressive many of them are. Today’s offering was a veritable casserole of mediocrity.
Lammy and Cleverly were unimpressive themselves, clattering at each other in lumbering fight about early release of prisoners. Daisy Cooper of the Lib Dems added the square root of nothing with a predictably obsessive and petty question about Nigel Farage. But the real joy came from the questions by backbenchers.
Ellie Chowns, who terrifyingly is one of the better Green MPs, tried to get Lammy to commit to proportional representation. Lammy managed to turn this into a comment on the Greens’ racism problem. Chowns and fellow Green MP Sian Berry made faces at Lammy in response, like middle class versions of the hillbillies from Deliverance.
