What is Keir Starmer’s idea of a nightmare before Christmas? A by-election? Getting stuck in a lift with a farmer, a pensioner and a Chagossian? Quite near the top of the list for our scrutiny-phobic squealer-in-chief is probably being made to answer loads of questions. In a rare taste of the medicine he’s inflicting on the country, Sir Keir’s nightmares became a reality with a grilling by the Liaison Committee. Dame Meg Hillier began proceedings by asking the £22 billion question: when would people actually see all this economic growth that he’d promised? Cue squirming and a squeal about his “plan for change”.
Hillier concluded her questioning by asking if the PM had any regrets about how his first months in office had gone. Like a totally normal, non-psychopathic person, he just answered “no”. Liam Byrne gave the “plan for change” – fast becoming the PM’s albatross – a further roasting. How was he so sure he could beat literally every forecast and deliver the best growth in the G7? The plan for change would turn targets into “milestones”, apparently. Imagine if you got that as a riddle in your Christmas cracker. You’d think someone had spiked the bread sauce with LSD.
Tellingly, both Byrne and Hillier are from Sir Keir’s own party. Clearly, Labour committee heads weren’t going to go soft on the PM. Toby Perkins put him in hot water about brownfield sites. Florence Eshalomi grilled him about why on earth he expected local councils to report to him on their targets when he refused to report on his. The PM – or whoever it is that programmes him – turned on the voice he uses to patronise women and proceeded to explain the concept of targets to her by way of an answer.
As if to compound this, Emily Thornberry had to remind him to include women on his list of things he wanted to protect under the new regime in Syria. The biggest exception to this fast-emerging rule, and runaway winner of “suck-up of the week”, was the oleaginous Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi, chairman of the defence select committee. He began by thanking the PM for “his service to the nation” as if he were a bomb disposal dog, or a Chindit or one of those people who delivered soup during the Captain Tom times. Dhesi’s question was scarcely audible; by this point, he was so far up Oinky’s bottom that he could see Hamish Falconer’s feet. Labour did a pretty good job of filleting the PM but they were veritable chefs de partie compared to Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee chairman Alistair Carmichael. The Lib Dem fixed Oinky with a look of pure contempt and began, in his sonorous Scottish bass-baritone, “in the long run we’re all dead” – the PM looked as if he wished he were – “so I’d like to talk about inheritance tax”.
It was like watching someone make a Starmer-flavoured stock, every question reducing the PM further down to the little man he actually is: “Who were the targets of these changes?”, “Was the Prime Minister happy with the super-rich continuing to shield money in land?”, “Would he encourage the Chancellor to meet with the farming unions?” Each one met a wobble of the cheeks, a stammer and a lie. Finally, as Sir Keir tried to crack a joke about managing Rachel Reeves’s diary, Mr Carmichael caught him absolutely in his sights and reminded him, with a grimace, that a lot of people didn’t find this funny. Reduced down to his protoplasmic jelly, Sir Keir stopped smiling.
