It's a love-in at the home affairs committee as Yvette Cooper runs down the clock

The Guardian

2 days ago

What goes around doesn't always come around. When Yvette Cooper was chair of the home affairs select committee between 2016 and 2021, she was a force of nature. Tireless. Persistent. Forensic. A one-woman opposition party that the government took seriously.
Yvette pretty much did for Amber Rudd – or rather, helped Rudd to do with herself – as home secretary. Sajid Javid was lucky to escape with a score draw in his appearances before her. Priti Patel merely had confirmed what we all knew: that she was one of the worst home secretaries in living memory.
So you would have imagined that the current home affairs select committee would have wanted to live up to the reputation of its predecessor. To put Yvette through the same level of scrutiny. To make an appearance before them something the home secretary would come to fear. Two hours of her life in which her work at the department would be gone through in fine detail. And found wanting. After all, the Home Office is pretty much guaranteed to break every secretary of state in the end.
Only Cooper appears to be having a charmed life. It's almost as if she had handpicked the committee itself. Mostly Labour MPs from the 2024 intake who appear reluctant to ask the tough questions. As if it might somehow be thought rude to do so. Or it might get back to the party whips that they had been a bit harsh.
It's all a bit of a love-in. New MP Jake Richards's sister is an adviser to Yvette. He may as well have phoned in his questions over a drink or two. Nor are the two 2024 Lib Dems any different. There again, the current Lib Dems are even more enthusiastically Labour than Labour itself. This was the epitome of politesse. Courtly love. As a committee it was almost entirely pointless. Dumb, dumber, dumbest.
The tone was set by Karen Bradley, the committee chair. A kind and gentle woman who appears to have unwittingly made a career as a politician. How this has happened, not even she really knows. She was, briefly, under the previous Tory government, the Northern Ireland secretary. Once in post, she declared that she had had the stunning insight that the Protestants and the Catholics really didn't get on that well. You can't buy that level of intelligence.
To be fair, it's possible that Karen is merely biding her time. Trying to sit out life as quietly as possible, not rocking the boat, while her party indulges its current lunacy. Let Honest Bob and Kemi fight it out among themselves. Sooner or later some kind of sanity must return. Or maybe not. Either way, she's decided she's taking it easy. Time to make friends, not enemies.
We began with something vaguely topical. The arrest of Paul Doyle for allegedly driving into the crowd at the Liverpool parade. But no one had much to say about that. Nigel Farage and Richard Tice might have been bitterly disappointed that he hadn't turned out to be a Muslim or an illegal immigrant, but everyone in the committee seemed quite relieved he had proved to be white and English.
Then we moved on to policing. Which consisted of several MPs trying to name-check their own police forces. You feel that they haven't quite got the hang of this yet. They aren't in the committee room to generate a few soundbites for their constituency newsletters. They are there to interrogate the home secretary on the work of her department. But Yvette was more than happy to indulge the committee in its saccharine agenda. Why stop when you're winning?
This was Cooper in her happy place. It was as if she had dosed up on amphetamines especially for the afternoon. The words rattled out of her mouth at a frightening speed. Not necessarily in the right order. The sentences more or less made sense on their own but were completely unintelligible when collected into a paragraph. The overall effect was hypnotic. Words for words' sake that battered you into morphine dream submission.
In many ways, this was a bravura performance from Yvette. One designed to waste as much time as possible while saying little of interest. In among all the white noise she did commit news once, when she let slip that more children had been referred to Prevent, but that was a rare misstep. She wouldn't let it happen again. This was all about running down the clock.
Ten minutes from the end, Bradley finally noticed that no one had got round to talking about the small boats. Had anyone got anything they wanted to ask about this, she inquired. No one had really. It may be a hot topic elsewhere in Westminster but not here.
Eventually, someone said something about hotels. We didn't even get to discuss the warm-weather excuse that Chris Philp had described as nonsense, even though he had used himself. Was that the time? It was. It was over. Permanent Home Office secretary Antonia Romeo punched the air. She had lasted the entire two hours without saying a word. Civil servants dream of that sort of thing.
Elsewhere, it was another day of Honest Bob out and about on manoeuvres. He is fighting the longest guerrilla leadership campaign in Tory party history. Another pointless TikTok stunt, then off to justice questions, where he once again defended the right of Tory women to encourage people to burn down hotels with migrants in them. No compassionate conservatism for him.
But for outright stupidity, we must ask for the shadow Defra secretary, Victoria Atkins, to take a bow. Vicky had won an urgent question from the Commons speaker to ask Steve Reed about Thames Water. A scenario that even she couldn't screw up. Except she could. Vicky wondered if the reason KKR had pulled out of the deal was because Reed had said a few mean things about them at the weekend. This is what passes for scrutiny from the opposition these days.