QUENTIN LETTS: Pop! Mount Kemi blew her top like Etna ... vulcanologists in Geneva may have picked up a blip on their seismographs
Mount Etna erupted this week. Kemi Badenoch did something similar at PMQs. Blew her top. Pop!
Who could blame her? Sir Keir Starmer has become idly, sarcastically evasive. On his weekly trip to the Commons – how little this tiresome place merits a statesman of his hair-gelled importance – he has swapped tight dialectic for ironic vituperation.
Who does he think he is? A sketch writer?
Mrs Badenoch had opened with short questions about the winter fuel allowance and the two-child benefit cap. The latter could be fruitful territory for Conservatives now that Nigel Farage has switched to supporting high benefits. Sir Keir, in response to Mrs Badenoch, puckered his superior lips. He said she was struggling to 'catch up' with political events.
He leaned an elbow on the despatch box and twisted his neck, throwing his witticism towards his backbenchers so that they can savour its cleverness. He then resumed his seat with a satisfied moue and examined his notes for the next precooked slander.
Smoke started to seep from Mt Kemi's vents and fumaroles. Vulcanologists in Geneva may have picked up a blip on their seismographs. Warning rumbles rent the early-summer afternoon. Mind you, they may have come from Pamela Nash (Lab, Motherwell). 'Wee' Pammy, gaunt behind the PM, was looking peckish.
Sir Keir absorbed the usual bellows of support from his backbenches. He luxuriated in his pomp. Never, in all those years of grey opposition, did he imagine how dang sexy all this power would make him feel. The liberation of having to tell the truth! Now prime minister, he can tell as many fibs as he wishes, and there is nothing anyone can do to stop him.
He claimed that the economy was doing splendidly under Labour. Ha! He insisted he was much gripped by child poverty. As for the two-child benefit cap, well, the Conservatives were pro-Russia.
That last one was a bit of a leap. Mrs Badenoch looked perplexed. Tories said 'eh?' Hansard twitched. Speaker Hoyle, who had a rugby league magazine beside him on his chair, wondered if he had just drifted off for a minute and missed a few connecting sentences.
Sir Keir was referring to some allegedly dreadful remark Mrs Badenoch made about Ukraine. It did not seem particularly dreadful to much of the House when Sir Keir elaborated on it at greater length. Yet Sir Keir's acolytes reacted to this unsensational remark with theatrical astonishment. David Lammy might just have been mooned by Priti Patel. Lucy Powell, dimwit Leader of the Commons, sucked her lower deck of teeth.
This was when Mt Kemi blew. She sauntered back to the despatch box and exploded at Sir Keir's pettiness. Magma and ash flew everywhere as she denounced the 'chaos, chaos, chaos' of the Starmer government. A press-gallery colleague afterwards felt Mrs Badenoch made herself look silly. But I rather liked it. Her anger was extempore, eloquent and it showed us some character under her usual self-control. It won a moo of approval from the Tory benches, depleted as they are these days.
Sir Keir was equally half-hearted and derisive – anything to change the subject and jeer – in his answers to the SNP's Brendan O'Hara, who asked about Gaza. Reform's Sara Pochin asked if, like some countries, we should ban the burqa. Sir Keir answered that with a jocular insult about Liz Truss.
The other event of the day was a speech by Rachel Reeves at a bus factory in Rochdale, Lancs. Workers stood behind her as political stage-dressing but this backfired worse than an old charabanc. The workers found Ms Reeves unscintillating. A chap in a blue sweatshirt struggled to keep his eyes open. Another, grey-topped, rubbed his stubble, sighed, eased his neck, scratched his head, flared his nostrils, did a tunnel stare, ground his jaw, and laughed at a mate. Ms Reeves, for her part, spoke of her 'friscal famework'.
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