I enjoyed Prime Minister’s Questions today. Okay, it wasn’t actually the PMQs because David Cameron was busy arguing with Johnny Foreigner about the EU, so he sent his number two, the Chancer of the Excheqeur, George Osborne along instead. The convention is that if the PM isn’t answering questions, then the opposition will send in an underling to bat instead, usually the deputy PM or perhaps the Deputy party leader. Today, Labour sent along Angela Eagle.
We all have our own views on how Jeremy Corbyn has been doing as Labour leader but there is one area in which both his admirers and his critics agree, sort of, and that’s at PMQs. I say sort of because some say he has been effective, what with his radio request show style of asking Cameron questions that he has been sent by ordinary people. To a point, it worked because Cameron became ever so slightly defensive, not wishing to patronise someone who might actually exist but it also worked for Cameron because Corbyn never followed anything up. It was a mixed bag, really. Not great, not terrible but all in all pretty easy for the PM. Today, we were reminded how to do it.
Eagle was clever. She asked a couple of serious questions about flooding to start with, after which she started to score some political points against the heir to Cameron. It was all quite effortless too. Eagle was well prepared and when Osborne came back at her with a Blair quote which was meant to damage her comments, she came back with an even better Blair quote to damage Osborne. She was good, she was funny, Osborne was stilted, wooden and ineffective. If he wants to do this job permanently when Cameron goes in 2018, maybe before, he’d best do better than this. But then Eagle was very good.
Eagle’s excellent performance was another reminder of the shocking balance of the sexes on the Labour front benches. All the senior positions are filled by men – Corbyn as leader, his henchman McDonnell as shadow chancellor, Brownite union fixer Tom Watson as his deputy, Burnham as shadow home secretary, Red Ken Livingstone as special advisor on defence: need I do on? – but as soon as a very capable woman gets her chance to shine, she out performs her leader by a country mile. And it is not as if there are hardly any able Labour women on the Labour back benches. Caroline Flint, Rachel Reeves, Stella Creasy, Naz Shah, Yvette Cooper to name but a few. In the “new politics” they still seem to occupy the same areas as someone like Tyson Fury might prefer.
I come from the position that the “new politics” is no such thing. I see nothing new in terms of policy or content, there is nothing new with the bus pass brigade of Corbyn, McDonnell and Abbott, the latter of whom is the gift who keeps on giving to the Tories. They were not speaking of the “new politics” before Corbyn swept to power and they have not come up with anything new since his election.
If Eagle did anything today, she reminded us of the importance of the old politics; the old politics of damaging Tory morale, of undermining the heir apparent in front of his future electorate, of making Labour MPs, who, lest we forget, were elected by 9.3 million people, feel confident again in their own skin.
Corbyn is going nowhere – and you can read that any way you like! – so, for better or worse, we’ve got him at the head of the Labour Party for the foreseeable future. He will carry on until such time as he knows it’s time to go or when he gets a knock on his door from one of his own allies, telling him it’s time to step aside. Who knows when that will be? Perhaps he will have that ultimate political gift of luck which will sustain him until 2020 when he will get his one shot a the top job? It is not beyond the Tories to self-destruct before then, especially with a new, potentially divisive and unpopular leader like Osborne and, as always in politics, there are always events.
Whatever Corbyn does, he will surely need to nurture a little woman with a big talent called Angela Eagle. She gave Gideon a rough ride today and he will have known it. She will get no credit in the Sun or the Mail, but it doesn’t matter because the real politics is felt mainly by the participants. No doubt that Osborne is a smug, smooth operator who considers himself to be the smartest man in the room, but he will have hurt today. Labour, for the first time in months, had its foot on the throat of the Tories, and the leader and his comrades need to learn how to keep it there. And fast.
