In what counts as breaking news on this slowest of slow Wednesdays in Westminster – most eyes were on the US midterm elections – it was nice to be able to report that Nigel Farage was in the Commons for prime minister’s questions. Not something you can often say.
Despite Reform UK tanking in the polls, Nige still regards himself as the official opposition and considers it a major insult that he isn’t given six questions every week. Today he was happy not to get one. Not even Nige’s magic shield of narcissism would have been able to save him from hubris. An embarrassment of epic proportions.
On Tuesday night, Farage had used his GB News show to insist that the American pollsters had got it wrong. Sticking his neck on the line against what he dismissed as “the liberal consensus”, he was adamant that the Republicans would come good. How could they not, with Donald Trump as president and more than $400m of Elon Musk’s money behind them?
Only it didn’t quite turn out that way. The Donald had said “pretend I’m on the ballot” and Americans had taken him at his word. And they didn’t want to vote for a man who had said he would not get into any foreign wars and would protect his country against rising energy bills and had broken both promises.
Here in the UK, Nige was the last true believer left. His political judgment increasingly at fault, unable to conceive that Trump’s legacy was already in tatters. Along with his supporters. Even the Tories have now realised that a close association with Trump is toxic. Kemi Badenoch and her shadow cabinet are busily going through their social media accounts, deleting all Trump brown-nosing posts. They had always said Trump was a crook. A liability. Weird how none of that was a problem until he lost an election.
So you can just imagine how it would have played out. The speaker calls Farage. You can almost hear the derision. The loudest jeers coming from the very Tories who had previously praised Trump. It wouldn’t matter what the Reform leader asked, the response would have been the same. Nige would never live it down. One of the worst election calls of all time. The final piece of sycophancy from one fading politician to another.
In the chamber, it was a battle of the two deputies. Louise Haigh and Alex Burghart. Haigh was making her primetime debut and declared she was taking the place of Andy Burnham who was in Antigua and Barbuda for the Commonwealth heads of government summit.
This was said mainly for the benefit of the absent Badenoch, who is suffering from severe memory loss problems these days. Only on Tuesday she had appeared not to know why she had called a press conference on a decommissioned warship from the second world war. If she didn’t know, how the hell were we supposed to? She had also been under the impression that the prime minister had gone to the Caribbean for a midweek break. You know what it’s like. You’ve got a plane waiting for you at Stansted and you can’t resist some late autumn sun.
The exchanges between Haigh and Burghart can safely be filed under forgettable. Neither made any major fuck-ups – the first rule of PMQs is not to make yourself look a halfwit – but there again, neither were particularly impressive. These were performances that will earn them future bookings from their party leaders. The last thing you want is a deputy who does better than you. Particularly Kemi. The myth around her renaissance of the Tory party – up one or two points from an all-time low – rests on her MPs and party members buying in to her talent. It’s amazing how good you can look when you surround yourself with mediocrity.
Not that this was Burghart’s fault. Alex is as Alex does. He’s more an academic, an intellectual rather than a showman. A slightly more obnoxious Oliver Letwin. Someone not really suited to the vulgarity of the Commons. A deputy who needs to stick to the script because he cannot tolerate spontaneity. So Alex merely read out his prepared questions in the order they were written. Seemingly oblivious to whether they had been answered or not.
There were clearly moments in his notes where his special adviser had written: “This next bit is meant to be funny. Try to smile knowingly as you say it.” Except he couldn’t. The wannabe gags died on his lips. He could have been a natural Malvolio at the National Theatre. A man who has no idea that the joke is on him.
All of this was supposedly building up to a signoff laced with anger and contempt. “If Labour doesn’t want to do the right thing, why doesn’t it just get out of the way?” This too got lost in translation. Alex is not a naturally angry man. And he’s bright enough to realise that his own party is largely culpable for the state the country is in today. The idea that the Tories are somehow a new party is delusional. So to land a barb like that, you’ve also got to be a bit dim. Richard Holden would be a natural for it.
Lou Haigh was not much better. She too relied on tightly scripted replies and point-scoring lines. Burghart had asked about the welfare bill and no one was any the wiser how Labour planned to bring it down, despite Lou insisting that everything was in hand. You would have imagined the Labour comms team would have come up with a better line on this by now. It isn’t a subject that’s about to melt away.
The kindest thing you could say was that this was incident-free. Apart from one Tory heckler who was called out by the speaker for “shouting a woman down”. I think you will find that Lou is more than capable of looking after herself. Though if she were honest about marking her own report card, she would put this one down as “could do better”.
Speaking for the Lib Dems, Daisy Cooper celebrated the Democrats’ victory in the US and wondered now if the government could help in releasing the rest of the Epstein files and putting the president back in the dock. Haigh was diplomatically restrained. Pleased at the turn of events but noncommittal about the prospect of British intervention. Several rows behind Cooper, Nige stared into the middle distance. Seeking divine help. Fearing the end of days.
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