Time’s up for Hattie. Her performance at PMQs had a whiff of embalming fluid about it. This was probably her last performance as Labour’s stand-in boss and she declared it ‘an honour and a privilege to lead this great party’. Mentally everyone corrected that to ‘this once-great party’. Labour is on the verge of sundering into two factions: the Labour party in opposition (i.e. Jeremy Corbyn) and the Labour party in exile (i.e. the rest of them).
Magnanimous Cameron hailed Hattie’s three decades on the front bench. He praised her support for women’s rights and said she’d served her constituents ‘with distinction’. Which is half-true. Harman’s offspring enjoyed the ‘distinction’ of selective schooling which her constituents were denied. But it wasn’t a day for cheap political points. Cameron offered her a cordial and slightly gooey paragraph of commendation. It might have sounded more sincere if he hadn’t waited 28 years to deliver it.
She tried hard to get Cameron to tell us how many Syrian refugees he plans to accept by Christmas.
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