Honours dominated the exchanges at PMQs. Sir Keir asked why the Tories have spent an entire week bickering about which Conservative deserves ennoblement. Rishi claimed that he followed ‘established convention’ in approving Boris’s lavender-list. A bit of a whopper. He clearly didn’t support the candidacy of Nadine Dorries who complained in frothing prose about the ‘sinister forces’ that denied her a peerage. Sir Keir failed to spot Rishi’s clumsy footwork and instead he pretended that the PM approved ‘Johnson’s list’ in full.
‘Too weak to block it,’ said Sir Keir.
Rishi shifted tack and mentioned the peerage granted to Labour’s Tom Watson who, he said, ‘spread vicious conspiracy theories that were utterly untrue and damaged our public discourse’. This earned a knuckle-wrap from the Speaker who said it was wrong to speak the truth about Lord Watson.
Sir Keir set out today to smear Rishi as a slippery weakling, but the caricature fails because it’s not rooted in existing perceptions.
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