Lloyd Evans

The Rwanda treaty has established two new norms in politics. First, the Supreme Court acts as a revising chamber with the power to change government legislation. Secondly, Labour is terrified of Rwanda.  At PMQs, Sir Keir thought he was on a winning ticket and all he had to do was mock the relocation scheme and score an easy victory. He began with a joke: three Tory home secretaries have been sent to Rwanda but not one refugee.  Rishi ignored that and updated the house on Labour’s policy which is to ‘scrap the scheme if and when it is operational,’ he said. He concluded that Sir Keir ‘finds himself on the side of the people smugglers.’  Labour doesn’t realise how bad this will sound on the doorstep.

Winter looms, and at PMQs the Scottish nationalists were swift to exploit the darkness and the chill.  ‘Dread,’ intoned Stephen Flynn, the SNP’s freakishly macabre leader in Westminster. ‘Their hearts fill with dread,’ he said. Flynn was describing the inner lives of parents in Aberdeen as they contemplate the first snows of November. Their ‘dread’ arises from the knowledge that ‘they simply can’t afford to pay their energy bills,’ he explained. If Flynn played an executioner at the London Dungeon he wouldn’t need a face-mask. His natural expression does the job. He moved on to the children of Aberdeen who, he conceded, ‘were filled with delight’ at the prospect of snow.

PMQs began with Sir Keir Starmer’s favourite trick. He read out a sob-story intended to humiliate the government. Having outlined the woes of two unfortunate citizens, he accused Rishi Sunak of ‘refusing to take responsibility’ and of ‘boasting that everything is fine’. The sad pawns in this prank were a teenage boy and his hard-working mother. Sir Keir even named them in the house. The young lad doesn’t go to school and his mum struggles to look after him while maintaining her job in the NHS. The pair get no help. They have no friends or neighbours, apparently. No colleagues, no relatives and no teachers to give them support. There isn’t even a boyfriend or a husband to share the load.

The House of Lords is like a bag of doughnuts in the lap of a traffic policeman. There’s always room for one more. The newest peer, David Cameron, was the subject of much amused scorn at PMQs. Rishi Sunak wasn’t prepared for an obvious query about his new Foreign Secretary: what is Dave’s greatest feat on the international stage? Kevin Brennan, of Labour, put this question, and he asked Rishi to name a specific achievement. ‘Many, many,’ said Rishi, floundering in shallow waters. In search of a highlight from Dave’s CV, he said that he ‘hosted one of the most successful G8 summits of recent times.’ Rishi didn’t enlarge.

Two of the world’s great unelected power-brokers met last night at Bletchley Park. Elon Musk and Rishi Sunak held a joint interview after the international conference about AI. Their topic was regulation. ‘What should a government like ours be doing?’ said the PM. What an odd start. Why is the Prime Minister asking a foreign billionaire to pre-empt parliament by shaping our internal regulations for us? But Elon seems to get a free pass. He’s regarded as a disinterested operator who supports the powerless against the mighty. And his air of eccentric innocence is fortified by his appearance. He hadn’t bothered to shave. His jowls are rimmed with bum-fluff and he grins constantly like an excited schoolboy. No stylist gets anywhere near him.

Dominic Cummings showed up at the Covid Inquiry dressed in his signature white shirt. Plus, in a nod to formality, he’d added a shoe-string tie , rakishly askew. He was interrogated by Hugo Keith KC, a lawyer with a plausible manner and an expensive tailor. He looked like one of those shiny new MPs with an answer for everything. The kind who switches parties as easily as changing energy suppliers. Keith obviously hoped to make Cummings blush by reading out his famously sarcastic emails. He recited this from the archive. ‘The cabinet’, wrote Cummings, ‘is largely irrelevant to policy or execution… it’s seen by everyone in No 10 as not a place for serious discussion.’ Cummings stuck to his guns on the stand.

Sexism struck early in Rachel Reeves’s life. Last night the shadow chancellor gave a talk about her new book on female economists, and she recalled an early brush with toxic masculinity. Aged eight, competing in a public chess tournament, she faced a little boy who foresaw a swift and easy victory. ‘Lucky I’m playing a girl’, he said. Reeves duly thrashed him. ‘He didn’t say it again after that,’ she told the crowd. At Oxford and the LSE she was a keen sexism detective and she noted with dismay that there were no women teaching economics at either university. Things got worse at the male-dominated Treasury where her colleagues created a new computer graphic, BOEQM (Bank of England Quarterly Model.

A harrowing session at PMQs. Rishi Sunak seemed subdued and de-energised. His fizz had gone flat. The usual hip-wriggling shuffle at the despatch had been replaced with a hunched, anxious pose. Heavy shoulders. Head drooping. The Middle East crisis has snapped his elastic. The issue Sir Keir had ducked was Gaza. Too hot to handle Sir Keir, by contrast, was beaming like a City embezzler celebrating his daughter’s wedding. Spreading one arm wide, he turned munificently towards his backbenchers and welcomed the victors from last week’s by-elections. He poked fun at the defeated Tory in Tamworth, Andrew Cooper, who had dismissed the complaints of voters who can’t buy food but can afford a mobile phone.

The gears were grinding hard at PMQs. Sir Keir Starmer shifted his party decisively away from its Corbynista past and pledged full support for Israel after the recent atrocities. He said he was ‘still mourning the terrorist attacks’. And having met relatives of British hostages held by Hamas, he was unequivocal. ‘Release them immediately.’ Sunak hid behind legal sophistries It’s a shame that his rhetoric felt so polished and poetic. Almost like song lyrics. ‘Too much blood, too much darkness,’ he crooned. ‘The lights are going out and innocent citizens are terrified they will die in the darkness, out of sight.’ And he indulged in a lot of glib verbal counterpoint. ‘Hamas are not the Palestinian people and the Palestinian people are not Hamas.