If you knew Angela Eagle before she was famous, prepare to feel smug.
The shadow business secretary made her debut at prime minister’s questions today (with David Cameron abroad, it was understudies all round) and pulled it off with the kind of aplomb that makes reputations overnight.
But while it’s tempting to add the rise of the Eagle sisters (her twin Maria is shadow defence secretary) the list of things nobody in politics would have predicted a year ago, the truth is that like most breakout stars in politics Angela Eagle has really been there all along, if only anyone was looking.
She’s always had a dry, deadpan sense of humour, honed to perfection by years of shadowing William Hague as Leader of the House. Even if her jokes were the sort for which you definitely had to be there, they drew suppressed hysteria from the Labour benches, who have had little to laugh about lately.
But there was more to this performance than a waspish sense of comic timing. Eagle has always been the sort of politician everyone vaguely regards as a good egg but never gets particularly excited about; a Margaret Beckett figure, appreciated by connoisseurs but never the crowd. (For some reason, these underrated politicians tend to be women of a certain age; nobody thought Harriet Harman was going to be quite as good at deputising for PMQs as she turned out to be, either).
During the deputy leadership hustings, Eagle didn’t quite find her popular niche as Stella Creasy or Tom Watson did – yet when you thought about her answers afterwards, there was real substance to them. (Watson, by the way, deserves to take a bow for supporting the promotion of Eagle to shadow first secretary of state after complaints that Corbyn wasn’t appointing enough senior women; without that title, she might not have been standing in today).
And something similar was true of her PMQ performance. When she teased a rather stiff, chilly Osborne over his palpable longing to be doing this job for real, or mock-innocently inquired of David Cameron’s increasingly forlorn EU negotiations “how’s all that going?”, it wasn’t just knockabout. These things are starting to be serious structural weaknesses for the Conservatives, and they know it.
The coming EU referendum will test Tory unity to breaking point but it’s increasingly clouded by personal ambition, too: if Tory voters swing towards Brexit, how many of those anxious to succeed Cameron as leader would be prepared to follow suit? Can we really be confident they’re tackling this decision in the public interest?
There was deftness, too, in the way Eagle picked up Osborne’s predictable reference to Tony Blair and turned it back against him, managing to recite one of the few Blair quotes capable of rousing even her own side unapologetically to cheer him to the rafters. Watching her, as with Hilary Benn the week before, you felt the weight of years of parliamentary experience being brought to bear.
She may not have elicited any particularly revealing answers, but Angela Eagle made Labour look united and the Tories look divided – a bittersweet little reminder that too often in past weeks, the opposite has been true. One wonders quite how Jeremy Corbyn will have felt, watching that.
