Shortly after 11am the prime minister sent one of his aides out to Ladbrokes. “I want you to put £500 on me being able to answer every question using the word ‘aspiration’,” he said, handing over his wedge. Just over an hour later David Cameron went to the House of Commons to collect on his bet at prime minister’s questions.
“We are the party of aspiration,” said Dave when Jeremy Corbyn asked why he was cutting student maintenance grants when there had been no mention of doing so in the Conservative manifesto. Non sequiturs are just fine when there’s a bet to be won. In Dave’s strange logic, people only really aspire to those things for which they have to pay through the nose: ergo if you make higher education as expensive as possible then more and more people will sign up for it.
Corbyn moved on to why bursaries for student nurses were also being cut. “We are the party of aspiration,” Dave declared triumphantly once more. The problem with nurses was much the same as the problem with students, only the nurses were even lazier. The only way to make sure our NHS was staffed with the right sort of nurses was to make sure they were all permanently broke.
The Tory benches roared their approval as their leader lived both up and down to their own aspirations simultaneously. The Hegelian dialectic was showing its head in unexpected places. The Labour benches just looked morose and subdued because that’s how things are these days. Even when Corbyn asks a couple of half-decent questions they can’t rise above self-loathing.
Having brushed off the Labour leader with six aspirational anti-answers, Dave turned his aspirations to all comers. “Were the floods aspirational?” inquired Tory Neil Parish. “Indeed they were,” said Dave. “A Tory flood is an aspirational flood. We want to encourage our puddles to become lakes, our streams to become rivers, our homes to become boats and our sheep to swim.” Parish sat down, aspiring heavily.
There is now a point in every PMQs when Dave’s not very bright 12-year-old speechwriter gets to have his moment in the spotlight; it’s useful practice for when he is asked to do a recorder solo at school. “Yellow submarines … Twist and Shout … Help!” squirmed Tory Karl McCartney. In Dave’s party, if you share your surname with a Beatle then you must expect to be handed a planted question that includes a list of song titles; it’s utterly humiliating but unavoidable.
Dave responded as if McCartney had come up with this comic brilliance all by himself. “Our submarines are aspirational submarines,” he said. Labour members started to hide on the floor in anticipation of their own lack of defence policy being exposed yet again. “Labour’s submarines are Back in the USSR.” They aren’t of course; if they were, they’d be stuffed with weapons rather than meandering aimlessly around the ocean floor ready to call the Nukes “R” Us – “50% off if your Trident missile isn’t delivered within a week” – helpline should the need arise. But why ruin the piss-poor punchline of a piss-poor gag?
That left just one last aspiration to be fulfilled. Ever since Barack Obama got to hang out with Bear Grylls and make a TV programme, Dave’s been longing to do the same. Something macho like putting up a tent in his back garden while trying to survive everything the Cotswolds spring showers threw at them. Maybe he could play guitar while Bear sang Kumbaya? You can’t get much more in touch with the common people than that. Sure enough, the faithful Bob Blackman lobbed up a scouting question. “I aspire to be Bear,” whooped Dave. Within seconds a text from Bear’s agent arrived on his BlackBerry.
Dave had shown the country the way forward by daring to aspire. The bookies and the public both reckoned PMQs had once again become an institutional fix.
