The phoney war continues. With Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn having signed a non-aggression pact – any mention of Brexit in effect has been banned while the Tories and Labour go through the motions of pointless cross-party talks – prime minister’s questions has become an echo chamber. A place where that thing that cannot be mentioned is not mentioned.
So PMQs is now just a bloodless theatre of the mediocre. The Labour leader asks a few desultory questions about something he has read in the paper that morning and the prime minister makes little effort to answer them.
Today it was about underinvestment in the NHS and the fall in numbers of GPs, a matter of much concern to many people, but not enough to induce Corbyn to arrive prepared with decent follow-up questions. A lazy soundbite is no substitute for a forensic mind.
Even so, it was an easy enough victory. There again, if Labour can’t win on the NHS then it’s in more trouble than anyone thought.
But the inescapable feeling was that democracy, not to mention everyone’s mental health, would have been far better served if Corbyn had used his six questions to ask May whether she had been a bit disappointed with the ending of the last series of Line of Duty and if she still thought Gavin Williamson might be H.
The torpor was contagious as MPs on both sides seemed more interested in shoehorning feeble Liverpool metaphors into their questions – I love football, me! – rather than asking anything challenging.
Not even Williamson, who was making his first appearance on the backbenches since being sacked, could be bothered to cause trouble, choosing instead to settle for his idea of looking vaguely menacing.
So it was left to Andrea Jenkyns, hardly one of the sharper minds on the Tory backbenches, to provide the prime minister with her only real moment of jeopardy by pointing out she was a total failure and asking her to step down.
May was horrified. Nothing had gone wrong, but if it had gone wrong then it was certainly nothing to do with her. So she was going to stay on for as long as she possibly could as she was determined to do the one thing she had promised to do. All she needed was a bit more time to come up with a way of persuading the Commons that the plan they had voted down three times was actually the plan that they wanted to vote for.
They would never take her alive. Her determination to hold on to office has now slipped into full-on psychosis.
Meanwhile, the real war was taking place over at the Foreign Office where Jeremy Hunt was holding a joint press conference with his US opposite number, Mike Pompeo. At least it would have been a war if the US secretary of state had had his way.
Hunt had kicked off the event with the schoolboy error of mistaking the presser for a piece of international diplomacy. He was really, really, looking forward to Donald Trump’s state visit in June, he had lied. He isn’t. No one is. Not even the Donald, now the Queen has told him that every one of her 187 bedrooms is occupied on the two days he’s in town. Though she will try to get him a signed royal baby mug to make up for it.
Other than that, the foreign secretary continued, there wasn’t much going on. Iran would be no big deal as he was sure everything could be sorted out over a nice cup of tea and – he’d forgotten the other thing they had been discussing. The special relationship had never been more special.
Or it hadn’t been until Pompeo got his pudgy mitts on it. To be fair the US secretary of state did make a cursory attempt to keep things sweet, but the subtext to his remarks frequently peeked through the surface. Here was the deal. The UK had chosen to leave the EU. Well fine. But in return it would now have to make damn sure it played ball with the US if it wanted any sweetheart deals.
Chlorinated chicken was just for starters. Right now he fancied a war with Iran. So unless the Iranians got their shit sorted it was game on. Churchill wouldn’t have backed down from a fight, and he didn’t expect the UK to do so.
Over in the Commons, Gavin groaned. He had been dying for a good war – or a bad one – from the moment he had become defence secretary. And now he was going to miss his chance.
Pompeo wasn’t finished. While he was about it, he really, really, hated the Chinese. Untrustworthy Commies the lot of them. So, sure, the UK was free to do whatever it wanted with its 5G network. But if it knew what was good for it and wanted to keep the special relationship special, the UK would need to come to the right decision on Huawei. Capiche?
Hunt looked on awkwardly and wrapped things up as swiftly as he indecently could with an unconvincing “that went well”. Pompeo seemed disappointed. He hadn’t even got on to the bit about May being useless compared with Maggie Thatcher. Hell. That would have to wait for his speech later in the day.
