Amid Hot Wars, Trade Wars, PMQs’ Pugilistic Pygmies Take The Spotlight – Guido Fawkes

Kemi’s voice really is a thing of beauty. Rich, lustrous, natural – it also has the great political quality of commanding attention. When she has found something to say with it, she will be formidable. We are a little way off that happy day.

A comment under her ConHome article this week, referred to her remark about rebuilding the party: “Fundraising is the first step.” No, no – her reader said: the vision is the first step.

There is still no real sense on the floor of the House who Kemi is. She is someone who tells Keir Starmer week by week, in unpunctuated paragraphs of competing accusations, that he’s doing it all wrong.

She still asks questions that aren’t questions. Today, they included: “How does he expect pensioners on a fixed income to make ends meet?” And, “Does he not see that his budget is killing farming and he is making life so much harder for everyone else?” And “Will he use the emergency budget to fix the mess he’s made?”

Her supporters call it “holding the government to account”. Others call it heckling. How else can the PM have got away with claiming unprecedented investment and to have “created thousands of jobs”? He was contradicted en passant, but only as “he said/she said”
She was elected by the membership as Starmer’s nightmare – in his blokiness, he wouldn’t be able to handle an argumentative young woman. But he has worked her out. As she batters him, he batters her back. It’s the Equality Act in action.

If she wants him to be known as an abuser, she has to – quietly, charmingly, smilingly – make him lose his temper. She has to needle him, invisibly, into inarticulate rage. Goodness knows, she’s a married woman, she must know how to do that.

And he is ripe for the treatment. When he is lured into speaking off the cuff, he gets into linguistic difficulties very quickly. Richard “Two Breakfasts” Burgon, asked for two breakfasts for all beneficiaries to be paid for by a wealth tax. Keir mentioned non doms and air passenger duty on private jets , “but this isn’t a bottomless pit,” he said, “and we must kick start growth to get the economic stability”.

It’s a male thing. Assembling statements out of Lego. It’s why we can’t really match women in verbal combat.

But she confines herself to simple battery – a forum where men can actually compete. Labour is putting up employment tax, and council tax, and tax on farmers and she asks, “Why are you a moron?”. And Starmer is able to reply in variations of, “I know you are but what am I?” He doesn’t expend any more effort than he has to.

She got one shout of approval from her backbench. She said, again en passant, that Labour had “trashed the economy”. Her colleagues feel that is a bone with meat on it. A feast of meat on it. Gilts are up nearly 20% over the last year and are well up on the Liz Truss spike. “Trashing the economy” is a provable political accusation.

A leader with antennae – or, in lay terms, ears – would hear that response, that rush of support, that surge of blood, and would play up to it. It is a campaign line in itself – targeted, focused, credible but above all, memorable.

She went on with her untargeted, out-of-focus, unmemorable, AI-authored attack lines.

Sploshing slops over the despatch box isn’t really doing the work of opposition.

Andrew Snowden, speaking without notes, and ventilating the astonishment we all feel at the two-tier Sentencing Guidelines coming into effect in 20 days’ time – meaning “the colour of your skin or the religion you have can give you leniency in the eyes of the law”.
Alas, like so many accusations, Keir spoke from his top tier to say that the proposal had been drafted in 2024 and was welcomed by the Tory government.

Andrew Rosindell out-performed his leader by asking the embarrassing question about David Amess (“the much loved and respected” Member murdered by an Islamic literalist). The dead man’s family were meeting Keir that afternoon. Rosindell asked if he would “heed the family’s call for a judge-led public inquiry into David’s death and the related failure of the Prevent programme”.

He got a lot of Lego from the PM including, “it’s very important that I meet them this afternoon, which I will do”. The last thing Keir Starmer will agree to is a judge-led inquiry into the failure of Prevent. That would be revelling in Islamophobia, according to the evolving legal framework, and giving away 25 seats at the next election.

Julian Lewis, a lifelong student of the Russian mentality, told the PM that it was “standard Russian procedure to take over other countries by having bogus elections and installing puppet governments”. Rarely heard on the floor of the House, a usable piece of information – and capable, perhaps, of causing a thoughtful pause in the Trump room.

Always good to end on a lighter note.