By Editor,Quentin Letts
Copyright dailymail
Well that was all a bit sticky. Sir Keir Starmer was asked by Kemi Badenoch if he had ‘full confidence’ in Peter Mandelson. The question floated through the air, describing an arc. It landed in silence, despite the Commons being packed.
For all the mythology about PMQs’ boiling din, it is when the Commons is hushed that it is at its most dangerous. Forget the heckling. Silence is deadly. That is when you know somebody is in trouble.
Sir Keir was struck by antiseptic numbness. He coughed up answers, reading his script. Yes, he did have ‘confidence’ in Mandy. His voice lacked enthusiasm. He radiated no urgency to defend a wronged chum. Answers were kept curt.
David Lammy, Deputy PM, pulled to his grizzled chops an impassive expression. His replacement as Foreign Secretary, Yvette Cooper, had arrived late and was standing by the Speaker’s Chair. She looked more stern. Back in New Labour days she was seen as a Brownite. They hated, possibly still do, the Blairite Mandelson.
Mrs Badenoch, much sharper than last week, persisted with her surgical inquiries. She stitched the Mandelson/Epstein business into the obviously more serious matter of Russia’s drone incursion over Poland. At such an hour we needed our ambassador to be in the White House talking high strategy, not going on air to discuss his friendship with a dead paedophile.
Government ministers sat in a puddle. Labour backbenchers wore jowls and slumped shoulders. The new Leader of the Commons, Sir Alan Campbell, sat with a forefinger up one nostril. Sir Keir tried to taunt Mrs Badenoch for failing to spear him over Angela Rayner last week.
It was a peculiar thing to say. There was nothing wrong with Kemi’s interrogation this week!
Sir Keir was hating this. How shrivelling to have to refer to the dead Epstein and his grotty convictions. How, now, could Sir Keir defend His Britannic Majesty’s plenipotentiary to Orgy Island? And defend him, moreover, in front of Labour MPs who are in a fractious mood after the Rayner amputation, the bungled reshuffle, the economic foul-up, immigration difficulties and more.
Sir Keir is not the first Prime Minister to have been embarrassed by Peter Mandelson, nor possibly the last. The problem for him here was that he was embarrassing the parliamentary Labour Party, and making the Opposition stronger.
‘I have confidence in the ambassador in the role that he is doing,’ muttered Sir Keir a second time, again to an absence of cheers from his MPs. We were told that ‘the usual procedures’ were observed in his appointment.
Lord Mandelson had ‘expressed his deep regret’. This was repeated. ‘He has repeatedly expressed his regret. He’s right to do so.’ In a boxing report you would write that Sir Keir had retreated to a corner with gloves raised to protect his cut eye.
Still the torment continued. Mrs Badenoch wondered if Sir Keir, when sending Mandy to DC, knew that his lordship had called Epstein his ‘best pal’? She referred to ‘this intimate relationship’. What an adjective. It drilled into Sir Keir’s jawbone.
Even Sir Ed Davey was at it. The Lib Dem leader, in his second question, wondered if the Trump White House had any more dirt on Mandy. Oh, the seaminess of it all. How low it dragged No 10’s priggish pulpiteer.
At the back of the chamber sat Lucy Powell, newly ejected from the Cabinet. She flexed her scarlet fingernails. Two other ex-Cabinet ministers, Louise Haigh and Ellie Reeves, stood in the area known as the bar of the House, near the Serjeant at Arms. They did not seem remotely distressed by Sir Keir’s squirms. Their professional detachment was more that of two anglers watching a fresh-caught eel writhing on the riverbank’s wet grass.
Outside, on Parliament Square, a procession of Hell’s Angels roared on their motorbikes while playing Wagner’s Ride Of The Valkyries on a giant sound system. The very doors of Hades seemed to be swinging on their hinges.
