I set out to count one word and ended up reading the room like a woman reading a bus timetable.
LONDON, England – There are three things I need for Prime Minister’s Questions: a sofa, a pot of tea strong enough to stand a spoon in, and a pile of newspapers I have no intention of reading. The sofa is currently so full of newspapers that I am sitting on a Tuesday from the week before last. Nobody has told the cat, who has taken the Sunday supplements as a bed.
School run, 8.40
Today began with an argument about a shoe. My daughter had one and the other had gone to wherever odd shoes go, which I believe is the same place as odd socks, spare keys and the end of the roll of sticky tape. We found it in the fridge. I will not be taking questions on this. The school run was brisk, loud and conducted at a pace that a Cabinet minister might call “pragmatic”, which brings me to the afternoon.
The sofa, midday
I did not see all of it live, because I had a library book to return and a man there who wished to discuss a leaflet. I watched the rest on my phone, with the sound down, which I now think is the correct way to follow politics. You see who stands up, who sits down, who waves a paper and who looks at the ceiling. It is surprisingly informative, like watching a film about a dinner party through a window.
For the content I turned to a column in The Spectator Australia by Madeline Grant. I should say plainly that it is an opinion column, written by someone who is paid to have views, and I am reporting her account and not mine. She says the Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, opened by congratulating the Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, on approving the Jackdaw field, and that the Tories cheered while Labour’s benches were muted. The decision itself was reported by LBC as the Energy Secretary agreeing that the regulator can grant consent for the Jackdaw gas field.
The column also says the Prime Minister repeatedly used the word “pragmatic”, and reads it as evasive. I decided to test this at home, with a pencil, and a mug.
My official scorecard
- The word “pragmatic”: I stopped counting at the third, because I had to see to the kettle.
- Paper waved at the other side: one sheet, possibly a takeaway menu.
- Questions answered with the words “as I said earlier”: more than I had patience for.
- Tea drunk: a whole pot.
- Cat disturbed: once, fairly.
I think that is a fair summary of the exchange from the sofa. To be even-handed, I asked my brother-in-law Desmond for his scorecard, and he said it was a draw. Desmond says everything is a draw. He has said so about the football, the weather and his own wedding.
The interview, mid-afternoon
The part that held me longest was not in the Chamber. The column says the Energy Secretary, Miatta Fahnbulleh, went on Sky News with Sophy Ridge and was pressed about a report that she was resisting a plan linked to Shabana Mahmood: a 15-year work requirement before anyone could qualify for indefinite leave to remain. According to the columnist, Ms Ridge asked about five times whether she agreed and got evasive answers each time.
I am not going to take a side on the policy. I am a woman on a sofa with a cat on her foot, and the immigration system is a matter on which I have a great deal of feeling and exactly one tea towel’s worth of expertise. What I will say about the interview, from the columnist’s description, is that it contained something every parent knows. Asking the same question five times and getting five different shapes of “well” is the entire daily life of anyone who has said “have you done your homework?” in a hallway.
My daughter would call it a masterclass. She has been using “well, it’s more complicated than that” since she was seven, and has never once been asked to correct the record.
Who do you ask?
When nobody answers a question directly, my instinct is to ask someone further down the food chain. A headline on farm.fm put it neatly: who sets egg prices, and the answer is to ask the hens. I have long suspected that the hens know more about Westminster than the Whips do, and are better at roosting in committee.
There is a serious point inside the nonsense, which is that any system run on statements instead of answers drives voters up the wall. The column pins it on the Prime Minister, and I suspect a patient person with a pencil could fill a page from every bench. Some days you listen to the Chamber and conclude that the whole business is a glorious machine for turning a question into a weather report.
Evening, with the cat
By six the tea was cold, the cat was asleep on a Sunday supplement, and I had worked out that I had not read a single newspaper on that sofa for eleven days. I wrote down my notes for The London Prat, which has given me a corner of the internet to do this in. If you want to know how I sort a column from a report, I wrote it out in what commentary is and what it is not, and the whole site is a newspaper built on a straight face, if you want it. There are more of my daily notes at The London Prat to fill an evening.
Desmond rang at seven to ask who had won. I said the sofa. For once he did not say it was a draw.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/