The sense of ennui was almost tangible. Two men merely going through the formalities of prime minister’s questions with neither expecting their exchanges to serve much – if any – purpose. All of which was pretty much as Boris Johnson had planned. Boris has never been one to offer a straight answer to a straight question so his long-term goal has always been to lower the Labour leader’s expectations to his own level. And judging by Keir Starmer’s rather lacklustre performance, he’s just about achieved his aim. For this week, at least. Maybe Starmer will surprise us all next Wednesday by expressing himself through the medium of interpretative dance.
On Tuesday we were treated to the startling admission that Johnson had abandoned a career in journalism because he was fed up with abusing people. So we got to see that Boris had merely swapped the pages of the Daily Telegraph for Downing Street. After all, why limit yourself to an audience of a few hundred thousand when you have the intelligence of the entire country at your disposal to insult? For what better way to display your contempt for everyone than by rewriting PMQs as a pointless, unfunny farce. Starmer’s sense of resignation was apparent from the off. Normally the Labour leader can rustle up some enthusiasm for at least his first two questions before the air of futility descends, but this time he appeared to have lost the will to live before he had even begun speaking. He rushed his way through his first question about the Tory backbenchers criticising the government’s coronavirus roadmap safe in the knowledge that it would be ignored before moving on to financial support for those asked to self-isolate. Johnson merely lied, claiming that everyone was eligible for £500. Everyone, that is, apart from those who aren’t eligible. Even the digs felt laboured. Maybe Boris is finding impersonating a grown-up harder work than he had imagined. He brushed aside Keir’s remarks about croneyism in awarding PPE contracts to Tory donors with access to Matt Hancock’s Whatsapp number (what was the point of being in power if you weren’t prepared to give a few mates a leg up now and again? ) and the exchanges over which party would raise taxes higher went nowhere. At one stage it felt as if we had disappeared through the looking glass with Johnson promising the Tories would spend more and raise taxes higher than anything Labour had dreamed possible. Before going on to contradict himself by saying Labour would raise taxes higher. Confused? You will be… Johnson concluded by suggesting Starmer was a ‘“druidical rocking stone”. Though obviously this was intended as a compliment, because he’s given up abuse for Lent. “He vacillates, we vaccinate,” he said. A charge that might have carried more force if it hadn’t been the Tories who had been doing the dithering while the UK death toll exceeded 120,000. Nonetheless, Boris had got through the session almost entirely unscathed, so he had successfully executed a pointless job pointlessly. Yet even when Boris is talking pure bollocks you are still left with the feeling that somewhere inside him there is a homunculus capable of talking in proper sentences. Sadly, the same can not be said for Gavin Williamson, who was taking the evening No 10 press conference: listening to him reading a script is like hearing someone for whom English is a third language.
And a beginner at that. So it can only be an act of sadism – both towards the country and Private Pike – that Johnson has appointed Williamson to be his education secretary. One can only assume that Gav’s glory days as Fireplace Salesman of 2007 had little to do with his line in patter. Most Downing Street press conferences have a vague sense of purpose – a piece of news the government wants the country to hear. Only this time Williamson had been sent out with precisely nothing new to say. Or if there was something, then Gav had forgotten what it was by the time he started because all he could do was mouth it was safe for schools to go back on 8 March – something we’d already been told last Monday – and that he wanted children to catch up as much as possible on everything they had missed. Not that he had a clue how this was going to happen, but he hoped it would all turn out OK in the end. Gav looked straight ahead into the camera and started to ad lib about pupils “attaining their attainment targets”. A huge mistake even for someone who can barely manage a script. He couldn’t say anything on exams other than they were likely to be marked on teacher assessment. He couldn’t say how the summer schools would be staffed. He couldn’t even say how the extra money the government had made available would be allocated. Having screwed up so badly last year, Williamson has literally had one job since the beginning of lockdown and he hasn’t got round to doing it. So much for his own attainment targets. Come the end no one was much the wiser. Both of what the press conference had been about and why Gav was in charge of education. The last question went to a journalist from the TES. Why did he think that 96% of teachers felt that he was doing a crap job, she asked. Williamson quickly changed the subject. After all, his performance over the previous 40 minutes had pretty much answered that.