MDMA, before it was called ecstasy, was going to be called empathy, having been devised as a marriage counselling drug. The theory was that it would amp up your compassion and dial down your threat response to the degree that you’d be able to hear the truth with an open heart.
Then it turned out to be better as a party drug and was criminalised, and maybe it’s all for the best, but just once I would love to hear PMQs with everyone on E. Because a lot of what Rishi Sunak said on Wednesday was probably true: Keir Starmer, if he wasn’t Labour leader, probably would enjoy going back to being a lawyer. He probably did get a lot of satisfaction from successfully defending people’s human rights. “I would have thought that, out of everybody, [Starmer] would be the most grateful,” Sunak said of his – always subject to revision – plan to hold an election later rather than sooner. And isn’t that, if you think about it for five seconds, most likely true? Say what you like about the Labour leader, he’s no seat-of-the-pants merchant.
The prime minister himself, meanwhile, in a more mellow temper, would probably agree that two million quid is a lot for every asylum seeker sent to Rwanda; that in these straitened times there are as many better things to spend that money on as there are pounds in it. He’d probably greet the suggestion that he “pack up, go home and waste somebody else’s time” like the thought of a warm bath after a fight with a bear. There’s a lot of truth in what these two men are saying, they’re describing each other’s realities. Hell, they’re halfway there, they’ve stepped into one another’s shoes, but tragically they can’t even hear it, because they’re shouting over it.
Sunak is running on fumes. Almost all his retorts to the Labour leader amount to one of two ideas: this thing you did, while you were a lawyer, which we can broadly file under the category “being a lawyer”; or this other idea of ours you voted against, which we can broadly file under the category of “being a member of his majesty’s opposition”. He’s taking inordinate credit for the falls in inflation and energy prices over which he has very little control, and hosing blame for collapsing local councils as if the Conservative cuts to local authorities never happened, and don’t have a lot more chaos yet to deliver. He’s flubbing his words and strangling his crescendos. If he did pack up and go home, I doubt he’d waste anyone’s time. I think he’d sit really quietly and be no trouble to anyone, for a really long time.
Starmer certainly comes off with more confidence and verbal facility. He’s got much better at the casual put-down – “It’s genuinely sad to see [Sunak] reduced to this nonsense” – and learned how to repeat the same phrase over again without looking embarrassed. “Tory chaos”, “14 years of Tory chaos”, “the cost of Tory chaos, and the working families paying the price”.
I believe the principle originated with Blair, back in the day: just when you think you’re going to vomit if you say it one more time, that’ll be the first time the ordinary people have heard it. I’m sure it’s got worse over the decades, the phrases have got simpler and the repetition more insistent, but people in comas need to hear the political messaging, too, as they might wake up before polling day. Can’t be too careful. Every vote counts.
Yet Starmer does suffer a bit from the sheer proliferation of Tory screw-ups. He went in on immigration policy, on the failing Prison Service, on the “NHS struggling because the Tories broke it”, on the £46bn hole in the prime minister’s sums, but he could have gone in on literally anything. Transport, sewage, dentistry, social care, racism, education, housing, anything. It’s like what they say about DNA technology, that it’s become too good: if you shook hands with someone, and they picked up a cup and drove 200 miles and threw it in a bin, and the binman held up a Co-op, you could be pretty reliably placed at the crime scene. The technology has obviated its own usefulness, being too good; and the Conservatives have ruined their own open goals, everything being just wide, wide open.
So it was actually a relief for all of us, not just the prime minister, when questions went to his own benches and attention-loving MPs stood up to ask for bland, small things; sometimes just for a bit of attention. Sheryll Murray, the Conservative member for South East Cornwall, wanted something done about a local toll. Sunak thanked her and commended her to the toll people. “What about my psychic toll?” his poor face beseeched, silently. “I’m spent. I just pronounced drugs without the ‘r’.” The now obligatory and frankly mindless attack on Sadiq Khan from Andrew Rosindell produced an endorsement of Khan’s Tory rival Susan Hall that was so half-hearted she’ll have words to say about it, but luckily none of them will make any sense.
Labour interventions on Gaza produced more commitment to a humanitarian pause, nothing strong enough to allay anyone’s horror at what’s unfolding. And the Labour MP Ashley Dalton returned to the racism of Frank Hester, with some fresh remarks that have come to light. “I addressed this last week,” Sunak said, irritated but faintly plangent. Mate, that’s how this works: these disasters will come every week, and keep coming, until you stop creating them.
