Whatever Sir Keir Starmer may hesitate to say about such matters, Labour’s Siobhain McDonagh had a fine ding-dong. McDonagh (Mitcham & Morden) took a tilt at Rishi Sunak during the Treasury select committee. Others treated the chancellor with library-murmur respect. The bores! At least McDonagh brought some life to proceedings.
“D’you think people are stupid?” she roared, noting that his promised income-tax cut will probably coincide with an election. “D’you think people aren’t going to see through this?” This was said at top volume. The SNP woman on the opposite side of the horse-shoe table almost lost her paperwork in the gusts.
McDonagh shook her white barnet. Her necklace, apparently made from chunks of barley-sugar, swung. Words whooshed out of her and when she altered the direction of her mouth, they flew out sideways, like hot air from a public lavatory hand-dryer. She was sitting just in front of me. On the floor was her handbag. She had given it a good rummage earlier and it looked loaded.
If swung round like a medieval flail, that bag could do some damage.
McDonagh had been a spiky presence from the start. Hearing Sunak refer to benefits, she yelled “do you think Universal Credit is generous?”. After another mention of welfare, she erupted with something about “hypothermia”.
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No chance of that in the committee room, mind you. It was so overheated, we could have been in an Edwardian palm house.
Sunak tried to hose down McDonagh with charm. That only made her shout all the more and she bellowed that “we’re the ones who ask the questions”. She had started with a ripely sarcastic question about the car Sunak was photographed filling at a petrol station last week. The chancellor admitted that cheapo Kia was not his. He actually drove a Volkswagen Golf. But by now our Siobhain was on to other matters. “Are you a fiscal illusionist?” she boomed. Sunak began an answer but was soon barged off the road by the Hon Lady. “That’s misleading, isn’t it?” she shouted, eyes flashing, gob agape like Blakey from On The Buses.
Though entertaining stuff, it was not victimless. In the middle of all this was stuck some bum-fluff official, name of Dan York-Smith, head of “strategy, planning and budget” at HM Treasury; looked about 14 and had clearly never encountered a screeching old bus-bat quite like McDonagh.
York-Smith turned the colour of forced rhubarb and started blinking so fast, he may have been relaying a Morse code lantern message to the shore battery to come and rescue him.
This was Sunak’s first parliamentary outing since last week’s spring statement, which has received what we in the theatre business call “difficult notices”. How would Sunak react to those stinking reviews? He was still using that soothing voice, the one vets use just before they hand you the bill. He did lots of emotionally-literate hand gestures, touching his chest to show how much he cared. He repeatedly said “gosh” and kept using the expression “from memory”, often with regard to remarkably detailed minutiae of government spending. Behind him sat ITV’s Robert Peston, the man who during Covid was a leading enthusiast for lockdown but was now shaking his head and chuckling at the chancellor’s claims about how he was going to repair the economy post-Covid.
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There was, in Sunak, something a little grittier. Until now he has often been reluctant to pick a fight. Now he pushed back against Angela Eagle (Lab, Wallasey) and Alison Thewlis (SNP, Glasgow Central) when they complained about tax rates (too high) and spending plans (not enough). It was, he kept saying, “a choice”. His preference was to stick with “ambitious investment plans” while simultaneously trying to balance the books and soon cutting taxes.
He told Eagle that she would be first to attack him about “austerity” if he cut spending. She couldn’t really argue with that.
