There was but one word in every mouth on Wednesday: “Peace”. Was it possible that, after so much strife, such bitter hatred, we might actually see the armistice for which so many had prayed for so long? Might we finally see a ceasefire among Reform’s MPs?
Fat chance. As the House of Commons filled up ahead of Prime Minister’s Questions, Reform’s James McMurdock sat scrolling on his phone. He may have been catching up on the conflagration engulfing his party.
A lot of people are rude about Twitter these days, but if you want to see extremely right-wing people tearing chunks out of each other, there are few better places to go. Since his expulsion from Reform, Rupert Lowe has been running an around-the-clock denunciation of Nigel Farage. Five days in, he was accusing the party leader of having tried to silence him over rape gangs. This suggestion, Farage fired back, was “monstrous”. Lowe had been removed from the party for using violent language in the presence of the notoriously sensitive Lee Anderson. This, Lowe immediately replied, was “desperate”. Pretty much everyone else in parliament was watching and hoping this was a fight that both men could lose.
As McMurdock sat alone, the DUP’s Sammy Wilson squeezed by, then leaned over to offer some words of comfort. Farage himself arrived, all smiles: more than anything else, he loves being the centre of attention. Then we got Anderson, Reform’s delicate “chief whip”. Having previously been a member of both Labour and the Conservatives, Anderson does at least have experience of party management. But there are a lot of questions about this job title: for a start, in a party of five — sorry, four — MPs, who is the deputy chief whip?
What does the role involve? It’s hard to imagine that Farage and deputy leader Richard Tice listen to much instruction. So in terms of the usual whipping roles of ensuring that MPs behave themselves and have a good relationship with the leadership, Anderson’s entire flock has been Lowe and McMurdock. And now he’s lost one of them: still in what Lady Bracknell would have called “misfortune” territory, but teetering on the brink of carelessness.
As with almost everything the Conservatives complain about, the proposals had been drafted by them
Would Lowe turn up? Where would he sit? Tim Farron, a Lib Dem with a very clear idea of the blessed status enjoyed by peacemakers, slipped onto the bench alongside the diminished Reform gang. Was he hoping to stop a ruckus? Nothing if not thorough, I asked a “Lib Dem source” what he was doing there: “Tapping up Lee. It’s our turn to have him next.”
The actual Prime Minister’s Questions session was lacklustre. There were a few attempts to get Keir Starmer to say something interesting about Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin, but no one seems to know quite what the question is: we can all see that the Prime Minister has decided it’s best to suck up to the President, we all understand that he’s probably not enjoying this much, and few MPs seem to have an alternative strategy.
Kemi Badenoch asked about businesses that were letting staff go. Anderson shook his head sadly: last week his place lost a fifth of its workforce. Starmer replied with the obligatory “£22 billion”, raising a slightly desultory cheer from his own side. They were more energised when Badenoch tried to take things up a gear. “People vote Labour, and all they get is trash,” she announced, and was greeted with a vast mock “Oooooooh!” It would be hard to argue that she’s really got them rattled.
Andrew Snowden, one of her MPs, had a crack at a question about sentencing guidelines. Would the government block new proposals to take account of race and religion, or would he “prove that he has been two-tier Keir all along?” It was interesting to see the Tories adopt a slogan from last year’s riots: before long they will be complaining that you can’t even assault the police any more, because of Woke.
Starmer in any case had a piece of paper with a reply ready about this one. As with almost everything the Conservatives complain about, the proposals had been drafted and welcomed by their own government. Robert Jenrick, the prime minister noted, is trying to challenge the changes in the courts. “Perhaps he should add himself as a second defendant, so that he can get to the bottom of all this.” We’ll get “Hot Dog Tories” into Hansard yet.
After PMQs, we got the latest episode in the government’s slightly baffling War On The Countryside. As ever, this involved a minister from DEFRA, in this case Daniel Zeichner, standing up to explain something that had clearly been forced on him by the Treasury. This time it was the sudden closure of the Sustainable Farming Incentive, one of the subsidies that came along after Brexit.
We need to campaign for the liberation of Zeichner from a job in which he is so obviously unhappy. He would probably quite enjoy being a science minister, say, or doing something about transport. Instead, he is stuck trying to dress up bad news. SFI was ending early because it had been such a success! “Conservative members should actually be celebrating the fact that so many farmers are now taking up these schemes,” he said.
“The underlying problem facing the sector,” Zeichner explained, “is that farmers do not make enough money.” This was greeted with mock hilarity by the Conservatives: the government has been making precisely the opposite argument for the last six months as it explains why farmers can afford to pay inheritance tax. “We are creating the conditions for farmers to run profitable businesses,” he concluded, “that can withstand future challenges.” And, indeed, they are creating the future challenges.
We glanced over to the place where Reform usually sit, but they had all disappeared, and then we remembered why: their agriculture spokesman was, until Friday, Rupert Lowe. There’s a whipping problem for Anderson to get his teeth into.
