The BBC’s Christmas Day TV lineup was out – and it was…. identical to Christmas 2020. EastEnders, Call the Midwife and (horror of horrors) Mrs Brown’s Boys – all would be shown again, in the exact same running order as last year.
Oddly enough, something similar was happening in the Commons. Was it the advent of December, and the proliferation of festive TV repeats, or just the weird Groundhog Day state of post-Covid politics? Either way, Keir Starmer and Boris Johnson’s weekly battle descended into a greatest hits compilation – “Now That’s What I Call Commons 2021!”
From the Prime Minister, we had such classics as “Our NHS”, “Our Magnificent NHS” and “Captain Hindsight”. But his equivalent of Cliff Richard’s Mistletoe and Wine, the cursed earworm blighting many a Christmas playlist and many a PMQs session to boot, was undoubtedly “the People’s Priorities”. Ministers like to invoke this amorphous lump of the populace to justify any and every policy. And the PM hid behind it repeatedly, especially when under fire from the opposition on matters that had little to do with either People or Priorities.
From Keir Starmer we had repeats of “working-class dementia tax” and “the No10 wallpaper”. But there was also a great deal of “Last Christmas”. While ministers on the morning media round told people not to cancel their festive work parties, Sir Keir was trying to get the PM cancelled for Crimbo 2020. Perhaps he even wished it could be Christmas every day, if it allowed him to pursue the PM in best Cromwellian prude mode.
Sir Keir led with a tabloid splash accusing the PM of hosting a boozy bash in Number 10 last year while the rest of the country was under lockdown. “No Mr Speak-ah!” cried the PM, in Mockney sing-song. “All rules were followed”.
“Can I suggest that he does the same with his own Christmas party… to which, unaccountably, he’s failed to invite the Deputy Leader”, continued the PM, gesturing at Angela Rayner. As the Tory benches collapsed into theatrical giggles and some light chanting – like the obligatory pantomime singalong – Sir Keir remained straight-faced.
“Well I’ve got the rules” said Sir Keir, waving some sheets of paper around peevishly. He’d move, scatter-gun, between this and other lines of inquiry, quizzing the PM on the questionable progress of his hospital-building projects, on mask-wearing in the Commons and more. His lack of focus, and the PM’s evasive jokiness, gave an easy win to the Government – not that we’d learnt anything useful from the exchange.
While the main action proved “déjà vu all over again”, some wildcard events were kicking off. Mask holdout Jacob Rees-Mogg had finally been muzzled – though, this being Rees-Mogg with his black belt in trolling, he’d chosen a dark covering bearing suspiciously familiar pale blue stripes. This caused a sensation on politics Twitter when it turned out to be an Old Etonian mask. He only does it to annoy, because he knows it teases.
Most bizarrely of all, a sensible question was asked at PMQs. Would the promising new antiviral drug Paxlovid be deployed in the NHS, and would it be produced in Britain, David Davis wanted to know? But all too soon, the Chamber had retreated to Mrs Brown’s Boys mode once again. Roll on 2022.
