As I prepared for business of the House questions the government was in complete chaos. The prime minister suddenly pulled the plug on cross-party talks on the Leveson report. It is ninety nine days now since the Leveson Report was published. It is the time to act for the many victims of press intrusion the report identified.
Like Lord Justice Leveson, Labour wanted to reach a cross-party agreement and so we were disappointed when the prime minister acted in this peremptory way. When he launched the inquiry the PM looked victims in the eye and told them he would fight for them. It is a sad indictment that he now fights for the people who hurt them. I asked the leader of the House to guarantee that the government guarantee sufficient time for a debate and a vote on all the Leveson amendments in the crime and courts bill on Monday.
I followed this by pointing out the vivid imagery from the Liberal Democrat conference last weekend. The party president said that his own members were like ‘cockroaches after a nuclear war’ and then the deputy prime minister referred to his coalition partners as ‘…like a kind of a broken shopping trolley’. So this is our government: a broken shopping trolley full of cockroaches veering wildly to the right.
I noted that over the last week, the bookies have been raking it in because of an important leadership election. The frontrunners jockeying for position, factions forming, whispering in the corridors, people excited to see who will emerge as their next leader … And that was just in the Vatican. Meanwhile, here in Westminster, the prime minister is also searching for divine inspiration. The home secretary has openly staked her claim only to be silenced by the education secretary who harbours his own ambitions. Perhaps the PMs’ Aussie spin doctor should turn his attention to the cabinet and stop harassing Tory backbenchers about their tweeting habits.
Ahead of next week’s budget I raised the economy, wondering what the part time chancellor’s encore will be after last year’s omnishambles. And I have to say the omens aren’t good. The prime minister has suffered an unprecedented ticking off from the Office for Budget Responsibility for obscuring the facts on cuts; the business secretary is openly campaigning for Labour’s plan B; and the chancellor lost a billion pounds in the 4G auction before failing his own AAA test. The chancellor’s plan is just not working. People are suffering while our economy flatlines – and he’s busy handing out tax cuts to millionaires.
I finished by raising today’s Guardian which quotes a senior Tory as saying ‘the conservative party has two moods, panic and complacency’. I asked Andrew Lansley, which mood he thinks his party is in?
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Angela Eagle is MP for Wallasey, shadow leader of the House of Commons and writes the weekly Business of Parliament column for Progress. She tweets @AngelaEagle
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