Short questions are always the best ones. Ben Bradshaw, the Labour member of parliament for Exeter, had a good one today for the prime minister: ‘How is the campaign going to stop Mr Juncker?’
It was a cruel question because it looks like David Cameron is going to lose his battle to stop Jean-Claude Juncker becoming the president of the European commission. The former prime minister John Major admitted as much on the Today programme this morning and even Cameron, normally so insufferably buoyant at PMQs could only say weakly: ‘I will fight this right to the very end.’ Ypres was not mentioned but it is in this town – site of one of the notoriously awful first world war battles – where, it has been mooted, he may fight and lose to the Germans: the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, has said she wants this over quickly.
Foreign battlefields were where the minds of those in the House of Commons were today, but there was not much comfort that anyone had a solution. Ed Miliband, criticised in some quarters last week for ignoring the crisis in Iraq, was determined this week to concentrate on it. He asked six questions on Iraq, ranging from Cameron’s latest assessment of the situation to the refugee crisis. Cameron blustered on. He kept referring to Isis as Isil: it was simple one-upmanship, one of the few arts Cameron is naturally gifted in. And I am not sure we got much further in understanding the situation.
What any of us know about the murderous fighters sweeping across Iraq from Syria is sketchy, and it looks like the Foreign Office doesn’t know either. Miliband pledged to be as firm and unbending as any Tory on British youths flying out to Syria or Iraq to join the fighting. Cameron insisted that the real danger was that the extremists were ‘also planning to attack us here at home in the United Kingdom’.
It did all beg the question of risk. Liz Kendall the Labour member for Leicester West asked the obvious: exactly how big is the problem of British fighters in Iraq? Cameron said he only had the figures for the British in Syria which was about 400. Even the No 10 ‘Office for Dodgy Statistics’, where Cameron usually gets most of his information, was not able to conjure something up about Iraq. (Though the ‘Office for Dodgy Statistics’ did produce a figure that claimed people only waited two hours A&E now. Two hours! It can’t be the real time it takes from getting to the hospital to seeing a doctor. I bet there’s a lot of shifting waiting rooms and sitting in ambulances).
While there was much prating about ‘inclusive government’ in Iraq, we essentially witnessed hand-wringing. The only concrete offer from anyone was Cameron’s rather paltry £5m for refugees. Still, when you hear Tony Blair’s big picture view of the world, perhaps little Englander hand-wringing is preferable. Blair’s shadow did hang over the proceedings, not least because the Tory Father of the House, Peter Tapsell, asked at the beginning of the session whether Blair could be impeached for ‘misleading the house on the necessity of the invasion of Iraq in 2003’.
Lots of women MPs from all sides asked questions, though not about Iraq. Labour’s Yasmin Qureshi (Bolton South-East) asked if Cameron could meet the victims of the drug Primodos (a pregnancy drug from the 1970s) today. He didn’t have time, but was sympathetic. Gisela Stuart (Birmingham Edgbaston) asked about more devolution to the regions and more elected mayors. Cameron was sympathetic again but not promising much. And Natascha Engel (North-East Derbyshire) asked about GP waiting times: ‘Labour is promising a maximum 48 hour wait to see a GP, what is he promising?’ Nothing was the short answer, but there are now 19,000 fewer managers in the NHS.
Yawn, yawn.
A frustrating PMQs. Cameron is more comfortable fighting the Europeans over Juncker than working out what to do in Iraq. He wants ‘inclusive’ government in Iraq: when did ‘free and democratic’ become inclusive for goodness sake? But his solution is to deal with some pretty uninclusive ones, namely Iran. The government does not have a great grip on foreign policy you feel. The problem is Labour does not have much to say that is different.
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Sally Gimson is a journalist, a Labour councillor, and reviews PMQs on Progress