Prime Minister's Questions, 14 March 2012
With the Prime Minister in Washington, questions today fell to be answered by Nick Clegg. This was clearly an opportunity for the opposition to have a go at the Deputy Prime Minister and Leader of the Liberal Democrat Party. Labour members joined in too.
First up was John Redwood, a long-time foe of the leaders of every political party, including his own who, in the context of the government's 'Freedom Bill', wanted to know what was being done about "bossy and unloved regulations". It has an interesting history this particular bill, having started life with the rather stirring title of the Freedom (Great Repeal) Bill, since watered down to the more vegetarian-sounding Protection of Freedoms Bill, no doubt out of deference to the fact that there is hardly anything that it repeals. New codes of practice, regimes and frameworks will instead proliferate beneath the Bill's legislative canopy and perhaps Mr Redwood will find some or all of these bossy and unloved. Mr Clegg, who once keenly identified himself personally with this Bill, seemed in no mood to champion its freedom-seeking benefits on this occasion; he has since had his head turned by a different legislative priority, designed to liberate the House of Lords from 700 years of its history.
It was on this subject that another Tory, Hitchin and Harpenden's Peter Lilley, wanted to challenge the deputy prime minister. Mr Lilley began his question by invoking the priorities of his constituents. This is a familiar parliamentary device and usually means that the member concerned wants to talk about something of close, and often obsessive, personal interest to himself. Still, if we take the matter at face value, it seems that in Hitchin and Harpenden they lie awake all night worrying about the government wasting time on Lords reform when it could be getting on with cutting the deficit and reforming the welfare state. A reasonable answer to this might be that the government is getting on with cutting the deficit and reforming the welfare state and this occurred to Mr Clegg, who added gratuitously that time was also being found to rejig the constituency boundaries in the Tories' favour. Whether this also bemuses the good folk of Hitchin and Harpenden, who perhaps worry what will become of them when their lot is thrown together with bits of Bedfordshire, was a question left unasked.
Sandwiched between these twin Tory attacks was Harriet Harman, the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, who arrived armed with one of those clunking political scripts the true banality of which can only be appreciated when it is entrusted to the artistry of a seasoned practitioner, such as Harriet Harman. She began with the latest unemployment figures, focusing, as she is wont to do, upon the plight of unemployed women. There are, she told Mr Clegg, one million women out there looking for work. She should be careful using such figures since they also mean that there are 999,998 available who could deliver a line better than Ms Harman.
Having exhausted her feminist critique of supply-side economic failure, Ms Harman moved onto the NHS where Mr Clegg, she said, had failed to detoxify the Tory reforms, There are five Liberal Democrats sitting round the Cabinet table, she taunted, and they have made no difference whatsoever, perhaps forgetting to add that this must be because they are all men. Ms Harman then dragged Shirley Williams into the argument, the erstwhile hammer of the health reforms who has now become harnessed to Mr Clegg's proposition that the work is done and the Bill should now be allowed to limp across the finishing line. "You've trashed not just one, but two national treasures", Harman told Clegg.
This was the cue for a third national treasure, Mr Dennis Skinner, who all but challenged Mr Clegg to a fight. "Man to man what does he really think?" Skinner asked while turning the colour of a strawberry lollipop. The topic in question was the Leveson inquiry and what Mr
Skinner called "Murdoch sleaze". With David Cameron in the USA working on President Obama, Mr Skinner was, surprisingly, the only MP to refer to the special relationship between the Wapping press and the Metropolitan Police.