Furrowed brows at the Clown College

Political journalists did a bad job of pretending farcical scenes in Parliament didn't delight them.

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In Jerusalem yesterday, the Knesset voted to oppose the “unilateral” creation of a Palestinian state. Reuters reports that a clear majority of Knesset members — 99 of 120 — voted for the declaration by prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which was passed by his cabinet earlier this week. Israeli strikes across Gaza on Tuesday night and continuing into Wednesday killed at least 67 Palestinians. Syria claimed two people were killed in Damascus following what it said was an Israeli air strike. State media in Lebanon reported that an Israeli airstrike on the south of the country killed a woman and wounded her daughter.

The IDF announced that one Israeli soldier was killed in Gaza. Meanwhile: The UN World Food Programme said it is pausing food aid deliveries to northern Gaza due to a breakdown in civil order; Iran’s oil minister, Javad Owji, said Israel conducted last week’s attack on the country’s gas pipelines; and the Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel said it found evidence of “systematic and intentional” rape and sexual abuse during the Hamas attacks on 7 October.

That’s a snapshot of what was happening in Israel, Gaza, and the wider Middle East as the Westminster Parliament engaged in its latest Clown College degree show. The combination of clunking Labour Party machine politics, blatant opportunism from the Tory government, SNP showboating, and intolerable weakness from the Speaker, Sir Lindsey Hoyle, led to a farcical display. And, inevitably, the provoked scrumpled up faces of concern from political reporters as they did their best to pretend to be appalled at the goings on rather than absolutely fizzing with delight.

If a Westminster correspondent or professional political commentator howls that we have just witnessed “a truly embarrassing day in Parliament”, you should look past the solemn expression and to the gleam of delight in their eyes. Yesterday’s events were a Rorschach blot of ratbaggery — who a given paper or broadcaster has deemed worst behaved depends on prior convictions.

For James O’Brien on LBC, it was a qualified strategic success for Keir Starmer and the Labour Party, and yet another example of blatant hypocrisy on the part of Tory MPs decrying a breach of protocol having backed Boris Johnson’s illegal prorogation of Parliament. Labour’s contempt for convention was subjected to rather less scrutiny because when Starmer does it that’s ‘smart politics’.

Meanwhile, The Sun — which treated Johnson’s prorogation wheeze as a bold gamble — clutches its pearls:

For all the debate’s absurd self- importance, performative rage and chaotic conclusion last night, it doesn’t matter a damn to Israel or Hamas. What DOES matter, to our democracy, is whether Hoyle would have done the Tories the same favour and if question marks now hang over his impartiality.

Debates about the Russian invasion of Ukraine are lauded. Debates about Israel and Palestine are derided. The argument is that one is crucial while the other cannot be affected by the position the UK takes. Putting aside the UK arms industry’s stake in both conflicts, that’s a deliberately confused and casually hypocritical argument.

Casual hypocrisy and deliberate confusion is very much John Rentoul’s brand, so it was no surprise to find him in The Independent finding fault with everyone but Labour. The man whose bedroom is plastered entirely in vintage pics of Tony Blair writes:

What Sir Lindsay did today was to restore the spirit of that enlightened reform: by allowing votes on all three parties’ policies on Gaza. The reason the SNP was so upset was that he spoiled their silly game of trying to embarrass Labour.

But then Sir Lindsay’s plan blew up in the most spectacular fashion. A “senior Labour source” told Nick Watt of the BBC that Labour had told the speaker that he wouldn’t keep his job under a Labour government if he didn’t change the rules.

This was furiously denied by Labour, but it incensed the Tories. It was little more than a statement of the obvious: that the speaker would need the goodwill of the Labour Party if there were a Labour government. But for someone to say it out loud, and to a journalist, was asking for trouble.

You see, it’s fine for the Leader of the Opposition to threaten the Speaker as long as he is on the red team. Certain that Labour will be in government by year’s end, hacks are far more amenable to its shenanigans, with one eye trained on future access.

For The Guardian, Kiran Stacey provided the most moral-free football match report-style analysis of yesterday’s events. Through that prism, Labour’s tactics were not part of a shameful cavalcade but a success. Under the headline How Keir Starmer averted Gaza ceasefire vote crisis, Stacey writes:

After a dramatic day in parliament, the speaker’s standing, at least on the government’s benches, had been left badly damaged. Starmer, however, had pulled off a political coup, eventually avoiding any rebellion at all after the government decided to pull out entirely from the evening’s votes…

… The debate eventually began around an hour after it was expected. Five hours later, the Labour amendment passed easily with no resistance from the government.

Starmer had averted disaster and emerged stronger. “We came very close to a huge rebellion,” said one Labour source. “But in the end Starmer’s authority is stronger than it was before today.”

This kind of reporting used to be known as a “tick tock” — a chronological account of how something came to happen with lots of backstage insight — and there is value in it as a way of explaining to a reader why something happened. The trouble here is that Stacey and The Guardian are so wedded to the idea of Starmer as tactician, ignoring the evidences (present in their own copy) of indecision and cowardice.

Starmer and the Shadow Cabinet danced on the head of a pin — already overcrowded with equivocators from other parties — to push through a wishy-washy, morally empty amendment that twisted hard to avoid accusing Israel of collectively punishing the Palestinian people. It’s perfectly true to say that statements in the House of Commons will not change the situation in Gaza but principles matter in politics and Starmer has, once again, shown himself to have one principle — that he should be Prime Minister.

Inevitably, the right wing papers’ perspectives on the ratbag Rorschach don’t agree with the centrist conclusion that it was a triumph for Starmer. In the Daily Mail, the least popular resident of Hobbiton, Quentin Letts, honks:

Like a vintage Lagonda, Sir Keir's gambit later backfired spectacularly — a great 'kaboom!' — and by the day's close he was left with oil, or something else brown and liquid, all over his flat face. During the first part of the day the Speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, was absent from his chamber. We learned he was locked in argument with Sir Keir in the Reasons Room, a tiny space behind the Speaker's chair where the ushers keep tissues and bottles of water. Sir Keir — the living saint who is forever lecturing us on the rule of law — was applying thumbscrews to poor, weak Speaker Hoyle.

While the Telegraph’s similarly cringe-inducing sketchwriter, Madeline Grant, writes:

Labour’s efforts to ram through their amendment with a mixture of arcane protocol and dark arts had been intended to avoid petty internal fighting, but it all blew up spectacularly in Sir Keir Starmer’s (and, especially, Sir Lindsay’s) face.

Over at The Times, Tom Peck managed to recognise the ridiculousness on all sides…

The long House of Commons debate on a ceasefire in Gaza began in earnest with an eight-minute monologue from Labour’s Chris Bryant regarding the Vienna Road Traffic Convention of 2018 and its implications for the weight differential between a fully loaded and an empty minibus.

It ended with the SNP storming out, half the Conservative Party following them, an emergency vote on whether or not to shut the place down and carry on in private, and with the Speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, making an ashen-faced apology for his role in an afternoon and evening of furious chaos the like of which may never have been seen before.

… and recognising the events in Israel and Gaza (“… the kind of politics that actually has consequences.”) then he goes and spoils it all with a Sinatra style something stupid in his chuckling sign off:

All the House of Commons managed to achieve is to teach itself a valuable lesson — you play with ceasefire, you’re gonna get burnt.

On GB News and Talk TV this morning, the faux-seriousness masked a delight at the chance to rant about “Islamist mobs” — the latter’s chyron read ‘Just Stop Hoyle’. The BBC and Sky News purported to be awfully shocked while being absolutely ecstatic that the latest episode of the soap opera was packed with incident. When Westminster is at its worst, it is content at its best for the political journalists of Britain. While they pretend to want a chamber full of sober and thoughtful debate, they’re never happier than when they can pick over politicking, procedure, and personalities.

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