Labour MPs groaned and hissed the moment that Suella Braverman was called to speak during a discussion of Gaza.
Mrs Braverman (Con, Fareham) was further ya-booed when she said that Israel should be allowed to ‘finish the job’ in its war with Hamas. Cries of ‘shame’ and ‘disgrace’ and ‘finish the job!’ volleyed from the Labour benches.
It is a fact universally acknowledged that Suella has a genius for making things more explosive. She should sell sparkplugs for a living. Even so, the reaction to her very presence was unusual and it felt performative.
This was explained when the Speaker invited George Galloway (Workers’ Party, Rochdale) to ask a question. The reaction from Labour MPs was now very different.
No one groaned. No one hissed or sucked their teeth. They went utterly still, as hartebeests will when a predator is in the vicinity. Mr Galloway frightens them.
Former Home Secretary Suella Braverman pictured earlier this week after featuring on Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg
An Israeli soldier pictured near the Israel-Gaza border on May 7
Smoke pictured rising from buildings in Rafah after an Israeli airstrike on May 7
That may account for the tone in the Commons yesterday. When Hamas terrorists attacked Israel last October the parliamentary Labour party made great show of being even-handed towards Israel. Sir Keir Starmer pointed to this as evidence of his ‘changed party’.
Little now remains of that position. The opposition parties today are in an anti-Israel competition. ‘We Labour lot hate Netanyahu.’ ‘No you don’t, we Scots Nats really hate him and have done so for longer.’
In the chamber Mr Galloway does not wear his trademark fedora hat. This is confusing, for he and Liam Byrne (Lab, Hodge Hill) are ringers: same height, same baldness, same scrofulous stubble.
Okay, Mr Byrne was wearing pink socks, which might be open to unfortunate misinterpretation among some of Mr Galloway’s more socially fundamentalist friends, but apart from that and George’s Ronseal sun tan, it was not easy to tell them apart.
Mr Byrne struggled to catch the chair’s eye. Speaker Hoyle possibly thought ‘I’ve already called Galloway and don’t intend to give him a second go’. Poor Liam. And he takes himself so seriously.
So does David Lammy, Shadow Foreign Secretary. He has developed a terrible bogus gravitas, perhaps to compensate for his lack of ballast upstairs. He approached the despatch box with the tread of a statesman weighed down by international responsibilities and leaned on it as if grateful to have found a support for his IQ.
He proceeded to ask why the Government was not doing things that it was largely already doing. ‘Yes!’ said his Shadow Cabinet colleague Lisa Nandy, showing enough right leg to get her stoned by Hamas’s Tehran paymasters.
Labour leader Keir Starmer pictured as he welcomed Chriss Webb as the new MP for Blackpool south
Another Labour woman, I think Dawn Butler (Brent Central), kept making the sort of ‘mmmnn’ sounds people emit after biting into a particularly delicious custard tart.
Andrew Mitchell, deputy foreign secretary, called Mr Lammy ‘eloquent’. The House enjoyed that.
Mr Mitchell used to be nicknamed ‘Thrasher’ on account of his disciplinarian bent as a teenager at Rugby School but nowadays he weaponises politeness.
In a parliamentary setting this is deadlier than anger. He repeatedly declined to rise to the bait – instead spraying his opponents with treacle.
Pericles Lammy was not the only one told he was ‘eloquent’. The same fate befell that Hussain man from Bradford East who had gone to all the trouble of working himself into a tremendous vortex of wheezy indignation, only to be smarmed by Mitch. What’s more, he believed it, sitting back and smiling as he heard Mitchell’s syrup.
Stella Creasy was also told she was ‘very eloquent’. The Walthamstow whinger eloquent? Mr Mitchell said it without a hint of public-school irony. What a wonderful straight-man he would make.
Anyway, they were all, even dull Starmerites like Ealing North’s James Murray, hurling themselves into the fray, desperate to say something pro-Palestinian to stick on their social-media feeds in the hope of seeing off the Workers’ Party and the Greens.
The latter seem overnight to have gone from quinoa to al Qaeda. Hoity-toity Caroline Lucas (Green, Brighton Pavilion) was absent. Must have been at her local madrassa, undergoing re-education.
