The sessions of tributes to him, and later to his own selection as speaker's chaplain Rose Hudson-Wilkin, were gushing and interminable, and he sat there lapping it up - not an example of his better side - though Chi Onwurah put it nicely: "I find it very hard to imagine this Chamber without you, although I do hope the electors in Newcastle give me the opportunity to find out".
Please note: the vote is on Thursday 12 December and Parliament re-opens the following Monday for swearing in of MPs.
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| Corbyn greeting Andrew Gwynne, Labour's campaign coordinator, at the launch |
Battersea
Meanwhile, out here in the real world, Jeremy Corbyn was launching the Labour campaign (not the manifesto, as Clive Lewis would have to admit later to Andrew Neil - that still has to be written by the Clause 5 Committee).Corbyn's speech was mostly familiar stuff I'm not going to analyse here - it's going to be a long election - though the idea that this is the "last chance to tackle the climate emergency" - with or without a "Green Industrial Revolution at the heart of Labour’s plan to transform Britain" was perhaps a bit much for the first day.
"Labour will get Brexit sorted within six months. We’ll let the people decide whether to leave with a sensible deal or remain. That really isn’t complicated." We'll see. Perhaps.
"I travel all around our country and listen to people. This is what I learn from them: they don’t see politics like the media and political class do." This might be heresy, but I'd be surprised if we don't hear pretty much the same from every party at some point.
"The Prime Minister wants you to believe that we’re having this election because Brexit is being blocked by an establishment elite. People aren’t fooled so easily. They know the Conservatives are the establishment elite. And you know what really scares the elite? All of us, the British people. What the elite are actually afraid of is paying their taxes.
"So we’re going after the tax dodgers. We’re going after the dodgy landlords. We’re going after the bad bosses. We’re going after the big polluters. Because we know whose side we’re on. And the big question of this election is: whose side are you on?"
He personalised it, naming a handful of the villains Labour will be "going after", and followed it immediately with "And we have something that the Rupert Murdochs, the Mike Ashleys, and the Boris Johnsons don’t have. We have people". Which - I'm sorry - is vacuous tripe.
And it was picked up later as "unashamed class war", maybe a lazy label from Sarah Montague on World At One (available through most of November), though Professor Rob Ford told us it was "very much the approach last time, and last time [Corbyn] achieved the largest campaign swing in polling history, so if it ain't broke don't fix it is probably the thinking at Labour HQ".
Labour's Laura Pidcock dismissed the "class war" accusation with a laugh. "What's divisive about bringing together the majority of people in this country? The majority of people in this country are not millionaires, billionaires, speculators... Jeremy Corbyn was talking about that. They are in a tiny minority, and he's saying 'Whose side are you on?'"
Whose side are you on? What's divisive about that?
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| The Conservative party campaign has been going from early September. And we've been paying for it. |
Some playschool in middle England
It's difficult to work out when the Conservative campaign started. Work from the day Johnson was appointed, though, and you probably won't go far wrong. There is the small matter of his never having achieved a majority in the Commons, but I won't tell the Queen if you won't.He was continuing his tour of the primary schools of England, and there'll be plenty of time in the next few weeks for more on that stuff. More important was a point of order raised in the Commons by Dominic Grieve, who may not have much longer left in the public eye. He chairs Parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee, which has privileged access - as the title suggests - to the intelligence services and the security apparatus of the UK.
Grieve said: "The Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament, of which I am the Chair, has been investigating the threat posed to this country by Russia. We have produced a report, which, in accordance with the Justice and Security Act 2013, we sent to the Prime Minister on 17 October for him to confirm that there were no classified matters remaining. There ought not to be, because the report has already been carefully looked at by the Cabinet Office. That confirmation should have been received by today to enable publication before the House is dissolved, but I regret to say that it has not been. We thus have a Committee of Parliament waiting to lay before the House a report that comments directly on what has been perceived as a threat to our democratic processes. Parliament and the public ought to and must have access to this report in the light of the forthcoming election, and it is unacceptable for the Prime Minister to sit on it and deny them that information".
At the time of writing, nothing more has been heard from Johnson's tour of hospital wards ("Prime Minister Boris Johnson visits Addenbrooke’s Hospital - but is reportedly ‘booed’ out") and finger painting classes of the UK, but I'm sure he'll be heartened by the judgement of a vox-popper this morning on the Today programme - "I'm going to vote for Boris because he's a really naughty boy". As Newsnight's diplomatic editor tells us "failure to [publish the report] because of a refusal by No 10 to sign it off may be seen by many as an attempt to suppress evidence of previous Russian attempts to subvert UK polls".
London - air pollution capital of the UK
And what have the Liberal Democrats been up to? Not a lot today, apart from running a diesel vehicle around central London to try out a poster or two, and incidentally to annoy a Guardian journalist.Build a brighter future with idling diesels!
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| Apologies, this seems to have been slightly doctored along the way. |
The party of nowhere
And now, Brexit Party Ltd seems to be having a bit of a rethink. The message went out last night: "Message from HQ ... IMPORTANT. Please go DARK on social media. DO NOT respond to any questions about where we are standing, what the strategy or plan is from now".Will they not, after all, be standing in "all 650 seats in the UK" (despite not being registered for elections in Northern Ireland)? The operation has been naming prospective parliamentary candidates all over the place (and that "prospective" can be important; in theory, calling yourself an actual candidate opens you up to having to declare everything you do, even months before the actual election, as an election expense). One of them was asked this morning on Today whether the whole-UK approach is still the plan, and she didn't know. She was going to have to ask her election agent. If she ever gets one, since they don't have any local parties. Or members.
Foreign news
