Misery on misery. If prime minister’s questions was a war zone, it would have been declared a humanitarian disaster by now. Theresa May arrived in the chamber already looking shell-shocked and left an abject wreck. She appears hollowed out both as a person and a politician, a walking dead Maybot for whom every minute spent in the job is complete agony.
The prime minister knows she is hopelessly out of her depth and would like nothing more than to be put out of her misery, but is forced to endure the suffering because the Tories have no one better to replace her. Each day she remains in office, she appears just a little more diminished.
On her current rate of disintegration, there will be little left of the Maybot by the end of next spring. She is learning the hard way that when everything that can go wrong goes wrong, there is still more that can go wrong. If Brexit doesn’t get you, then the economy will. And if both of them give you a momentary break, there’s universal credit waiting round the corner.
Politics works to its own laws of quantity theory. So the worse that the prime minister becomes, the more assured Jeremy Corbyn becomes. Give him a few more weeks and he will look like a natural orator. Not that he needs to get much better as he is already running rings round Theresa. It’s not just that his questions now combine bite and insight with occasional flashes of wit; it’s that most of the country now think he’s on the side of the angels.
“I welcome the fall in today’s unemployment figures,” Corbyn began. It’s a measure of just how confident he is feeling that he can afford to bring up the one bit of moderately good news the government has had in recent weeks. Theresa looked taken aback, shocked even. She had been hoping to use the figures as her “get out of jail free” card for every question to which she didn’t have an answer. Now, she was fatally holed below the waterline before battle had even begun.
Corbyn went for the kill. Most of the new jobs were rubbish jobs that paid the minimum wage. Could she explain why wages were on average lower than they were 10 years ago? “Are falling wages the sign of a strong economy?” he asked. Strange times indeed. Yesterday Labour had been the voice of business. Today it was the voice of economic competence.
The Maybot’s mouth open and closed. Things were basically fine. People weren’t really as poor as they thought they were. This could have been the first time a Conservative prime minister has championed false consciousness. Corbyn wondered if she could go for another first in PMQs and answer a direct question. That was beyond her.
With the government having earlier in the day given in to his suggestion that the universal credit helpline be made free, Corbyn tried his luck and asked if Theresa would go further and pause the rollout of universal credit entirely?
“Yes,” said Theresa. The Labour benches fell about laughing; the Tories looked appalled. The prime minister had meant to follow the yes with a but, but her voice operating system had failed. By the time it had been rebooted, the damage had been done. All that came out thereafter was pure uncoded Maybot. “We-are-going-to-change-in-relation-to-telephone-charge,” she said, her voice laced with desperation. Universal credit was absolutely great and all the people who said it was a complete mess should ring the helpline to find out just how well it was working.
Several Labour MPs were disinclined to take the prime minister at her word. Laura Pidcock wondered whether her refusal to rethink was “gross incompetence” or “calculated cruelty”. Theresa didn’t know – presumably it was too close to call – and merely reiterated her insistence that everything was working near enough perfectly and that if everyone worked just harder then there would be no need for them to claim benefits in the first place.
The Tory benches were by now reduced to near silence. Even for the bloodsport enthusiasts this was a bit too much. Many sloped away early, but a few diehard loyalists tried to cheer her up by throwing her a few planted questions that she stood an even chance of being able to answer. It was their way of letting her know that she was a worthwhile person in her own right, that they loved her regardless of how bad she was and that everything was going to be OK. But it wasn’t. It really wasn’t. If Theresa was a pet, she’d have been put down by now.