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You probably haven’t heard of Lucy Powell. She was responsible for some of the absolute greatest hits of Ed Miliband’s Labour: from the EdStone - the deranged slab of ineptitude on which the Labour Party carved selected parts of its disastrous 2015 manifesto - to the infamous interview between the former party leader and the Aldi Maharishi Yogi, Russell Brand, which the latter says “f—ed up the election”.
All this is behind the MP for Manchester Central, recently appointed as Shadow Leader of the Commons. She rather gallantly described this role as now being “on the world stage”, courtesy of Penny Mordaunt’s sword-wielding tenure.
Ms Powell had come dressed as “Supernanny”, the hectoring childcare expert of television yore, and proceeded to deliver a stern ticking-off for the Government’s treatment of the House of Commons.
Put to bed with a spanking
It pained her much more than it was going to hurt them: we had lots of “I’m sorry to says” punctuating her complaints. “As always happens with a Tory government, [there is] sleaze.” she lectured, in a tone suggesting that His Majesty’s Government had done a poo-poo in a place that they shouldn’t have done.
Mordaunt – dressed as and with the general demeanour of a glacier, rose to reply. She welcomed Ms Powell to the job, but, in lieu of being put to bed with a spanking (something she can doubtless leave to some of her backbenchers), it was time for a fairy story.
Stuck in the scullery with me
The Leader of the House compared her opposite number to Cinderella, deprived of the “glittering” advantages of her precious brief at Culture, she was now “stuck in the scullery with me”. “Ascot’s horses have turned to House of Commons mice,” she smirked.
Mordaunt perhaps had in mind her own ambitions to move on from the cul de sac of business questions to the Defence brief - a battle she lost to Grant Shapps, a man with the skill set and general appeal of Rumpelstiltskin.
Poor Deirdre Brock also languished in her post as SNP spokesman for Commons Business – clear evidence of either a compassion bypass from Stephen Flynn or serious masochism on her part. Putting Brock against Morduant seems a little unfair: like asking a toad to do quantum mechanics or expecting a walnut to give a decent rendition of Hamlet.
‘Sad spent force’
Brock’s opening remarks seemed designed to tee up her counterpart. She seized on Mordaunt’s recent visits to Scotland as evidence of the SNP’s superior leadership. “It is a different country north of the border”, she said, with the blind confidence of one who thinks she’ll demolish a building by routinely smashing her head into a supporting wall.
It was indeed, a very different country north of the border, smirked Mordaunt, who referenced the Glasgow rat problem and the return of Victorian diseases like rickets to the city. She even managed to use the phrase “sad spent force” about a different political party from her own, while maintaining a straight face. No mean feat in this climate.
She looks like Supernanny but Lucy Powell needs a lot more kryptonite to take on Penny Mordaunt
Labour’s newly-appointed Shadow Leader of the Commons arrived in Parliament to give the Tories a ticking-off