Cry and you cry alone - political sketch
The spectacle of Rachel Reeves in tears and obvious distress throughout yesterday's Prime Minister's Questions was the nadir in a torrid (half) week in British politics.
To make matters worse, the fact that her senior colleague, the Prime Minister, seemed not to notice her plight,
while the female Leader of the Opposition openly mocked it, made one despair of progressive policies ever emerging from this bearpit. To say it was an unedifying episode would be to grossly understate its impact; it provided a shocking insight into everything that's wrong with Westminster politics - all in real time on live TV..
It is impossible to separate the human from the professional, in politics as in any other walk of life - and why would one want to anyway when we are all human and only too fallible? - nevertheless, we seem to expect sphingine inscrutability from our politicians. So it came as something of a shock to see the holder of the second greatest of the 'Great Offices of State', the Chancellor of the Exchequer, so clearly and publicly upset.
In politics, arguably more than in any other occupation, appearances are everything, but yesterday the mask of professional imperturbability and infallibility slipped and fragile humanity was exposed. When the demeanour of the person in question is forensically scrutinised on a daily, hourly basis by already jittery financial pundits such a lack of composure can have potentially catastrophic consequences for the economy. One misstep can wipe billions off the national balance sheet - and so it proved, albeit briefly before reassuring support from the PM calmed frayed nerves.
But missteps can be literal ones too. As the holder of the first 'Great Office of State', the Prime Minister, left his office (10 Downing Street) on his way to Parliament for PMQs yesterday he tripped on the step. Immediately, this was seized on by a febrile media as an ill-omen, as if he were Julius Caesar on his way to the Capitol. As it turned out, the consequences for Keir Starmer were almost as bloody and may yet be as fatal.
What we witnessed in the Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payment Bill debate in the Commons on Tuesday, and in its repercussions at PMQs yesterday, was Westminster politics at its best and worst. There was plenty of passionate debate but also some vicious tribalism, verging on the cannibalistic. And it really was dog-eat-dog - politics red in tooth and claw - with the Leader of the Opposition elbowing aside her Shadow Secretary for Work and Pensions, the hapless Helen Whately, to personally stab the government minister, Liz Kendal, in the front. For her part, Kendal looked as if she had been put through the wringer. In reality, she had been thrown to the wolves.
Sadly, all this is the lamentable consequence of an outdated adversarial parliamentary system which favours the imposition of the party whip over the exercise of individual conscience. Sensible consensus invariably gives way to visceral conflict - both intra- and cross-party - and a rational outcome becomes virtually impossible to achieve. Bad policy results and, worse, individuals are damaged in the process and democracy lies bleeding.
Rather like, come to think of it, Caesar on those Capitoline steps.