For the first time since she returned as acting leader, Harriet Harman unambiguously defeated David Cameron at today’s PMQs. Labour’s decision to swiftly endorse the Davies Commission’s recommendation of a third runway at Heathrow allowed her to ably expose the PM’s prevarication. After Cameron warned that the “legal position” meant he could not say anything before studying the report (merely promising a decision by the end of the year), Harman gently gibed: “They’re briefing it’s not going to happen. It looks like the PM has been overruled by the member for Uxbridge. He should tell him he’s not the leader of the Tory party yet. Will he stand up for Britain’s interests or will he just be bullied by Boris?”
In desperation, Cameron sought to change the subject (a tell-tale sign that he is losing) to last week’s unexpectedly stable child poverty figures. Harman responded by deploying her best line: “He’s in a holding pattern above Heathrow and Boris won’t let him land” (likely crafted by her aide and former stand-up Ayesha Hazarika). Cameron rightly reminded the House that Ed Miliband almost resigned over the third runway in government: “I seem to remember that the last leader of the Labour Party, although we’ve been churning through a few recently, had a totally different position on airports to the one she has just offered” (though Miliband himself U-turned before the election). But that only highlighted why Harman was able to pull off a victory that Miliband would have struggled to achieve. The PM’s lukewarm welcome for Davies means that the odds remain against the third runway ever being built.
The other politically notable moment of the session came when Cameron confirmed to the DUP’s Nigel Dodds that the number of MPs would be reduced from 650 to 600 by the end of the parliament. Dennis Skinner made his first PMQs intervention of the new term when he berated the PM for not requesting EU aid for miners. Cameron, who was previously forced to apologise after describing the 83-year-old as a “dinosaur”, again deployed this charge but with greater wit than before: “Very good to see the Labour Party in full voice cheering on Jurassic Park – I would stick to the movie.”
The first PMQs since the Tunisia atrocity had started on an appropriately sombre note. In response to Harman, Cameron said that a taskforce would be established to coordinate support for families and victims and grimly announced that the number of Britons confirmed dead had risen to 27.
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