Angela Rayner vs Oliver Dowden: a clash of the uninspiring understudies

The only explanation for such a dispiriting session of Prime Minister’s Questions is that neither deputy wanted to do well, writes John Rentoul

Rayner and Dowden seemed to be trying to keep the tone as partisan and as trivial as possible (PA Media)

Angela Rayner, the deputy Labour leader, was unimpressed: “I know that for the past couple of years, he has been trying to prep prime ministers for this, but these punchlines are dire.” She was right.

In fact, Oliver Dowden has been preparing Conservative leaders for Prime Minister’s Questions since he joined Tory HQ from university, advising Michael Howard against Tony Blair.

Dowden has been a central figure in the Tory backroom ever since, eventually rising to the rank of deputy prime minister, which is how at last he has had the chance to act on his own advice. Rishi Sunak is in Washington, which meant that Dowden stood in for him again.

Unfortunately for those few MPs who had turned up to watch the clash of the understudies, Dowden is better at advising other people how to do PMQs than he is at doing it himself. Rayner was not wrong about the quality of his punchlines. He had just told her: “While she was collecting titles, I was getting on with the job.”

Perhaps Rayner needed a better foil to bring out her combative spirit, or perhaps she and Dowden were both engaged in a conspiracy to avoid outshining their leaders. There was certainly no danger of that happening today.

Rayner’s first question was sharp and short, reminding Dowden that the Tory manifesto had promised to end the abuse of judicial review and asking: “How’s it going?” This was essentially knockabout, making the rather silly point that the government has resorted to judicial review to try to block the release of “unambiguously irrelevant” material to the Covid-19 inquiry.

Still, it served a purpose, in that it made me look up what the Conservative manifesto actually said: “We will ensure that judicial review is available to protect the rights of the individuals against an overbearing state, while ensuring that it is not abused to conduct politics by another means or to create needless delays.” Which seems perfectly sensible.

Unlike Dowden’s initial response to Rayner’s question, which was to point out that there is no independent Covid inquiry in Wales, where Labour runs the NHS. This was an absurd argument, because Baroness Hallett’s inquiry is UK-wide. A separate inquiry in Wales would be just as pointless as the SNP’s separate inquiry in Scotland.

Having made a ridiculous point and been told off by Rayner for it – “They set up the inquiry and obstructed it” – Dowden then made a serious defence of the government’s legal case, saying how important it is to protect information about “civil servants’ medical conditions and intimate details about their families” that might be in the communications demanded by the inquiry.

He might have made some headway with this argument, about which he and the civil service appear to be sincere, if he hadn’t undermined it a few seconds later by switching to the subject of Rayner’s claims on expenses for noise-cancelling headphones.

Rayner got no further with her next question, about why taxpayers should pay for Boris Johnson’s legal bill for the inquiry. The serious answer to that is that he is answerable to the inquiry in his capacity as former prime minister, elected by the people. But Dowden didn’t bother with that, going for a cheap crack about how “we don’t need to search her WhatsApps to know there’s no communication between her and her leader”.

Rayner then asked disconnected questions about children missing from school registers since coronavirus and the Covid-19 fraud bill. Dowden replied with Labour’s “unfunded £28bn spending spree” – a reference to the party’s Green Prosperity Plan, currently being dismantled by Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor. Reeves, sitting next to Rayner on the front bench, shouted at Dowden at this point, presumably to say that her policy had nothing to do with the question he had been asked. “Britain can’t afford Labour,” Dowden concluded.

“Britain can’t afford any more of the Tories,” Rayner hit back, as if by reflex. It was the only flash of genuine feeling in a dispiriting session, in which both Rayner and Dowden seemed to be trying to keep the tone as partisan and as trivial as possible, but she sounded more plausible.