Don’t mention the cuts. Your life won’t be worth living if you start talking about austerity. Anything but the A word. Anything except tax breaks for tech oligarchs.
These are a tough few days for the Labour party. All anyone outside government wants to talk about is Rachel Reeves’s spring statement. What it means. How many promises broken. The cabinet aren’t quite so keen. Their aim is to bunker down and try to ride out the storm. They can already smell the incoming disappointment.
So they are desperate for distractions. That was why Keir Starmer was out and about on Radio 5 Live first thing on Monday morning to talk about potholes. Not that there was anything wrong with wanting to fix potholes. Every motorist and cyclist wants that. It’s just that when potholes are leading the government’s news agenda you can sense the kiss of death.
No wonder then that the transport secretary, Heidi Alexander, has been thanking her lucky stars. She’s been seen doing cartwheels down the corridors of her department. Because she has her very own crisis-not-really-a-crisis to deal with: the shutting down of Heathrow airport for the best part of a day because of a fire in a nearby electricity substation.
A crisis-not-really-a-crisis that caused a great deal of disruption. But one in which no one died. And, best of all, it was a crisis-not-really-a-crisis for which no one could possibly blame the government. It wasn’t her fault that someone had accidentally plugged in another heater to an overloaded socket. It wasn’t her fault that a dopey engineer had reattached the brown wire to the blue terminal. Or whatever had happened. All you really need to know is that Heidi doesn’t give a toss what happened as long as it wasn’t done on her watch.
These are the days that cabinet ministers dream of. All too often these things are their fault and they have to send a junior minister along to the Commons to sheepishly admit that something has gone wrong while they barricade themselves into their office. But for this statement, Heidi had no reason to hide. She could hold her head up high and deliver the statement herself.
First thing was not to smile. Always tempting when you have dodged a potential bullet and even the opposition realise this is a crisis-not-really-a-crisis. Heidi passed this with flying colours. She has the air of a woman not possessed of a great sense of humour. Mostly she just stares at her phone, as if waiting for the next potential disaster to derail her. A face carved out of misery.
She also has a voice made for AI. If a career in government doesn’t work out there will be alternative employment as a consumer complaints operative. Thank you for phoning the Department for Transport. Your call is not important to us. All our lines will be busy for the rest of the day. Please continue to hold until you give up and kill yourself.
Heidi began with a word of thanks. To the firefighters for containing this “unprecedented” event. To the maintenance worker who botched the job and caused the power outage. For turning what could have been a disaster into just an inconvenience. Last Friday, when the incident was still going on, you could hear the disappointment in the media that the fire wasn’t down to the Russians, a terror group or Just Stop Oil. It was just one of those things. An honest mistake.
Not that this was going to stop Alexander threatening retribution. Heidi said ominously that there would be “learnings”. Probably best not to cross her. There would also be a review that no one would read, chaired by Ruth Kelly, that would report in six weeks. I’m not sure quite why it would take that long.
We all know what happened. There was an accidental fire and Heathrow didn’t feel there was enough backup supply to safely power down and power up the airport. A hassle for everyone planning to fly in and out, but not the end of the world. Flights are always getting delayed. Better than crashing, you would have thought.
The shadow transport secretary, Gareth Bacon, could barely stay awake throughout his reply. Not even he could manage the futile gesture of trying to pretend that the crisis-not-really-a-crisis was somehow the government’s fault. He wasn’t even that bothered that the the Heathrow chief executive had nipped back to bed after the fire had broken out. Enviably calm, or maybe he doesn’t reckon he gets paid enough to pull an all-nighter. He only earned £3.2m last year.
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The most significant contribution to the subsequent debate came from someone who wasn’t there. Step forward, Richard Tice. Rapidly advancing himself as the prime contender for this parliament’s Idiot’s Idiot award. And that is a hotly coveted title given some of the quarter-wits on the benches. But Our Dicky is a collector’s item in quarter-wittedness. Someone who believes himself to be super-smart and has no idea of his limitations.
On Friday, Dicky was parading himself as the man with the inside knowledge on Heathrow. Mainly because he is a not-so-frequent flyer to Dubai to visit his on-off girlfriend. But Dicky had managed to solve the question of who and what was to blame for the outage long before the police had started their own investigation.
“IT’S NET ‘STUPID’ ZERO,” he yelled to the Daily Telegraph, who duly printed his story. Heathrow had been closed because it was too woke to use any backup diesel generators. Which might have been an interesting angle, if any of that had been true. But it wasn’t. None of it was true. Heathrow had several backup diesel generators. They just weren’t enough to safely restore full power.
So you’d have thought the pale orange Dicky might have at least turned up to correct the record. To say sorry for providing misleading information when the police and fire brigade were already overstretched. But Dicky was nowhere to be seen. Nor was Nigel Farage, who had been dim enough to retweet Dicky’s nonsense. Instead, all we got was the Reform outcast, Rupert Lowe, who showed no signs of knowing where he was or what was going on. Perhaps Lowe and Farage have taken out mutual restraining orders and they can’t be in the chamber at the same time.
Otherwise, there were just a few grumblings. Something must be done. It was because there were too many runways. Or not enough. It must never happen again. But something like it probably will. Humans make mistakes. Things fall apart.
