Policy u-turns, robot babysitters AND, of course, KISS star Gene Simmons all feature in Who's Top Who's Not - Whitehouse's weekly blog where we examine the headlines to see which MP fared best, and which will be listening to "Tears Are Falling" on repeat...
Flying high: Caroline Lucas MP
During a time in which it feels like a new MP has been disgraced and forced to stand down on a weekly basis, it feels like a novelty to have a high-profile MP leave on their own terms.
Upon the news that Caroline Lucas, the Green Party’s former leader and only MP, will be standing down at the next election, political commentators broke out into soliloquies about how she was “the best PM Britain never had” and how she “was a force to be reckoned with” in Parliament - and, they’re right.
Climate policy is now a daily topic of conversation in Parliament, and as the only nationally elected representative of a party for which climate policy is sort of their whole thing, it’s a tough gig.
But barely 24 hours after Lucas’s announcement, Labour’s Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves announced that Labour would be dumping its flagship £28bn a year pledge to invest in green technology, watering it down to get to that figure in the second half of the next parliament. The Green party has played a part in moving the debate on climate policy and forcing Labour to take quite a radical position in this area. But Labour’s backtrack shows that politics still trumps policy.
Middle ranking: Rishi Sunak MP
Top of the agenda for Sunak’s trip to the US was Ukraine, trade and the role of Britain in regulating AI.
In the face of concerns that AI will “kill many humans” in two years, Sunak said in an ITV interview that he would let robots look after his grandmother and teach his children. A minor safeguarding concern, sure, but maybe he was Biden his time (sorry) in order to distract from news that his two-day trip, the latest in a series of dalliances with the US President, failed to achieve the much hoped-for and much-promised post-Brexit US-UK trade deal.
Sinkonf low: Angela Rayner MP and Oliver Dowden MP
Sunak’s questionable babysitting choices has kept attention away from the fact that Sunak has now missed four PMQs, giving him the worst attendance record of any PM from the last few decades. Could it be because he wants to avoid the very cringe rap battle-esque scenes from the front benches…
With Sunak away, MC Rayner and MC Dowden went head-to-head, equipped with what can generously be described as – I think you’d call them - ‘jokes’? The Telegraph summarised the affair perfectly as a “pair of elderly sausage dogs fighting over a chew toy”.
PMQs serves many purposes – geeing up the backbench troops, pinning down the PM on a particular issue, setting the politician agenda, testing campaigning lines and creating social media clips.
But to do any of that you have to have good content and good delivery. Maybe give Gene Simmons from rock band KISS a go? After all, in his words, he’s “made for PMQs, baby”.