Carillion. It doesn’t help that the name resembles a kiddie’s word, like gazillion, suggesting an astronomical sum of cash. The sudden death of this lumbering giant gave Mr Corbyn an easy route to victory at PMQs. He didn’t take it. Corbyn outlined Carillion’s recent woes: the collapsing share-price, the short positions taken by hedge-funds, the profit warnings.
This seemed to amuse Philip Hammond. ‘Profit warnings?’ he muttered audibly, ‘companies issue profit warnings all the time.’ An odd boast for a chancellor to make. Mr Corbyn’s performance lacked bite and precision. He simply rambled his way through a long description of the government’s conduct. Either, he burbled, the government had awarded contracts to keep a failing company afloat, ‘or it was just deeply negligent of the crisis that was coming down the line.’ By ‘deeply negligent of’ he meant ‘oblivious to’.
Mrs May chopped this flabby speech to pieces. ‘I’m happy to answer questions when the honourable gentleman asks one. He didn’t.’
‘I asked if the government was negligent,’ he whined back.
He claimed the Tories were only interested in protecting the salaries of Carillion’s ‘super-rich’ bosses. In her defence, Mrs May said that the state is Carillion’s customer not its manager.
This was a staggeringly weak and disingenuous argument. But Mr Corbyn didn’t anticipate it, let alone pursue it. No matter how slack Mrs May gets she’s always out-feebled by hopeless Corbo.
Several backbenchers asked the PM to apologise in person to their distressed constituents. We heard of a 70-year-old woman who died after tangling with a shop-lifter. A voter in Manchester wanted an apology because his mental health clinic was inconveniently located. The SNP’s David Linden sought Mrs May’s statement of contrition on behalf of ‘Margot’ whose benefits had been docked and later restored.
