Field/Day for Icons

Did anyone watch this week’s PMQS ?

Not our usual cup of hemlock but the opening exchanges between PM Theresa May and the Leader of the Opposition Jeremy Corbyn were pure showbiz.  As everything is modern political life these days seems so scripted, rehearsed and stage managed  we’d be forgiven for thinking that there was a political and personal subtext.

Enter stage left sly old fox Jezza Corbyn firstly paying tribute to the late Hollywood actress Doris Day before saying “talking of icons…” and moving on to acknowledge that an unnamed somebody had been the MP for Birkenhead for 40 years. Now we might be reading too much into this but this neat little segue from from Doris Day to Frank Field –  What could possibly be the connection ? A mutual love of gingham? That in their respective quarters they’re regarded as some kind of ‘icon’?

Whatever the intent it is amusing to observe that no matter how many times Field taunts him in the tabloids or tears into him on the telly there are always conciliatory words from Corbyn and the Labour leadership or when Field is on the campaign trail for the local Tories (oops! ,sorry, Matron’s Independents ) there are no threats of suspension or expulsion from the Labour Party. Field keeps on paying his Labour Party subs in the hope that all this awful, nasty Militant left wing nonsense blows over soon and everything can go back to being ‘nice’, where locally, nobody challenged his authority or his pet projects on the poor.

In tribute to Day (or was it Frankenfield?) Corbyn teasingly suggested that members  should join him in a rousing  chorus of  ‘Whip Crack Away” (whip – geddit?). Meanwhile they seemed to opt for ‘ Que Sera Sera’. We would have thought that in this instance ‘Secret Love’ would be as the most appropriate tune in more ways that one but especially when Theresa May reminded the House of Commons that Frank becoming MP for Birkenhead in 1979 coincided with Margaret Thatcher, Field’s great friend and political inspiration, becoming Prime Minister…