QUENTIN LETTS: For once Starmer united the House, but there was a peevishness in our stodgy helmsman's breast
Nasal knight nips! Maybe it was tiredness, or crossness at recent setbacks, or simply that he cannot abide the sound of the woman.
Whatever, a crabby Sir Keir Starmer bit the head off that Plaid Cymru woman with the purple stains in her hair. You know the one. She starts every question with a guttural glurp of Welsh, even though she herself hails from south London.
We were halfway through PMQs when Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) rose with the portentous hunch of a club bore.
After a cough of Welsh she started sawing away in her customary festive tones. Boy, what a glumster. One has known wet weeks on the Gower to be sunnier.
Pursing her lips, straining for dramatic purchase, Ms Saville Roberts said Sir Keir 'once spoke of compassion and dignity for migrants but now talks of islands of strangers and taking back control'.
After a moment of self-polishing she added: 'The only principle he consistently defends is whichever he last heard in a focus group. Is there any belief he holds which survives a week in Downing Street?'
Sir Keir, without hesitation: 'Yes, the belief that she talks rubbish.' Cue laughter, cheers, knee-slapping. Sir Keir won instant delight.
For once he had united the House. Everyone finds Ms Saville Roberts insufferable! Not a bad question, mind you.
There were further moments that betrayed the existence of a certain peevishness in our stodgy helmsman's breast.
During exchanges with Kemi Badenoch he snapped that 'her criticisms are TOTALLY CONFECTED'.
Those last two words went mad. They really might have been in capital letters, so freighted were they by exasperation.
And he kept going all acidic and rubbishing the Conservatives as a spent force. They were in 'brain rot, brain-dead oblivion', a 'dead party walking'.
Mrs Badenoch, who had pressed him repeatedly on the rise in unemployment, did not seem wildly distressed by this.
The chamber's chandeliers reflected off her gap-toothed grin. There is a touch of Terry-Thomas to her sometimes.
Talking of teeth, one possible reason for Sir Keir being off his oats may have been that his parliamentary private secretary Chris Ward (Brighton Kemptown) was absent.
The efficient Ward normally sits directly behind the PM, whispering prompts and briskly ripping sheets of statistics out of his file.
That duty fell instead to his colleague Liz Twist (Blaydon & Consett) and she was more passive, sitting back and sucking her front gnashers. What pearlies they are.
Had the British chieftain Caratacus only possessed camp palisades as jagged as Liz Twist's teeth, he might never have been captured by the Romans' Publius Ostorius Scapula.
While Ms Twist gazed at the world amiably, if a little dimly, through a pair of wonky and smudged spectacles it is fair to surmise that Sir Keir missed Mr Ward.
Nigel Farage (Ref, Clacton) had a question about immigration.
He mucked it up by getting the terminology wrong, telling Sir Keir how much he had enjoyed 'your speech'.
In the Commons 'you' or 'your' refers only to Mr Speaker. Mr Farage's new-boy solecism cost his moment its dramatic peril.
The Labour whips had planted a few backbench questions about Reform.
These allowed Sir Keir to set up a series of sallies about how Mr Farage's party had voted 'against' certain government proposals.
Sir Keir speaking during PMQs on Wednesday where he got some laughs for his responses
'Against! Against! Against!' chanted Labour dingbats.
Emily Darlington (Lab, Milton Keynes Central), who appeared to be chewing gum, shook her head dolefully when Reform was mentioned.
The Chief Whip, sitting near Sir Keir, radiated portly satisfaction at the anti-Farage choreography.
Less happy sights on the front bench were Lisa Nandy and Bridget Phillipson, two Cabinet ministers who have reportedly had the black spot put on them by Downing Street.
As Sir Keir dashed away at the end of the session – to catch a flight to Albania – he managed to look at neither of those luckless colleagues.
On the eve of abattoir day it is never easy to look a doomed piglet in the eye.
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