Sir Oinky plays in the same mud after the chamber's recess
The first Prime Minister's Questions back from recess is always a strange one. There is a sense that anything could have happened over the course of a week off. Could Kemi Badenoch finally have learned the order in which to ask questions? Would the Secretary of State for Rural Affairs have located his spine? Might, in the midst of global security trepidation, Sir Oinky have finally grown from being a trough-hungry and petty little man into a great statesman?
No such luck. By my calculations it took just under two minutes for the Prime Minister to stand up and shriek his old Dalekian line of '£22 billion black hole!' at Tory MP Dr Luke Evans, who had dared query whether slapping the National Insurance rise onto hospices was a particularly compassionate idea. Behind him, Yvette Cooper – the extra from A Bug's Life who the Labour Party believe is more worthy of a portrait in parliament than Admiral Nelson – smiled and nodded eagerly. Next to her Big Ange was doing her usual target measuring on the PM's back.
When it came to her turn, Mrs Badenoch accused Oinky of playing 'silly games with numbers' when trying to account for his defence spending rise. She wondered whether the indeterminate wads of cash soon to be hurled in the direction of Mauritius were being included in the increase in defence spending.
The PM in turn accused Mrs Badenoch of asking the same question again and again. Undoubtedly this is true; however perhaps if he actually answered any of them we'd be saved from the need for this deranged circularity every week. The whole thing makes a Punch and Judy show look like King Lear.
More effective was Stephen Flynn of the SNP. The Volcano of Aberdeen North is particularly adept at filleting Oinky, having, as he does, a very tangible contempt for the wobbly dissembling that he deploys in lieu of answers.
Was, Mr Flynn asked, the rise in energy bills, despite endless pre-election promises that they would fall, a result of incompetence or just old-fashioned Labour lying? The Prime Minister dismissed this all as 'grievance politics' which was, again, technically true but failed to account for the fact that some grievances are justified.
Perhaps the most topsy-turvy question of all came from Charlotte Nichols of Warrington North who asked about suicide prevention. Oinky put on his serious face and intoned earnestly that 'every suicide is one suicide too many'. Just down the hallway Kim Leadbeater and her pals were busy voting down every sign.
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