QUENTIN LETTS: Castration! The Secretary of State was desperate to depict herself as a toughie, so she aimed below the belt
Soft on crime, soft on the causes of crime. Yet Ms Mahmood was keen to depict herself as a toughie, so she aimed below the belt. Castration.
'I'm not squeamish,' she averred, narrowing her eyes like a farmer closing some gelding clamps on a bullock's knackers.
Charlotte Nichols (Lab, Warrington North) had asked if chemical castration might suit sex maniacs. Ms Nichols remains utterly still when she speaks. There is something troubling about her, even when she is not proposing castration.
Ms Mahmood said the idea had often been considered by her Tory predecessors but they (even Liz Truss, amazingly) had demurred. What was different this time?
Well, none of them ever agreed to such an extraordinary release of convicts. None, therefore, needed to create a distraction by talking about sex pests' down-belows.
Beside the Secretary of State sat a ministerial colleague Alex Davies-Jones, crossing her muscular forearms and shouting 'year-year' in a Rhondda baritone. Ms Mahmood had one last thing to say about castration. She wished 'to use every tool'. Blimey. That was one way of putting it.
This announcement represented a Leftwards lurch in penal liberalisation.
Labour and Lib Dem MPs (they are increasingly the same thing) approved; yet they did not want it applied to those guilty of violence against women.
This was the crime that most gripped the Left. Not burglary. Not murder or terrorism. Not even BBC licence fee evasion. Count yourselves lucky they won't be giving us the snip for that.
Robert Jenrick, shadow minister, sprang to the despatch box and unleashed a response that instantly drew fire from the Left. No one upsets them quite like Mr Jenrick.
'The Labour Party doesn't believe in punishing criminals,' he cried, his delivery salty, energetic, undeniably electric. Speaker Hoyle may not be a fan, mind you.
He twice interrupted Mr Jenrick, ostensibly to hush the hecklers. This cost Mr Jenrick his flow. Then the Speaker told him off for saying Ms Mahmood was 'out of her mind'.
When Ms Mahmood was back on her feet, the Speaker told Mr Jenrick to show more respect to the minister. Mr Jenrick harrumphed.
A United Nations peace envoy may be needed to improve relations between Hoyle and Jenrick.
Sir Desmond Swayne (Con, New Forest West) said nothing weakened justice more than knocking years off judges' sentences. Ms Mahmood seemed to agree, oddly.
Sir John Hayes (Con, South Holland & The Deepings) noted that 'the Establishment, poisoned by liberal thinking' had long been at odds with public opinion on prison sentences.
For this he was rewarded with further yelps of abuse from Labour and the Lib Dems. Which in a way rather confirmed the truth of Sir John's comment.
'I believe in prison,' said Ms Mahmood, even as she was letting cons go free.
She complained bitterly, in just about every paragraph she uttered, about the previous government's failure to build enough prisons; yet her policy was based on a report by David Gauke, who served in that very government as minister in charge of prisons.
Labour MPs kept attacking the old Tory government and praising Mr Gauke. They were the same thing, you numpties!
With MPs now off for the Whitsun break, perhaps they could use their leisure to read Evelyn Waugh's story Mr Loveday's Little Outing, about an apparently reformed murderer who is let out of his lunatic asylum with predictable results. The story is short and horribly true.
Which leaves room to touch, briefly, on another apparently inevitable tragedy.
Amid rumours of her impending destruction, Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy missed her departmental questions. She was at the World Expo in Osaka. In her absence she was theatrically upstaged by her deputy, Chris Bryant.
Farage in France, Reeves in Canada, Nandy in Japan: Parliament's a tough old gig.
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