Some poorly-timed heckles made for an unedifying PMQs

Thank goodness there aren’t that many Prime Minister’s Questions left before the election. As James said, there was a rather end-of-term feeling to today’s session: indeed, it felt a bit like an end-of-term lunch where all the pupils are hopelessly overexcited and the teacher has given up.

It wasn’t just that David Cameron decided he should troll John Bercow by reeling off a lengthy list of Tory commitments that the party has stuck to, giggling at the Speaker as he said ‘plenty of time!’ to mock Bercow’s habit of pompously telling MPs that the session will take as long as it needs to. It was also the way MPs were heckling, laughing and talking throughout most of the exchanges. The worst bit was when, in the middle of a gale of laughter from other MPs, Labour MP Barry Gardiner stood up to announce that a number of his family members had died of cancer. They were laughing at something else, but their giggles punctuated his first sentence which was ‘my father died of cancer’. He then added, to shame-faced silence from those opposite him that his mother died of cancer and his sister died of cancer. The collision between question and behaviour elsewhere in the Chamber couldn’t have been worse.